Josh Ritter & the Royal City Band

Performing the album Hello Starling plus more

Singer-songwriter of Americana and folk music, artist and writer Josh Ritter is one of the most thoughtful and prolific voices of our time. His career started twenty years ago with the breakthrough album Hello Starling (2003). During a special tour, Josh Ritter & the Royal City Band will celebrate the 20th anniversary of this album by playing it live in its entirety, and much more.

Josh Ritter: “When I wrote Hello Starling, I was playing coffee shops and open mics. By the time the album came out, I was on tour with The Frames and Joan Baez. I lived out of a suitcase, heard my songs on the radio again and did the things I always dreamed of: staying up all night and touring Europe. It was a special time. The band and I are celebrating the album’s 20th anniversary by playing Hello Starling in its entirety, starting in Europe. It feels good to first come to the Netherlands, Ireland and England with this special project. Where it all started.”

Josh Ritter has released eleven studio albums to date, including the critically acclaimed Fever Breaks (2019). In addition to his work as a musician, Ritter also released two well-received novels: The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All and Bright’s Passage. Stephen King wrote in The New York Times that Bright’s Passage “resplendent with a compressed lyricism reminiscent of Ray Bradbury in his heyday…This is the work of a gifted novelist.”

At the end of April, Josh released his new and enchanting album Spectral Lines, which shows that he thinks a lot about space exploration. “The Voyager spacecraft went up in 1977 and now it’s in a place where no one has ever been before and it’s sending all these messages back,” Ritter said. “I feel like songs do that in their own way. They are probes: they go out into the world, and sometimes you hear stories about them, but they actually go their own way.”

This concert is presented by LantarenVenster, Rotown & MOMO Concerts and has mainly standing room.