Josh Ritter's "I Believe In You, My Honeydew" Reviewed

Josh Ritter is my favorite working singer-songwriter. Thus, it’s no pleasure to report that the decade to date has been the least inspiring period of his career. In 2023, Ritter returned after a four-year hiatus from the recording studio with the perversely gentle Spectral Lines, following it with the somnolent Heaven, or Someplace as Nice in 2024. Combine this with the odd choice to tour the predominantly acoustic album Hello, Starling for its twentieth anniversary last year—a decision Ritter seemed almost to apologize for with the disorientingly adrenalized rock sets that bookended the play-through—and you end up with a list of creative choices that together threaten to shake one’s faith in a great artist.

To be sure, Ritter has crafted great art in a career that stretches back to the early 2000s. Emerging as a cookie cutter heir to Dylan—or at least John Prine—his songwriting ambitions spiked and peaked with 2006’s The Animal Years, a collection of uniformly fantastic tracks connected by recurring motifs and a widescreen vision of Americana that drafted off everything from Mark Twain to silent film to the war in Iraq. After barely a year’s wait, he offered up 2007’s rough and rowdy The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, an album on which the musician has said he intended to perform in character as something like Yosemite Sam. This double whammy of capital-G Great albums is something any artist would struggle to top, and indeed, Ritter has only sporadically lived up to the potential demonstrated by his highest highs. Just one record—his “divorce album,” 2013’s The Beast in its Tracks—has been particularly consistent, with the albums on either end, 2010’s So Runs the World Away and 2015’s Sermon on the Rocks, serving up some riotously high highs and various skippably low lows.

It’s been a gradual slide downhill since Sermon on the Rocks, which featured Ritter’s last capital-G Great track (lead single “Getting Ready to Get Down”). After that, an artist who once wrote with fire in his belly seemed to lose a certain urgency in his songwriting. 2017’s Gathering failed to yield anything worth calling out for at a concert, and when Ritter teamed with producer Jason Isbell for 2019’s Fever Breaks, the results were surprisingly anonymous, as disspiriting in its way as the two flat-out unimpressive records that followed this decade. 

It may seem like I’m picking on Josh Ritter, particularly when I’ve gone this long without even mentioning the album I’m ostensibly here to review. But it’s important to lay this foundation, because if I say Josh Ritter has lost touch with his muse over the past ten years, then it seems fairly explicit the artist agrees. “ There have been times,” he wrote in the press release announcing his new album, I Believe In You, My Honeydew, when “I felt my inspiration, my Muse, had passed.” Having reached this realization, Ritter apparently made a decision: “Instead of waiting for the Muse to write me a song, I would write the Muse a song instead.”

It’s a heady sentiment, and perhaps even a hair mawkish (Ritter goes on to mention that “My Honeydew” is his nickname for that muse, a cloying thing to say in any context), but you can swiftly see what he means. This new, muse-chasing songwriting has yielded by far Ritter’s most compelling songwriting since Sermon on the Rocks, and his most consistent album since The Beast in its Tracks. There are points where this new collection feels like Ritter thumbing a well-worn playbook, offering a collection of what can only be characterized as “Josh Ritter-type songs,” but, well, it’s been a painfully long time since we had a good collection of Josh Ritter-type songs. I Believe In You, My Honeydew is a welcome delivery system.

The album opens with something like defiance. “I am no weeping willow,” Ritter sings in the opening line to lead single “You Won’t Dig My Grave.” “I am no fragile flower.” Yet the Josh Ritter songwriting persona is no preening egotist, so he shifts quickly to a mode of poetic self-effacement (“I can’t see that far,” he goes on. “There are things that I can’t see”). Perhaps, then, it isn’t defiance that threads through the album so much as a man standing tall and expressing a sort of belief in himself for the first time in a while. Deeper into the album, on “Noah’s Children,” Ritter sings of his suspicion that the world may be ending, but he chases it with his belief that he and his will emerge from the water sadder but wiser.

I Believe In You, My Honeydew lacks the ecstatically high highs of barn-burners like “Getting Ready to Get Down” and “To the Dogs or Whoever,” nor does it feature the sort of sweeping ambition displayed in an epic like “Girl in the War,” or even an infectiously sing-along-able instant favorite like “Kathleen.” Leave those hopes at the door. Instead, this album serves up a Ritter who plays in his lane. If “Wild Ways” sounds distractingly like “Homecoming” off Sermon on the Rocks, it’s worth bearing in mind that “Homecoming” is better than any song he’s released in a decade. A new “Homecoming” counts as a treat. In that respect, the album’s greatest joy may be the second single, “The Truth is a Dimension (Both Invisible and Binding)” an eerie soundalike to the songs on the self-titled solo debut he released way back in 2000, at age 24. Ritter slips back into this fingerpicking, lyrically dense mode with such dexterity and verve that it feels like an artist productively in conversation with his past more than any rehash of a worn-out style.

As producer, Ritter has once again enlisted Sam Kassirer, who’s not only produced the likes of Langhorne Slim (certainly an artistic cousin to Josh Ritter), but happens to be a longstanding member of Ritter’s Royal City Band. Kasirer marshals the classic Ritter folk-rock sound, but adds brushstrokes from pedal steel to a gospel choir. Whatever mood Kasirer was able to conjure in the recording studio, it seems to have been catching—on “Thunderbird,” one can clearly hear Ritter grinning while he sings. If you’ve seen him live, you know that grin does a certain something to his voice, and it indicates the session for “Thunderbird” made him very happy. It’s an infectious sensation, and part of a fairly infectious album.

There’s a perceptible strain of spiritual exhaustion to I Believe In You, My Honeydew. “Dark days lead to dark years,” Ritter sings on the second track, “Honeydew (No Light),” a frustration that only yields when he admits the eponymous words: “I believe in you, my honeydew/I know you’ll come for me” The reappearance of the muse just might be enough to break him out of the dark years that followed the dark days. Towards the end of the album, though, we’re back to a place of nihilism. “I don’t mind dyin’,” Ritter sings on “Kudzu Vines.” “Been alive for a long enough time.” Both tracks are the sort of heavy, driving roots rock that Ritter can’t help but indulge in a couple of times per album, and these feel like the songs during which you could comfortably hit the bathroom at the next show. If one track feels primed for a singalong at that show, though, it must be penultimate track “The Wreckage,” the sort of song that makes you want to sling your arm around your neighbor, be it lover or stranger, and sway to the beat while the bartender pours the last drink of the night.

Ritter has a habit of ending his albums on a gentle note rather than a commanding one. Even the mammoth The Animal Years placed the Whitmanesque epic “Thin Blue Flame” second-to-last to make room for “Here At the Right Time,” a brief and aching love song crying out to be used as a first dance (not to speak from personal experience). Here, Ritter again closes with a soft touch, but there’s a bit more of a pulsing power to the waltzing “The Throne,” a nearly five-minute song—of which there are several on this hefty, ten-track record—that makes a promise: if the listener is not just tired but “past tired,” there’s  a throne waiting for them. The singer has seen it and come back to tell that even if you’ve sold your soul and been “deviled by the angels,” this redemption is something you can count on. He doesn’t just gesture at “the loss of the muse,” he sings the words explicitly, and seems to apologize and account for a stretch of directionless music. It’s a powerful and confessional closer to an often raw collection of songs, and it’s easy to feel endeared to Josh Ritter all over again. There’s something inviting about witnessing an artist acknowledge their own failings so openly, make the pledge to do better, and then meet that pledge with renewed vigor.

It’s good to have you back, Josh Ritter, your honeydew and all.