Josh Ritter was born in Idaho and released his self-titled debut album in 1999 at age 23. This poignant and disquieting song was featured in AUK back in January 2025 following a certain president’s inauguration. A year on, things have moved at a pace, not for the better, and Ritter’s lyrics have become even more powerful.
This stripped-down translation, with Josh Kaufman’s beautiful guitar as accompaniment, is much more intimate and delicate than the album version. In these times with “compassion on the run”, Ritter spins the story around and asks the questions we all know deep down the answers to. What would we all do when faced with the hardships and displacement that others have had to endure? Stay put and take the consequences of a potentially violent regime, or leave, looking for something better. The risk in both is immense. The opening lines are well-crafted, as he explores humanity rather than just numbers. “I saw my brother in a stranger’s face / I saw my sister in a smile / My mother’s laughter in a far-off place / My Father’s footsteps in each mile”.
To see Ritter in a live setting is a delight. The troubadour has so much joy and passion for his music. Mainly, as he does here, singing with his eyes closed and searching deep into his own soul for the answers. He can rock with the best of them and then produce something of impeccable beauty like this. The song comes from his tenth studio album “Fever Breaks”, produced by Jason Isbell and recorded with Isbell’s band The 400 Unit. Ritter didn’t feel he could sit and write his usual wonderful love songs. He refused to turn away from what, in his own words, was “the world in flames”. The record gained overall favourable reviews, and the perspective was that Jason Isbell and his band had added some bite to Ritter’s music. When you listen to this version of ‘All Some Kind of Dream’ back-to-back with the ‘Fever Breaks’ offering, there is a sense that this stripped-down translation is how the song should be sung. It feels more heartfelt, and indeed, the tender moment in the last verse where a couple lie on the bed, contemplating the future and wishing they could wake from the dream, is compelling. The album version, perhaps, has just a little bit too much going on. Josh Kaufman’s guitar interlude before the final verse is stunning. Regular readers will know Kaufman as one-third of the highly acclaimed band Bonny Light Horseman.
Every lyric is carefully plotted in Ritter’s persuasive and clever wordplay. The whole passage is poetry for the displaced and the lost, summed up in the second verse. Ritter may have moved away from his usual formula. Still, in that moment, he produced social commentary on days that we will hopefully look back on with only a kind of morbid curiosity and not a sense of shame. “I saw my country in the hungry eyes / Of a million refugees / Between the rocks and the rising tide / As they were tossed across the sea / There was a time when we were them / Just as now they all are we / Was there an hour when we took them in? / Or was it all some kind of dream?”
