Josh Ritter has had a career that would be the envy of most any singer/songwriter, a steady upward progression in acclaim and fans over the past decade. But that didn't keep him from having a major, crippling crisis of confidence after his last album, 2007's "The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter." At one point, Ritter wasn't sure he'd ever write again.
"I'm still not sure why it happened," Ritter says, calling from his tour in Ireland. "It wasn't a crisis about my life so much as what I was writing about, which is what made it so strange. In every other way, things were going great, and I don't believe in the whole 'tortured artist' thing. Even the darkest song is fun to write.
"But suddenly, nothing felt new to me, and I didn't know which direction to push in. I wasn't bringing anything new. It took a lot of beating my head against the wall to come up with something that could break me into the clear again.
"Sometimes," he concludes, "you just lose your mojo."
Fortunately, the mojo returned to the point where Ritter has even branched out into prose. "Bright's Passage," a novel set in West Virginia after World War I, is due for publication. Ritter is juggling final edits for that with a tour that brings him to Durham's Carolina Theatre for a Tuesday night show.
Meantime, there is a brand new album out, Ritter's sixth - "So Runs the World Away" (Pytheas Recordings). Ritter's albums have always had thematic elements, but "World" is his most intricately structured work to date. It's a meditation on restlessness, set in a series of dangerous landscapes ranging from a mummy's tomb to trackless Antarctic wastes.
"It's a record with a lot of tension, a lot of things about to happen," Ritter says. "The last record was very spontaneous, and I wanted this one to feel more like a play unfolding. Songs capture a moment, but this album is my first where the characters feel fleshed-out enough to go out and do things.
"I always liked a song like 'Tennessee Stud,' which is cool because things happen and it's an adventure. I wanted these songs to be like that, telling a whole saga."
Of particular note is "Folk Bloodbath," which combines elements of Stackalee, Delia and other classic folktales into what Ritter jokingly calls "a remix mash-up, Girl Talk goes folk." Then there's "Rattling Locks," as withering a kiss-off as you'll ever hear: "Rather than rattling your locks, I'd rather spend another night in hell."
"That one has a lot of real emotion and real anger," Ritter says. "When I'm really angry, I can't put it into words. It's just emotion. The part about writing that's fun is trying to get that into words. But I never take stuff from my own life. I just don't like that, and it's a pet peeve of mine when others do it. As much as whatever we write is a reflection of ourselves, I still don't want to impose my life on others, because it takes away from the music. There's so much autobiographical songwriting, and it sounds like torturing a raccoon. Just not interesting."
