JOSH RITTER TO PLAY CORK OPERA HOUSE
‘Hello Starling’ 20th Anniversary Tour
With The Royal City Band

Monday 23rd October,
Cork Opera House

Renowned singer, songwriter, musician, artist, and best-selling author Josh Ritter arrives in Ireland next week with his ‘Hello Starling’ anniversary tour, at the Set Theatre, Kilkenny (Oct 18th), Leisureland, Galway (Oct 19th), Mandela Hall, Belfast (Oct 20th), Dolan’s, Limerick (Oct 22nd), Cork Opera House (Oct 23rd), National Concert Hall, Dublin, (Oct 24th & 25th). Ritter will be joined on the road by his longtime band, The Royal City Band.

Speaking about the tour, Josh says: "When I wrote Hello Starling, I was playing coffee shops and open mics. By the time it came out, I was on tour with The Frames and Joan Baez. I was practically living on the road, hearing my songs on the radio for the first time, staying up all night, touring Europe, doing all these things I had only dreamt of. It was a grand time.

For the 20th anniversary of the album, the band and I will be taking a swing through Hello Starling. We'll play the entire album in full, front to back, and then play a bunch more music. It just felt right to try this out first in Ireland, England, and the Netherlands, where I spent so much time in 2003 when the album came out; but we hope to bring it to other spots as well, if all goes well! Thank you all for listening all these years.”

Ritter’s most recent album, Spectral Lines, was released in April to critical acclaim via Thirty Tigers (stream/purchase here). Produced by his longtime collaborator Sam Kassirer (Lake Street Dive, Langhorne Slim), Spectral Lines finds Ritter expanding beyond the bounds of his previous work to create a record both atmospheric and profound. Dedicated to the memory of his mother, Ritter searches for commonality across these ten seamless tracks by exploring life’s most universal ideas—love, devotion and what it means to be connected, to both each other and to ourselves.

Critical acclaim for Spectral Lines:
“His most adventurous album yet”—The Irish Times
“Richly atmospheric, sonically adventurous”—The Sun
“Primarily, this is an album that exalts the power of shared human experiences”—Hot Press
“one of the most perceptive artists making music today…with Spectral Lines, Josh Ritter continues to blur the boundary between melody and mystique”—American Songwriter
“Josh Ritter is like a more open-hearted version of Leonard Cohen. His lyrics draw on the divine but he seems to see a little heaven in all the people around him”—Paste
“Spectral Lines stands as a heady revelation”—PopMatters
“a hopeful tapestry that encourages listeners to sit with each other in introspection, but not to forget to sing along”—No Depression