Name: Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band
Start: 2025-11-04T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Taft Theatre

The venue enforces a clear bag policy for all events. To view the bag policy and a complete list of Rules and Prohibited items, please go to our website: www.tafttheatre.org. There are no elevators in the Theatre. All Balcony seats require climbing stairs.
Renowned singer, songwriter, musician, artist and best-selling author Josh Ritter will release his anticipated new album, I Believe in You, My Honeydew, September 12 via Thirty Tigers (pre-order/pre-save here). Ahead of the release, his new song, “You Won’t Dig My Grave,” is out today. Listen/share HERE. The release will coincide with an extensive fall headline tour that includes a stop in Cincinnati, OH at Taft Theatre on November 4.
Throughout his decades long career, Ritter has established himself as “one of the most perceptive artists making music today” (American Songwriter), releasing twelve albums to date and earning the respect of countless music legends, with artists such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Bob Weir having performed and recorded his songs.
With the release of I Believe in You, My Honeydew, Ritter shares ten new tracks that further demonstrate the insightful and engaging artistry that he’s celebrated for. Produced by Sam Kassirer (Lake Street Dive, Langhorne Slim), the new album features Ritter alongside his Royal City Band: Kassirer (piano, organ, synthesizer, accordion), Zachariah Hickman (acoustic and electric bass, thumb piano, mandolin), Rich Hinman (guitars, pedal steel, mandolin) and Ray Rizzo (drums, percussion).
Of the project, Ritter shares: “I lived in the woods when I was a kid. I used to believe (and maybe I was right) that I could walk out of our front door, across the gravel road and, pointing myself north, I could walk to Canada, never once leaving the tree line. Wonder was a temple with no walls, and the Muse was still just a ripple in the ponderosas. I felt no fear.
I’m 48 now. Decades have passed. There have been times I felt my inspiration, my Muse, had passed along with them. And then, not too long ago, I decided that instead of waiting for the Muse to write me a song, I would write the Muse a song instead. I started referring to my Muse as my Honeydew. And this album was born.
The songs on Honeydew are songs for my Muse, my invisible and blinding companion of long-standing. I hope it enjoys them. I hope that it experiences a bit of what it’s like to be human, a bit of what it’s like to be lonely, scared, uncertain, joyful, righteous. I believe in you, my honeydew.”
I Believe in You, My Honeydew follows Ritter’s 2024 mini-album, Heaven, or Someplace as Nice, which he recorded with legendary jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, and his acclaimed 2023 full-length project, Spectral Lines. Of the record, Paste praised, “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,” while No Depression declared, “a hopeful tapestry that encourages listeners to sit with each other in introspection, but not to forget to sing along.”
In addition to his work as a musician, Ritter is also a national best-selling author, having released two novels to date: 2011’s Bright’s Passage and 2021’s The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All, for which the film rights have recently been optioned for development. Released to critical attention, Stephen King wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Bright’s Passage “shines with a compressed lyricism that recalls Ray Bradbury in his prime…This is the work of a gifted novelist.”