Josh Ritter, Americana songwiter extraordinaire, is set to play February 27 at the Myer Horowitz Theatre. It won’t be his first time his presence has graced Oil City, however. In fact, Ritter says both times he’s appeared in Edmonton before this one have been memorable. Not because we have the largest mall, or a tent city of homeless people in Canada’s richest province, but because, for Ritter, Edmonton is a city that’s been hard to get to, and hard to leave.
Ritter explains by telling me about the time he and his band were on their way to our fine city from Saskatoon.
“We were driving on the Yellowhead,” he begins, “and you could see forever and ever. Up ahead, all we could see was this one thick, black plume of smoke. It still was an hour away, but when we got to it we were the first car there. It was an intersection between a road and a train track, and standing out in front of this huge fire was this train conductor and a truck driver, and they were both kind of scratching their heads. Apparently they had been racing each other.”
“What!?” I say.
“Well, the semi truck almost made it, but the train hit the back of it and it was on fire.”
“So this wasn’t really an accident,” I say, trying to understand the logic behind this “race.”
“It was an accident in that the truck driver didn’t quite make it,” Ritter explains. “They were expecting it to work out better than it did.”
“But if the train was racing... if it had been able to go a second faster it would have nailed the truck right in the middle, and the guy would have died, right? It just seems like... a weird goal.”
“Right,” Ritter says. “But he made it!”
Maybe it’s a guy thing. I still don’t get it. Anyway, I decide to drop it and let Ritter continue his tale: “We turned the car around, and we drove about an hour and a half on these country roads to get back where we were going. We had to go around this mile-long train—it was exciting! The trailer fell off and we had to repair it in the wild.”
“The wilds of Saskatchewan!” I say.
“Yeah,” says Ritter with an enthusiasm that suggests why he’s such a great songwriter: he has a knack for making things sound more dramatic than they are.
As for his problems leaving Edmonton, Ritter recalls the time he flew in to play the Folk Festival. “All these musicians flew in on this tiny little plane,” he says, “John Prine, Amos Lee, Alexi Murdoch.... We just kind of looked at each other. At the end of the festival there was this incredible rainstorm, and there were all these musicians just waiting to get out of Edmonton, wondering if we were going to get out or not: the plane started to look more and more like a little coffin, because, you know, so many musicians on a plane is a terrible thing. We just don’t have good luck with planes, in general.”
“Is that true?” I ask, suddenly alarmed. After all, I do a lot of flying myself.
“So many musicians have died in plane crashes,” Ritter says. “Buddy Holly, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Big Bopper—you know, all these people!”
“Great, I hadn’t thought of that,” I say. Pause. “But musicians fly a lot more than most people too, to get to gigs. Maybe it’s a skewed statistic.”
“Maybe,” Ritter allows. “And if God doesn’t like your music it’s an easy way to pick you off without attracting suspicion. Works better than a lightning bolt.” Whoa! Who knew God didn’t like Buddy Holly!
“There’d be a lot more casualties, though,” I point out. “But then, the mercy of God has always been mysterious.”
“It’s a fickle thing,” Ritter agrees. Another pause. “Edmonton, for me, is just a hard city to get into, and hard city to get out of.”
Let’s hope, for everyone’s sake, that this time he comes and goes without a hitch.