Josh Ritter again

by Anton Zuiker on May 24, 2026

Josh Ritter is one of our favorite singer-songwriters, and I’ve seen him perform at least six times, often with Erin but also with Oliver and Malia. Earlier this year, Ritter was scheduled for two nights at the Haw River Ballroom, where I’d last seen him. But Erin and I had plane tickets to St. Croix and we were going to miss his shows, and then a big winter storm came through North Carolina so we pushed our travel out, we hunkered in our warm house, and Ritter’s second show was canceled.

So, I bought two tickets to the final night of Ritter’s tour at the famed Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee. I invited my college buddy, Mark Schreiner, to join me in early May. Mark lives in Raleigh and he worked at Duke University until last summer. Now he’s a part-time announcer at The Classical Station and I get to listen to him talk about classical music when I’m driving to the Wednesday evening pick-up soccer game. Mark and I connect every few months for lunch, and we’ve hoped for years to take a trip together. But life got busy and I didn’t even think about the Nashville details. With airfares and AirBnB prices a bit much, we decided instead to drive to Boone, visit a couple of the breweries, and hike Grandfather Mountain.

Still, I was holding two tickets to the Ryman show. I asked around and found a Vanderbilt colleague whose parents live in Nashville and was happy to be introduced to Josh Ritter. I transferred the tickets to them from the cabin in Boone. The night of the concert, Mark and I sat at the cabin’s kitchen table to record a long conversation about our memories of John Carroll University and how our we reconnected in North Carolina and on the Duke campus. (I posted one segment over on Wan Smol Blog.)

Here’s a video from Ritter about that Ryman show:

Ritter’s tour was over but he’d committed to a make-up date for that canceled Haw River Ballroom show. Erin surprised me with tickets from a local friend, so there we were with Oliver (and Mary and Ginny) last Tuesday for his stand-up standout solo performance. It was awesome: nearly two hours of Ritter singing his stories—Truth is a Dimension is both funny and deep—filling the old textile factory with his exuberance.

Good friends. Good music. Good travel.

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