Josh Ritter – I Believe in You, My Honeydew
On his eleventh album, I Believe in You, My Honeydew, Josh Ritter isn’t reinventing himself—he doesn’t need to. What he’s doing here is harder: reminding us why belief itself still matters, and why he remains one of the most essential voices in American songwriting.
Where his last full album, 2023’s Spectral Lines, leaned hushed and minimal, Honeydew is expansive—ten songs brimming with big ideas and sweeping arrangements.
Ritter explains the album’s unusual title:
“I’m 48 now. Decades have passed. There have been times I felt my inspiration, my muse, had passed along with them. Not too long ago, I decided that instead of waiting for the muse to write me a song, I would write the muse a song instead. I started referring to my muse as my honeydew. The songs on Honeydew are for my muse, my invisible and blinding companion of long-standing. I hope it enjoys them. I hope it experiences a bit of what it’s like to be human—lonely, scared, uncertain, joyful, righteous.”
The opening track, “You Won’t Dig My Grave,” sets the stage with defiance. Driven by church organ and a swelling choir, Ritter pushes back against mortality itself: “I am no weeping willow / I am no fragile flower.” Then comes the knockout refrain: “I have lived among the angels / You never were that brave.” It’s an anthem about outlasting your enemies, delivered with the conviction of someone who’s been through the fire and emerged stronger. Think Johnny Cash in his late years, but with Ritter’s literary edge intact.
The title track, “Honeydew (No Light),” is the album’s anchor. A Guthrie-style ballad that sprawls across the Upper Plains, it tells of a Robin Hood figure taking from the rich to feed the poor, all while the narrator sings from behind prison bars. Its chorus—“Dark days / Lead to dark nights / Lead to dark years / No light”—feels like a mantra for the times we’re living through. Yet hope flickers in the refrain: “I believe in you, my honeydew / I know you’ll come for me.” It’s vintage Ritter—both haunting and strangely comforting.
Ritter has always had a knack for finding the sacred in the scientific, and nowhere is that clearer than on “Truth Is a Dimension (Both Invisible and Blinding).” A highlight of his live shows since 2022, it finally appears on record, and it’s stunning. Consider this lyric:
“Of the System 611, a Magellanic cluster / I’d been watching for a while, I got my telescope adjusted / And I turned it on an unassuming patch of dusty sky / That was really fifty billion stars a billion lightyears wide.”
That line captures Ritter’s magic. It’s a bit esoteric (“System 611”?), a bit showy (“a Magellanic cluster”), but mostly it’s revelatory. How many of us can look at an “unassuming patch of dusty sky” and see “fifty billion stars a billion lightyears wide”? It’s not just the telescope that gives Ritter the ability to see what others miss—it’s his approach to life and to art. And the song is catchy as hell. (For those keeping score at home, System 611 refers to Abell 611, a galaxy cluster about 3.2 billion light-years from Earth imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. A Magellanic cluster refers to one of the Magellanic Clouds, the last supernova visible to the human eye from Earth. But you already knew that.)
“Noah’s Children” is the record’s most chilling track. What starts in suburban blandness—“Split-level ranch on a mid-level street”—spirals into violence, biblical imagery, and apocalyptic dread. Ritter says the spark came from staring at an El Greco painting, and you can hear the haunted brushstrokes in every line. The refrain, “The world’s ending but it’s ending all the time,” lands like a gut punch in an era when catastrophe feels constant.
Elsewhere, Ritter leans into mystery. “Wild Ways” feels like a prayer, or maybe a surrender—“I give everything I have / To your wild ways.” “Thunderbird” turns a lover into a mythological force, while the feral and unrelenting “Kudzu Vines” uses invasive plants as a metaphor for everything choking modern life.
Recorded at Pachyderm Studios in Minnesota and produced by longtime collaborator Sam Kassirer, Honeydew finds Ritter’s Royal City Band—Kassirer on keys, Zachariah Hickman on bass, Rich Hinman on guitars and pedal steel, and Ray Rizzo on drums—in peak form. They give Ritter’s songs room to breathe and burn, layering in unexpected textures—Matt Douglas’s saxophone, choral voices—that make the whole record feel like it was cut inside a revival tent.
The record builds toward “The Throne,” Ritter’s most direct confrontation with power and faith. He lists the burdens of our time—“The weather / The news / The self-isolation / The loss of the muse / The disinformation”—before revealing: “I have been to the throne / And there was nobody there.” It’s a devastating moment, but he doesn’t leave us in despair. The twist comes with a measure of hope: “We’re just skin and bones / In that there is power / If we want it it’s ours.” Ritter refuses to let the emptiness be the end of the story.
That’s what makes Honeydew such a rewarding listen. Ritter has always written songs that straddle wonder and worry, mystery and clarity. Here, he takes that balancing act further, mixing telescopes with angels, kudzu vines with gospel choirs, science with scripture. It’s an album about trying to keep faith alive when the world seems to be unraveling—and about finding strength not in certainty, but in the act of believing itself.
With Honeydew, Josh Ritter shows that questioning, imagining, and believing don’t have to be solemn endeavors. The album sparkles with clever turns, rollicking stories, and irresistible hooks—proof that even the weightiest ideas can be entertaining when delivered by a master storyteller.
Find tour dates and more information here on his website: https://joshritter.com
Enjoy our previous coverage here: Show Review: Josh Ritter in Annapolis