Josh Ritter & The Royal City Band

Josh Ritter will set out on an extensive U.S. headlining tour in support of his latest album Sermon On The Rocks (out now out now via Pytheas Recordings/Thirty Tigers). Joined by The Royal City Band, this run of dates will include performances in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia and more.

Ritter recently released the official music video for his new song “Homecoming,” which features thousands of hometown images submitted directly to Ritter by his fans. Of the video, The Huffington Post raves, “‘Homecoming’ moves from a solo piano setting a butterscotch tone, to the voice of a young man backed by a band chugging in the background; to an acoustic middle eight and back to the glorious rhythm…It’s seamless, sweet, and real.”

Released to widespread critical praise, Sermon On The Rocks was recently named one of PopMatters’ “80 Best Albums of 2015” with NPR Music including his song “Getting Ready To Get Down” in their “Favorite Songs Of 2015” list, and Paste Magazine naming “Birds of the Meadow” in their “50 Best Songs of 2015” list. The New York Times asserts, “The literary-minded songwriter Josh Ritter…recharges his music on his eighth studio album, Sermon on the Rocks…Harking back to Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and maybe a little Mark Knopfler, Mr. Ritter has always been a slinger of serious ideas and high-flown imagery,” while The Wall Street Journal declares, “The new album’s music is airy, propulsive and more often than not, catchy.” NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson raves, “…it’s an approach that brings out some of Ritter’s slipperiest, nimblest wordplay…and a few genuine head-turners. Not many singers could pull off a whopper like, ‘If you wanna see a miracle, watch me get down,’ but when Ritter gets there near the end of ‘Getting Ready To Get Down,’ it lands like a grand punchline.”

Produced by Ritter and Trina Shoemaker (Queens of the Stone Age, Emmylou Harris), Sermon on the Rocks was recorded over two weeks at New Orleans’ The Parlor Recording Studio and features Matt Barrick from The Walkmen on drums, Zachariah Hickman on bass, Josh Kaufman on guitar and Sam Kassirer on piano.

Of his inspiration behind Sermon on the Rocks, Ritter comments, “I wanted to play messianic oracular honky-tonk.”

Over the course of his acclaimed career, Ritter has released seven full-length albums, including his most recent, 2013’s The Beast In Its Tracks, which debuted at #22 on the Billboard 200 and #8 on the Top Rock Albums chart. The record also received widespread critical praise—NPR Music called it, “…gorgeous and glorious,” while Pitchfork asserted, “Beast is contemplative and forgiving, a means of burying one relationship to commit to another, and Ritter nicely evokes the excitement and resignation of such a transition.” Additionally, in 2011, Ritter made is debut as a published author with his New York Times best-selling novel, Bright’s Passage (Dial Press/Random House). Of the work, Stephen King writes in The New York Times Book Review, “Shines with a compressed lyricism that recalls Ray Bradbury in his prime…This is the work of a gifted novelist.”