Mariposa Folk Festival

The main purpose of this post is to tell you all that Josh Ritter is the nicest, most awesome person around.

But I'll start at the beginning.

David is an obsessive Josh Ritter fan and turned me into one, and all of you should be one too. The greatest songwriter of our generation. Definitively spoken. By, er, me. So maybe not so definitive, but I think he's absolutely brilliant. And it turns out he's super, ridiculously nice. I know this because last weekend, David, Sarah and I went to the Mariposa Folk Festival, where Josh Ritter was headlining Friday night. 

We drove up after work on Friday to Orillia, which is a neat little town on the shores of Lake Simcoe. We caught several cool bands on the mainstage that night and last of all, Josh Ritter. His concert absolutely blew me away. I haven't been to a lot of concerts. Like, I can think of 3. But even though this statement might not mean much in light of my lack of experience, it was the best concert I've ever been to. And David, who has been to possibly somewhere around a million concerts, said it was the best he's ever been to (technically, he said it tied with the Raconteurs, but honestly, they have Jack White, so come on.) It was so brilliant. Josh looked so delighted to be playing music. It was high energy and fun and beautiful and epic and there was the perfect amount of stage banter and no commentary that began "this song was inspired by...", so it was perfect. Perfect. Perfect, perfect, perfect. I love Josh Ritter.

That night we camped and the next day, Josh was doing a little workshop with a few other people and so, after a swim in the lake and a rinse in the splash pad, we went to the workshop. It turned out to be an excuse for another mini-concert, which was awesome, because he played one of my favorites ("The Temptation of Adam"), which he hadn't played the night before. The other people playing were good too. After the workshop, we went behind the canopy thing and waited for him to put away his guitar and then he came out and obviously we were standing there to see him, along with a bunch of other people and I was standing first and he came right up and bear-hugged me and said, "Thanks so much for coming!"

I blubbered something ridiculously fan-boy into his shoulder, like, "I love your music so much, you're just so great..." and then David blurted out the first thing that came to him, which was, "We came from Idaho to see you!" Not technically true, but since Josh is from Idaho (Moscow), it was a good conversation starter and converse we did. He asked us about where we're from, we told him we're working at a music production company right now, he said, "How're you finding it?", we gushed some more about his music, he hugged David, he hugged me again, he realized Sarah was with us and hugged her too, he signed a copy of his book, "Bright's Passage", which came out a couple of weeks ago and which we were reading in the car on the way up to the festival. When we finally said goodbye to him, we sort of floated away and I felt like I was shiny on the inside. I didn't think it was possible, but after meeting him, I like his music even more. What a guy. Oh, and his book is great and you all should read it.