Josh Ritter To Perform At The PAC

Scientists Bob and Sue Ritter taught their son, Josh, a life lesson that helped shape his entire career­. The lesson: music, science and art are inextricable.

“Art and science are both about solving human problems and addressing human questions, they told me,” Mr. Ritter said during a telephone interview from his home in Brooklyn last week. “That was an extremely important point for me. It was inspiring.”

The singer-songwriter/folk rocker went on to create six studio albums­ (and countless unreleased songs) from which he will pull during his solo performance on Friday, June 3, at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center. The concert will mark his debut show and visit to the Hamptons.

“Totally, I can’t wait,” the 34-year-old said of the upcoming concert. “The weather is going to be nice, I can just feel it. I’m going to come in the night before, do some long walks on the beach,” he added with a gravelly chuckle.

He’s not the only one stirring with anticipation. Clare Bisceglia, the theater’s executive director, is also counting down the days.

“He’s such a remarkable talent,” she said. “He’s definitely an artist on the rise and an artist everyone should know. We can’t wait to have him on our stage. Whether you know him or not, you should come and you’ll be truly wowed.”

Mr. Ritter has his set list mapped out, but the Idaho native was tight-lipped on giving away any hints.

“It’s going to have to be a surprise,” he said. “I’ve put some thought into it, and it’s going to be a fun show. I’ll play guitar and sing my heart out.”

Recognized by Paste magazine as one of the “100 Greatest Living Songwriters,” Mr. Ritter first found success when he toured with Glen Hansard’s band, The Frames, in Ireland—a long way from his home in Moscow, Idaho.

“I always loved writing and loved reading,” he said. “We grew up, my brother [Lincoln] and I, really far out of town. There wasn’t TV or radio, per se, at all. So really, reading was what took me places. I always felt like I had a special relationship with language, but it wasn’t until I got into the idea of writing a song that I had a bucket to pour the words in.”

“So Runs the World Away,” Mr. Ritter’s latest album, released last year, took more than a year to finish, he recalled. He said that it was a much more daunting task than his prior album, “The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter,” which he wrote in a mere three weeks.

Several tracks on his latest album have garnered national attention, including “Rattling Locks,” which National Public Radio’s Bob Boilen, the creator and host of NPR’s online music show “All Songs Considered,” named “Song of the Year.”

“It’s a spooky, loud, fun blues song,” Mr. Ritter said. “I like to be able to shout. I like the anger, I feel that there’s humor in it.”

In March 2010, “Change of Time,” another song from the album, aired on NBC’s “Parenthood.”

“It was a song that I went through a bunch of lyrics on,” he said. “I had it in my head for the entire year I was working on the record, then verses started to come out that felt polished and real. It was cool to hear it someplace.”

Much of Mr. Ritter’s songwriting pulls from his day-to-day experiences, but actual inspiration is hard to pin down, he said, noting that’s as it should be.

“Like anything we do obsessively, a lot of the time you don’t understand any of it,” he said. “You write and when you’re done, there’s a song and you’re not really sure how it got there. Writing gives you the permission to follow whatever you’re interested in and not ask why, and I’ve always been suspicious of looking too closely at why. It makes me happy and I get a lot of ideas from the books I read and the places I go.”

Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” and any novel by Stephen King are among his favorites, said Mr. Ritter, who is releasing a book of his own on Tuesday, June 28. The novel “Bright’s Passage” follows Henry Bright—a young, widowed, World War I veteran—as he and his infant son, along with an unlikely guardian angel, flee from a forest fire and Mr. Bright’s cruel in-laws.

Mr. Ritter wrote most of the novel over a two-month span while on tour and finished the first draft in two months. The editing process took another year. The plot just came to him, he said, but it wasn’t in one large chunk.

“It came in bits in my mind,” he said. “I had the character and I wanted to throw him into the middle of a situation. If he’s in your mind, your plot becomes a function of that, as it is in songs, I think. I hope.”

During long bouts on the tour bus in between shows, Mr. Ritter would write several pages of the novel at a time, he said, a drastic change from what he was used to.

“In a way, it was exciting,” he said. “As the drafts piled up and each sentence became more important and each word, it became a lot more like songwriting. In a song, when you’re really trying to say something, any word out of place can change the whole meaning. As I went on, I began to see that the writing was the same, songwriting and any other kind of prose writing. I can’t wait to try it again.”

Josh Ritter will give a concert at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Friday, June 3, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $40, $55 and $70. For reservations, visit whbpac.org or call the box office at 288-1500.