JOSH RITTER

 When Josh Ritter sings, you listen.

His songs play like chapters in a well-worn paperback novel, where dreams don’t feel quite as far-fetched and life’s greatest obstacles can be challenged with a few chords and plain-spoken truths. His songs don’t only capture life – the ups, downs and hard-to-describe moments in-between. With melody and rhyme, he chronicles what it’s like to be alive.

And on I Believe In You, My Honeydew, he’s wrangled free-floating inspiration into a 10-song collection of mystic vignettes. On the album, he chronicles tales of off-the-cuff characters, relays advice for tackling everyday demons and stitches together stories in nod to a muse that’s been at his side for much of the journey.

“I’m 48 now. Decades have passed. There have been times I felt my inspiration, my muse, had passed along with them. And then, not too long ago, I decided that instead of waiting for the muse to write me a song, I would write the muse a song instead. I started referring to my muse as my honeydew. And this album was born,” Ritter said. “The songs on Honeydew are songs for my muse, my invisible and blinding companion of long-standing. I hope it enjoys them. I hope that it experiences a bit of what it’s like to be human, a bit of what it’s like to be lonely, scared, uncertain, joyful, righteous.”

He added, “I hope these songs are useful to people in any way they can be, because it’s a strange and confusing world out here and we all deserve to know that from each other. Letting our guard down, talking about the things that we love and people we love as plainly and honestly as we can is one of the ways that we can stand up for each other.”

Debuting this summer, Honeydew follows Ritter’s 2024 self-described nine-song “mini-album,” Heaven, or Someplace as Nice and 2023’s full-length Spectral Lines. It’s the latest addition in an untamed expedition between Ritter and his songwriting muse. His two-plus decades of writing observational songs have led to collaborations with Joan Baez, who Ritter first heard as a teenager after he traded a bottle of lemonade for one of her cassette tapes at a country store in small-town Oregon. In the years since swapping a sugary drink for a tape of songs, he’s toured with Baez and penned a handful of numbers that the timeless singer has cut in the studio or covered on stage (most recently a rendition of protest song “I Carried The Flame,” which Baez sang earlier this year).

Additionally, he’s been covered by Bob Dylan (during a run of international shows in 2023), shared the stage with John Prine (as heard on Prine’s 2010 live album In Person & On Stage) and wrote songs for Bob Weir’s 2016 album Blue Mountain.

His gossamery, unbound take on songcraft shows on I Believe In You, My Honeydew, which Ritter and his faithful Royal City Band recorded during a July 2024 trip to Cannon Falls, Minnesota, a rural community southwest of Minneapolis.

He works best when he’s close to friends, away from distractions that may come with decamping to a major city. Ritter was raised in Moscow, Idaho, a small city on the state’s Washington border; his dad now lives in northern Minnesota, creating what Ritter described as a kinship to that corner of the world.

“Underneath a giant sky, it was exciting to go out at night and hear the bullfrogs,” Ritter said. “What a beautiful place.”

The album opens with “You Won’t Dig My Grave,” a courageous rock-inspired number where he sings, “You won’t dig my grave/ I’ve been up to the Mountain/You’ve never been that brave.” The song’s message? A reminder that “the best way to defeat your enemies is to outlive ‘em,” Ritter said.

“Things can be taken from you, but your dignity can’t be,” he said. “So much of what’s going on in this very moment is about the extraction of dignity. They can’t take away dignity, even though they try to convince all of us they can.”

Honeydew rolls on with tracks like the blues-y, big-riff rocker “The Wreckage of One Vision Of You,” “Kudzu Vines,” a song that takes its title from a wild-growing plant Ritter first heard mentioned in a June Carter Cash song, and “Truth Is A Dimension (Both Invisible and Blinding),” a soft-picking slice of storytelling that finds Ritter at arguably his most comfortable.

For Ritter, “Truth Is A Dimension,” represents those moments in experiencing a song that can take you to new places.

“That was a way I never thought about Truth before,” he said about the song. “That Truth could be equal to a physical thing. Something that could be bent or broken or seen from certain angles to be seen correctly.”

Still, no song on I Believe In You, My Honeydew takes hold quite like “Honeydew (No Light),” a five-minute outlaw tale set in the upper plains. The story’s one that shouldn’t be spoiled, but be prepared for a gummy hook that’s sure to stick with listeners long after the music ends.

“That one felt fun because it was not a way I had played before,” Ritter said.

And when you press play on the album, be sure to take in every word. After all, Ritter’s a songwriter who always listens back.

“A song has enormous kinetic and potential energy” he said. “When a song, big or small, collides with us, either in writing or performing or listening, its effects can reshape individual hearts or entire worlds. For that reason, I treat them with respect. I try to do them justice.”