Bob Dylan has covered his songs. Bob Weir called him up to co-write an album. Stephen King called his prose work a work of a gifted novelist. But the reason to pay attention to Josh Ritter right now isn’t the credentials — it’s the new single, “One More River to Cross,” a 3-minute piece of Americana that feels like it was dug up from somewhere old and true and necessary.
Ritter brings his full band to the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on Saturday, May 2, 2026 at 8pm, and if his recent run of shows is any indication, this is a night worth clearing your calendar for. He has a rare gift for making a room feel both enormous and intimate at the same time — the kind of performer who can hold the Ryman’s pews in absolute stillness with a solo guitar and then, two songs later, have the whole place moving. The set will almost certainly include “Girl in the War,” “Kathleen,” and “Only a River,” but the new single is the reason the evening has particular weight right now.
“One More River to Cross” is a co-write between Ritter, producer Josh Kaufman, and Bob Weir — a song that grew out of the same campfire sessions that produced Weir’s Blue Mountain. Ritter wrote on his Substack that the song came to him immediately after finishing a phone demo of “Only a River,” the two pieces born from the same place — rivers, memory, the long road. The single lands somewhere between a folk hymn and a traveling song, patient and unhurried, with Ritter’s voice carrying the full weight of the journey. It follows his 2025 full-length I Believe in You, My Honeydew (Thirty Tigers) and the gorgeous, jazz-tinged 2024 mini-album Heaven, or Someplace as Nice, on which Bill Frisell appeared on four tracks. Taken together, Ritter is in the middle of one of the most quietly prolific stretches of his career.
Don’t miss Josh Ritter at the Ryman Auditorium, 116 Rep. John Lewis Way North, Nashville, on May 2nd. Tickets and full tour dates are at joshritter.com. An evening with this man is not something you leave unchanged.