While admitting to a partiality to him around this time would make a lot musicians the butt of many a joke – possibly accompanied by wedgies – the legacy of solo Paul McCartney and Wings circa 1971-2 is substantial.

Not the trendiest of musical epochs I know, but the albums he made around that time are defined by those ramshackle, almost half-written songs that contain a certain vulnerability and chaotic charm that he arguably never found at any other point in his career.

Josh Ritter, prior to the writing and recording of his new album The Historical Conquests Of, was very much enamoured with 1971’s Ram, McCartney’s second solo album made towards the end of his post-Beatles period of directionless, marijuana-numbed stupor.

“Just the spirit in which it was made really impressed me,” said Ritter, probably the friendliest and most articulate alt-country journeyman around. “I felt like that was him kicking himself in the pants saying ‘OK, this is what you’ve come through, what are you going to do now? Are you gonna take a rest or are you gonna go for it’?

“Those songs are so great, one thing I responded to was the feeling that they were being written right in front of my eyes.”

While Ritter’s album continues his habit of writing cinematic songs of a mythical America (preposterously, but inevitably, compared to Dylan, Springsteen, Oberst et al), the Ram effect is evident on ‘Mind’s Eye’ and ‘Open Doors’, which sound hastily recorded with that same apparent thoughtlessness as McCartney’s effort. As such, it is a notable departure from Ritter’s previous work. The Animal Years, released in 2006, was a more structured, overtly political album with the pangs of his liberal ideology very deliberately at its core. The Historical Conquests Of has no such mission, and took a scattergun approach both thematically and musically.

“Spontaneity,” he says emphatically when asked the inspiration behind the record. “I just wanted to make a record that was far different from The Animal Years. It’s loud and anxious, and feels like your throwing something really precious down the stairs. I think I’m just more content with throwing things up in the air and seeing where they land.”

As well as Ram, Ritter took inspiration for the album from a quite unexpected source – what he calls ‘big rap’, like Notorious BIG and Jay-Z. “There’s a sense of humour, and I want the sense of humour to come across on my album. When those guys are shouting at you they’re saying some really funny things.” The other palpable invocation one gets from the new album is that of frontier America… saloons and gunfights and the like. He mentions films like Rio Bravo, Liberty Valance and The Searchers, all with those “big bold colours”.

This discussion leads us to consider that Ritter is a storyteller, a narrator, rather than an artist who gives you a naked insight into his ‘troubled soul’. In each song on The Historical Conquests Of Ritter assumes a persona, be it of grizzled gunfighter or heartbroken troubadour – he also references figures like Joan of Arc, Calamity Jane and Florence Nightingale. Both on record and in person, he is deferential, and loath to put himself centre stage.

“Bearing your own soul can only happen every so often,” he said, “because in the end, no one is so interesting that they can keep talking about themselves and people care. I really despise a lot of confessional music. I think it’s gratuitous, putting the singer on a higher pedestal that the people listening… that’s just hokum.

“So often it’s so easy to raise up somebody and make their music or their art more than what it is, raising it out of the realm of human creation and turn it into something higher, neutering it by saying it was ‘genius’. By doing that you take away all the culture and influences that surround it. It’s like, this was not magic, this happened, and lets treat this song for what it is.”

Such sentiments chime with his Idaho upbringing. He describes his parents, both scientists, as ‘liberal humanists’ – hence the atheistic railing at assigning artistic achievement to anything other than human endeavour.

“It was really conservative,” he said of his home state. “But I was lucky ‘cos I grew up near a couple of university towns, plus I got to travel a lot.” Ritter lived in Britain, in Edinburgh and Worcester Park, earlier in his life.
“It’s a very conservative state, but the people are good people,” he said, his voice acknowledging the implication he’d just made. “With farming it’s not easy. It’s a beautiful place to grow up.”

Taking the cue from his parents, Ritter initially studied to be a neuroscientist, getting as far as his sophomore year before realising the fruitlessness of carrying on with something he wasn’t altogether very good at. Naturally after falling in love with songwriters like Gillian Welch, Townes Van Zandt and Leonard Cohen, a trip to K-Mart was necessary to buy a guitar. “What attracted me to science was the scientists, ‘cos their much like other artists.

“It was coming up to my organic chemistry final, and I realised I wasn’t going to pass. But I’d always known I was going to do music, ever since I heard Johnny Cash back in high school.”

His eponymous first album, self-released, came out in 1999 and The Historical Conquests Of, out on V2, is his sixth. While he is successful enough in his homeland to tour regularly and enjoy moderate album sales, it is in Europe that he is most appreciated. In Ireland, for example, he is practically a household name.

“I guess it’s ‘cos that’s where I began, I really learnt how to perform there,” he said. “There’s something to be said for Ireland – they’ve really given some great chances to folk like me, or Steve Earle or John Prine. Maybe it’s about storytelling – in terms of language technology the Irish are about ten years ahead.”

The other thing you should know about Josh Ritter – if it isn’t apparent already – is that he is a formidably intelligent chap. He talks of the books he’s reading, like God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens (“which I thought was awesome) and The Most Famous Man in America, a biography of a 19th century preacher (“they were like rock stars back then”).

Then there are his politics. While acknowledging that anything explicitly political was never the intention with the new album, he is aware enough to see that any work of art cannot be divorced from the social conditions that gave rise to it – even if anything ‘political’ is far from one’s mind. “If you’re picking up the strata coming around from all kinds of things in society and culture, then stuff is going to come out anyway. Every record is a product of the time it is written in, in the same way you pick up on that tension and strangeness off of Ram.

“Anytime you go beyond ‘I love her, she doesn’t love me’ you get into a political world.”

For good measure, the new record does have some of that old-fashioned boy-girl romance along with all the violence, struggle, humour, heroes and villains. It’s all an affair in the life of this new freewheelin’ Josh Ritter.

Josh Ritter plays Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 22 November 2007.