Theodore walks around the city a lot alone, but those walks are not as hard as when he gets home. There, he spends all his time alone. From the floor-to-ceiling windows you can see the large, illuminated buildings of the metropolis, with their little lights like unreal stars, which make you seem smaller in your own solitude. Contrary to what his coworkers or anyone who knows him believes, he is not a lonely man. It is not because he does not live voluntarily without anyone. Theodore is a lonely man, sunk by the memories and feelings of his previous life in the company of his wife.
MORE INFORMATION
- Bon Iver and the good winter cabin (1)
- Bruce Springsteen and the ranch house of love and hate (2)
- Damien Rice and the island refuge from volcanic waters (3)
- Tom Waits and the Scrap Basement (4)
In his isolation, Theodore will fall in love with an operating system called Samantha, but, as explained in Her, the wonderful Spike Jonze movie, although sometimes real feelings spring up, is a way of pretending something neither Samantha nor Theodore They are. Because Samantha is simply a very intelligent machine, perfect but without a heart, while Theodore is a human being beating inconsolably without his true love.
Josh Ritter didn't need to explain how Theodore felt when he wrote The Beast in Its Tracks , the most confessional album of his career in which he dived into the pain of loneliness after the breakup with his wife, singer-songwriter Dawn Landes. Both Her and The Beast in Its Tracks came to light in 2013, one of those rare coincidences that mean nothing, but help us to place them even better in the same emotional and temporal space. Both deal with heartbreak from the perspective of loneliness, that new and inhospitable territory that arises from one day to the next, both in the middle of a large indifferent city, as in Her , and in the middle of the silent night in an apartment, as in The Beast in Its Tracks . A wild territory, inhabited by beasts, so much so that Josh Ritter included this word in the title of his album: “The beast is heartbreak, grief. It is like what comes when the sun falls and the night begins. It is that moment within a long winter night and it is dangerous. "
After his wife left him, Ritter lived in the house they had shared. It would be the same place where, since his departure, "the beast" appeared to him every night. That is, a horse depression, which forced him to stop playing and consume himself in his own solitude. Depression led to insomnia and the doctor prescribed more sleeping pills, but nothing improved. With so much medicine, he even suffered muscle necrosis, which almost took him to the other neighborhood. Choking on his grief, Ritter was like a dead fish until one night he made a crucial decision: the beast or him. One of the two had to beat the other.
Confined to his home, he turned a room into a home study and began to compose. It was his way of fighting hand-in-hand against the effects of chemical relaxants and against his own ghosts. In this way, there was no night that Ritter did not grab his guitar and seek to end the beast. Night after night, song by song, chord after chord, until you create music with a homely air, as if whispered in half light. As he later recognized: "In the dark of night I composed the most destructive material on the album."
With his very personal folk, Ritter composed even more naked songs than he had done in previous works such as Hello Starling, The Animal Years or Runs the World Away. They are the songs that, with their timid echo and oscillating touch, dominate the first face of the album, in which the pain takes the shape of a devilish eye that does not stop observing you in the sleepy eye ( Evil eye ), of a ray of light extinguished in the shadows ( A Certain Light ) or from any invasive nightmare ( Nightmares ). The different forms of the beast. And the beast, always punctual, dresses in all kinds of costumes because its destiny is tied up waiting. As Theodore stated in Her : "I keep waiting for her because I care." As the philosopher Roland Barthes wrote: “The fatal identity of the one who loves is nothing other than that 'I am the one who waits'.
In Her , Theodore met another love in Samantha. With its ingenious phrases, its programmed sensitivity and its virtual company, the operating system once again placed it in the world. He also said a definitive phrase: "The past is just a story that we tell ourselves." Theodore ended up defeating his beast when, observing through the same window that reminds him of his loneliness, he dictates a farewell letter to his ex-wife. It is also a letter of thanks.
Josh Ritter met another love in another woman. When you think The Beast in Its Tracks is going to drop deeper, it transforms into the second side into something brighter. Ascend. It is the same hurt identity album, but finding another way since New Lover (New lover) sounds . Then they arrive, with the same spirit of nomadic folk, In Your Arms Awhile, Joys to You Baby ... until closing with Lights. "Joy for the city / Joy for the streets / And joy for you, darling, wherever you sleep ... And joy for me too," Ritter sings on the last of the album. He sings it slowly, as if it were the precise lyrics of a letter he writes for his wife. As if they were the measured and sincere words that Theodore dictates to his ex-wife. As if, after defeating the beast, it turns out that the worst thing about the monster is to let it make us the opposite of what we were.