Josh Ritter Redux

The problem with saving up things for massive blog posts is that I inevitably forget some of them, and have to go back. So here's two of the things I was going to include in my initial Josh Ritter post the other night:

The Irish music magazine Hot Press -- Ritter is immense in Ireland, in that odd postmodern way that random artists get big in random places these days, due to luck or a good break or just an affinity for the gestalt of a nation -- declared two weeks ago to be Josh Ritter week, and posted five free MP3s (three live versions of songs from the new record, and two of the songs in their album versions). All five are still up, but, since this was supposed to be for a "week," they may not be there forever. Particularly good is the clangy, dark, clanking "Rattling Locks."

And Josh Ritter led me to another wonderful musical resource on the web, Daytrotter. It's a studio in Rock Island, Illinois, that posts a new session -- generally about four songs, twenty minutes or so of music, recorded live in their studio between gigs -- by various artists nearly every day, and has done so for the past two years. So they have an immense catalog of sessions by a huge number of great artists -- it's a great place to poke through and download piles of music to listen to later. Ritter's session was just a few weeks ago. If you like new music at all, I'm sure you'll find something good there -- just from bands I like, I grabbed sessions from the Mountain Goats, Tilly and the Wall, Alela Diane, Aimee Mann, Ingrid Michaelson, KaiserCartel, and at least a dozen more.
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Listening to: Josh Ritter - Rattling Locks
via FoxyTunes