On August 21 Sony BMG Music Entertainment/Victor will release Josh Ritter’s highly anticipated label debut The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter. Arriving at the apex of a breakout year, Historical Conquests–Ritter’s fourth full-length album–follows the success of the critically acclaimed The Animal Years (2006), which The Boston Globe describes as his "most intensely political, deeply personal, and darkly ambitious disc yet…" Paste Magazine named him one of the "100 Best Living Songwriters" and author Stephen King named it his #1 album of 2006 stating, "this is the most exuberant outburst of imagery since Bob Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall."
For Historical Conquests, Ritter altered his approach to the recording process in an effort to make a more spontaneous album. Ritter expounds, "A lot of this record is an effort to capture moments when they were at their most passionate; to capture many different emotions that simply wouldn’t work if we had ever tried to re-record them." He goes on to describe, "The vocal take on ‘To the Dogs;’ the feel of ‘Wait for Love;’ the guitar of ‘Mind’s Eye’–there are a lot of different feelings here, but what ties them together for me is how raw they were captured and how we maintained that rawness throughout the production."
Recorded in the winter of 2007 during breaks from being on the road, The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter was produced by keyboardist and longtime collaborator Sam Kassirer in Maine at The Great North Sound Society. The album’s 14 songs were written by Ritter (vocals and guitar) and feature Kassirer (electric and acoustic pianos, organs, guitar, vibraphone, and percussion), Zack Hickman (double bass, electric bass, acoustic and electric), Liam Hurley (drums and percussion) and The Great North Sound Society Orchestra.
