#sermonontherocks

We had Josh Ritter at Virginia Arts Recording in Charlottesville, VA for an In Studio session and interview, you can listen to this on our website! 

The message can be hazy at first, mopped in a Twain-esque glaze, left to smoke for a day in a Cajun steel tube, and finally pulled forth from the river after a long lost escape journey. Ritter's words captivate and calm - create and reason - in his own image, as he sees fit. Sermon on the Rocks finds a remembrance of The Animal Years: true story-telling prowess, aged in experience after a return from parts unknown. New sounds and old imagery riddle Ritter's latest manifesto, harkening back to his small-town days in a soft recall of golden fields and stupid college experiences. This is not a regret of the past, but an understanding and reconciliation with faded emotions that once burned, and forgotten places re-emerging. The haunts, the memories, the good and evil: they still abide. And so do we.

Ritter's story recounts the true story of fundamentalism: small-town private colleges where dress codes still apply and true growth is only achieved in the alone-moments.  He exists somewhere between doing right and fulfilling forbidden passion, a narrative deemed a rite of passage as much as useless ritual. This, in turn, is an awakening of all paths, embodied in the joys of alcohol, rejection, aloneness, and separation, rampant in this place that's not worth interacting with, yet still worth witnessing. In a world where answers are expected, and progress is the norm, slowing down and saying "I don't know" becomes the only resolution to a seeking heart. This concept of sin, so readily accessible in our childhoods, begins to melt away with every drop and drag, ultimately revealing the harsh, beautiful, uncaring world opposite humanity, sometimes "right" and sometimes "wrong," but always in control. This "individuality" and "solidarity" with a midwestern Americanized monastic deity is the cause of separation throughout so many memories. And this separation sets the journey that so many walk alone.

But the good news resides, as in any story, in love - an action/reaction wholly grasped within, and yet completely apart from, this strange existence. Love is the conclusion of separation, and the beginning of the return. The true joy in Ritter's words exists in the realization that this is best experienced in the quiet place, where memories make their mark, and where we can touch a piece of eternity. And when the return is complete, love is its end. Getting high and tongue-tied, wasting gasoline, partying, studying the Bible academically: these are but steps taken that may or may not have virtue. Yet, they make the space in life for connections to be made, ideas to flow and merge, and for love to take root. The beauty of the quiet place is that there's nowhere to go.

Sermon on the Rocks has been out for a while now on Pytheas Recordings.