Recap Josh Ritter at the Bluebird Theater

Is the colloquial, down-home pronunciation of guitar as “gee-tar” ever going to stop being cute and endearing (if it hasn’t already)? Apparently Josh Ritter doesn’t think so. As he went through the band introductions at the end of his sold-out show at the Bluebird last Thursday night, it became clear that Ritter’s farm-boy naïveté and enthusiasm doesn’t stop when his music does. Ritter and his five-man band took the stage decked out in clean, white dress shirts, ties, vests, and even a fedora or two, like they were showing up to a wedding when a rock ’n’ roll show suddenly broke out. And make no mistake: This was a rock  ’n’ roll show—electric gee-tars, stand-up drumming, caught-in-the-moment howls and all.

Ritter was all grins the entire time, whether during a raucous, anthemic sing-along (“Empty Hearts”) or a melancholy, Dylan-esque story-tell (“Thin Blue Flame”). It was almost too much—when he sang, you could hear in his voice that he was smiling. At times, his good nature almost seemed like a caricature of itself, like when he told a rambling, go-nowhere story about a guy he knew growing up called Luscious Johnny, or when he playfully tied his necktie around his eyes like a blindfold for a verse or two.

It seemed incongruous for Ritter to look so overjoyed during the more forlorn songs, but it was hard not to be at least a little charmed by his consistently optimistic attitude. That’s not to say, of course, that the sad songs weren’t sad. When the band took five and he played his breakout single “Girl In The War,” full of quietly bitter condemnations and metaphors for crying, he asked for the stage lights to be turned off, so the whole room was dark, the audience left only with the sound of his fingerpicking and lamenting whispers.

When he thanked Denver, the Bluebird, and the audience over and over again, repeating things like, “You guys are amazing,” it was obvious: Ritter was genuinely, disarmingly excited to be up there playing his songs for strangers, like a boy who’s just solved a riddle in his head and can’t wait to tell someone about it.