Josh makes his return to Australia in July where he will be playing four very intimate solo acoustic shows, co-billing with Simone Felice.

July 5 – Brisbane, QLD, Australia – Old Museum
July 6 – Newtown, NSW, Australia – Notes Live
July 8 – Sydney, NSW, Australia – The Basement
July 11 – Melbourne, VIC, Australia – Corner Hotel

Tickets are on sale now and can be purchased here. Hope to see you there!

The Irish hardcover edition of Josh’s Bright’s Passage, published by New Island, is available for pre-order now.

Josh will be reading and signing copies of Bright’s Passage in Ireland (Cork, Galway, Dublin) in June. Dates and details here.

To celebrate publication of his debut novel, Bright’s Passage (New Island) in June, American singer-songwriter Josh Ritter will be appearing at a select number of events in Dublin, Cork and Galway where he will read from the novel and play acoustically.

JOSH RITTER BOOK READING EVENTS
copies of Bright’s Passage will be available for signing at these events

Saturday 2nd June
Christchurch at the Triskel Christchurch, Cork
Tickets priced 10 Euro from Triskel Arts Centre (seated event).
Telephone 021 4272022 or online at triskelartscentre.ie
Doors 7.30pm / Show 8.00pm

Sunday 3rd June
Roisin Dubh, Galway (seated event)
Doors 7pm. Reading starts 7.30pm sharp.
Tickets 10 Euro from www.roisindubh.net

Monday 4th June
Dublin Writers Week Festival @ Liberty Hall, Dublin
(seated event). Event : 3.00 pm
Tickets: €12 / €10 from www.dublinwritersfestival.com

joshritter.com/shows

The second batch of Bringing In The Darlings t-shirts are in from Topo Ranch and shipping now from the official Josh Ritter webstore. These shirts are hand sewn, screen printed, and available in extremely limited quantities. Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. Check out some photos from the production of the tees, above.

Topo will have some of the t-shirts available for sale in their two physcial stores. Each shirt purchased from one of their stores comes with a free copy of the Bringing In The Darlings EP.

Be sure to follow Topo Ranch on Facebook.

Josh Ritter & The Royal City Band will be playing some co-bill dates this summer with Brandi Carlile. Show details and ticket info is listed below:

June 28 – Wolf Trap – Vienna, VA
Ticket Pre-sale on 4/11/12
Public on sale 4/14/12

July 27 – Chastain Amphitheater – Atlanta, GA
Ticket Pre-Sale is open now
Public on-sale 4/23/12

August 4 – Bank Of America Pavilion – Boston, MA
Ticket Pre-Sale is open now
Public on-sale 3/29/12

Be sure to check the Shows page for all of the most updated tour info. We can’t wait to see you there!

Are you on Spotify? Josh just made a playlist with a few of his current favorite songs. Listen here. And check out what he has to say about his picks below:

1. Randy Travis – Digging Up Bones
Randy Travis is one of the greatest male country singers of the last fifty years. I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise. No one else sings through their teeth like that man can.

2. Duffy – Breath Away
I won’t say I cried when I heard this song, but I won’t say I didn’t, either.

3. My Morning Jacket – Holding on to Black Metal
MMJ continues to blow my mind. Circuital is a beautiful record and they’re only just beginning. And that’s all kinds of inspiring.

4. Latin Playboys – Forever Nightshade Mary Goodnight
I haven’t heard so many cool sounds add up to such a pretty song before. This is a song I wish I’d been in the room to hear the first time these badasses sat down to play it.

5. The Felice Brothers – Refrain
Celebration, Florida is a big, gorgeous, sprawling stew of a record. Completely off the chain. I can’t wait to see what these monsters come up with next.

6. Dave Van Ronk – In the Pines
Dave Van Ronk has the kind of voice that sounds like a paper bag full of aquarium gravel. Truly one of the great singers. So much momentum.

7. Frightened Rabbit – Old Fashioned
I wish I was in a gang with Frightened Rabbit. A really badass gang. Oh wait, I am.

8 Elvis Presley – Mystery Train
This song is one of the strangest, most beautiful snippets of music I have ever heard. Elvis, just a kid at this time, singing a song off the cuff of a cuff.

“Love Is Making Its Way Back Home” video by Prominent Figures

This video was created with over 12,000 pieces of construction paper, shown as it was shot, with no effects added in post.

Director : Erez Horovitz
Concept : Sam Cohen + Erez Horovitz
Illustrator : Sarah Graves
Text Illustrator : Savannah Wolf
Lead Production : Marlie Pesek + Eric Giordano
Photo Editor : Felipe Sanchez
Technical Director : Ali Mohammed
Grip : James Wells
Production Assistants : Paige Ellis, Jacqueline Geisheimer, Angelina Zhou, Jesse Ashcraft-Johnson, Jovin Cronin, Faizan Ahmed

Produced at Danger!Awesome, special thanks to Nadeem Mazen and Ali Mohammed
Shot at Industry Lab, special thanks to Jamie Zigelbaum
Rigging provided by High Output, special thanks to Joe McLeish

And thanks to Jen Stark and Ghost Robot for their incredibly inspirational work.

From Sam Cohen:

The video for “Love is Making It’s Way Back Home” was definitely the most labor intensive video we’ve been a part of – and with my background in stop-motion collage animation, and Erez (Horovitz) having worked on videos for OKGO, that’s kind of saying a lot. This is the first video to be officially released as a Prominent Figures production, which is the team Erez and I (Sam Cohen) formed after collaborating on a video for my own band, Yellowbirds. To tackle the technical demands of this process, we augmented the team with our resident graphics wiz, Sarah Graves (also my wife!), graphic designer Savannah Wolf, and the team at Boston’s Danger Awesome in Cambridge, MA, which included Marlie Pesek, Eric Giordano, Felipe Sanchez, and Ali Mohammed.




The video was made in several stages: storyboarding, computer animation, converting the computer graphics frame by frame to paper cutouts, and photographing those roughly 12,000 cutouts into about four minutes of paper animation.

Josh Ritter had come to us with a loose narrative about driving through the night, and he wanted it to tie into the cover artwork which is a two-tone illustration. We started planning things out, keeping in mind that everything would be conveyed more-or-less as silhouettes. I wanted it to have the organic quality of those old Lotte Reiniger animations, but Erez saw the potential for it to start with that quality but evolve beyond that medium, so, once we had the story laid out, Erez spent over six weeks animating the entire video in After Effects, which gave him more control of perspective and perceived camera motion. We scoured books, magazines and the internet for the right images from which to create illustrations to use in the digital animation process, and during that time discovered the strata-cut technique which we used for the video’s ending. We were very inspired by Jen Stark and Ghost Robot’s strata-cut animations.

The video you see in the end is purely physical frame by frame animation. Everything you see is photographs of paper with no effects whatsoever. One of the most challenging parts of making the video was looking at the computer screen during the pre-animation phase in rigid black and white with no shadow or depth, and trying to visualize how it would later look and work as paper in 3D space. We had to determine ahead of time which images to cut as positives or negatives, how to anchor the cutouts to the paper frame that surrounds it so the pieces wouldn’t fall out, and a host of other problems.




When the animation was finished, the team at Danger Awesome began the process of making the paper cutouts used in the final video, manning 2 laser cutters receiving images directly from the digital animation to create the 12,000 cutouts involved.




The final stage was photographing – good old stop-motion animation done at 15 frames per second. The frames were hung vertically from hooks in 23 rows, row 1 being closest to the camera, row 23 farthest away. The rig was setup in our makeshift cave of thick black blankets hung from the ceiling to keep out all light. The paper scenes were then lit from the front and below, and photographed with a digital still camera on a tripod. Each photo is viewed for 1/15th of a second and each cutout represents one layer within a frame. A single frame could have anywhere from 2-100 layers, with a setup time of 20 seconds to 5 minutes. Shooting took a full week of mostly sleepless nights, and Erez holds the record with 5 all-nighters in a row.




We poured a lot of love into this video, and we hope you’ll love it too!

Live at the Iveagh Gardens is available today! The 2 CD + 1 DVD set is available from the Josh Ritter webstore, Amazon, your local indie record store, or on Itunes (audio only).

On 20th July 2010, Josh Ritter & The Royal City Band performed a two hour show at the Iveagh Gardens in Dublin, Ireland spanning Josh’s full catalog.

This two CD & Single-DVD set is the result of that show.

The Iveagh Gardens is a set of beautiful public gardens in Dublin, Ireland. This was the first time there had ever been a rock show there.

Check out the 6 videos from the DVD that are streaming online below:

Lantern (watch on YouTube)

Change Of Time (watch on YouTube)

Harrisburg (watch on YouTube)

The Curse (watch on YouTube)

Bright Smile (watch on YouTube)

Me and Jiggs (watch on YouTube)

Kathleen (watch on YouTube)

Order Live at the Iveagh Gardens:
Josh Ritter webstore
Amazon
Itunes (audio only)

Surprise Black Friday! The ‘Live at the Iveagh Gardens’ DVD/Double CD is now available for pre-order in North America! The first 150 preorders will receive signed copies and free bags of popcorn! Click here to pre-order!

The CD/DVD set officially hits stores on December 13th. We’ll be posting two videos from the DVD every week from now until after the release of the DVD! Check out the first two to be posted, the performance of “Lantern” and “Change of Time”.

The coupon code RITTER2011 does not apply to Iveagh Gardens pre-orders, but does work for all other items in the Josh Ritter store – until December 31, 2011.