An Electric Dissatisfaction

June 17, 2022·42 min·4 clips

Josh Ritter describes being on stage as the reward where the rest of him goes to sleep.

The frame stays modest. Dingman says this is a rerun from a temporary feed experiment, made while Family Ghosts was waiting to find out if season two would happen. The setup is simple: producers bring him artists whose work helped them think about the kinds of stories the show wants to tell. Josh Ritter ends up near the center. The conversation gets into the odd way a project can be led by concerns the artist does not fully notice until later. Preoccupations leak into the work. Ritter talks about how whatever occupies a writer in a given period can move through every song instead of staying neatly boxed off. The concept comes after the mess. Once the work settles, the pattern starts to show itself. That lands with Dingman because he had been listening to Ritter's The Temptation of Adam while making the show over the previous summer. The song gives him an opening. Its underground missile silo has cheesy banter sitting beside the real terror of nuclear responsibility. Adam and Marie are people before they are uniforms. Ritter likes imagining people with an extreme job becoming more than their assignment beneath the ground. The episode keeps coming back to that tension. It is about art, yes, but also about how ordinary feeling survives inside frightening machinery. Even the ending turns back toward home: a family car scene, a mother scolding Stephanie after a scare, memory and fear giving way to a comic aftershock. Dingman thanks Jason DeLeon and Josh Ritter, then sends the ghost family off until the next return.

As heard by us

A Family Ghosts bonus episode follows Josh Ritter into the strange inner logic of one song.

Family Ghosts returns to a temporary bonus episode from the uncertain stretch after season one, with former producer Jason DeLeon bringing Sam Dingman into the music of Josh Ritter.

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Why you'd press play

You hear how one opening line drops a love story into a missile silo, then lets a songwriter notice the larger preoccupations already taking shape.

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