I'm a fan of the singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, who I first discovered a few years ago after hearing the song "Good Man" on the radio and thinking it was a lost Springsteen track. Ritter has that effect; his songs are so good you'd swear you'd heard them before. Ritter has been putting records out since 1999 to critical acclaim but is famous primarily to the crowd that follows "alt-country" and "adult alternative" music thanks to places like Paste Magazine and the No Depression website. That didn't stop one music blogger from referring to Ritter (after hearing a track from a new album) as one of the "...most important songwriters of our generation" and another from firing back that the claim didn't hold up because Ritter's music hadn't been heard by enough people. (Green Day is used as a point of comparison) Like so:
Important songwriters of our generation (I guess that’s applying to Generation X) would be more like Billie Joe from Green Day, whether you like his music or not with American Idiot he said some pretty unpopular things to many people & received quite the backlash for standing on principle. Another would be Jeff Tweedy who revolutionized the alt-country genre twice with Uncle Tupelo & then Wilco. Ryan Adams has such an amazing body of talented work that he is a better example of one the most talented writers of our generation.
Tweedy and Adams, who have both made a good deal more music than Ritter, are indeed pillars of the alt-country genre though each have their detractors. They could each be accounted more "important" than Ritter because they've influenced more artists. (Ritter's music is less obviously influenced by country than either Tweedy or Adams's) Billie Joe is a different case, part of a hugely successful band with a built-in audience that has become fashionable for expressing banal anti-war and nonconformist attitudes. To put it another way: Who needs a civics lesson from a band that once released an album called Dookie? Billie Joe's songs have reached more listeners than those of anyone else under discussion, but will they last? The fact that some of his work has already been sentimentalized and contextualized in a musical isn't a good sign. What's the answer? Ritter will never sell as many records as Green Day (unfortunately) but I think he's far more likely to produce work that will endure, and for an artist isn't that really what's "important"?
Josh Ritter hasn't weighed in on his own importance, but he is blogging about his current tour.
To describe the cities we've been in I would have to use all the same old adjectives that you've read before, so I'll try to avoid a straight forward accounting. Suffice to say that Prague wows even those who have been there before and aren't looking to get wowed. Art seems to spring up from everywhere, and the omnipresence of decoration new and old makes the new art seem on a par with the old art and vice versa. Stoop shouldered statues, mysterious saints, concert posters, enormous metronomes, cathedral spires, communist-era TV towers; it's all there for your eyes to see if you're looking.
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