Somehow, after more than a decade's worth of releases, Josh Ritter continues to fly under the mainstream radar. I simply cannot fathom why. Taken from Ritter's fourth studio album The Animal Years, "Lillian, Egypt" is an exemplary embodiment of Ritter's talents. The songwriting is clever and heartfelt, and when put to music it flows and blends with the measured percussion and slightly jagged, serrated electric guitar riff.
There is an old time feel to the lyrics and the song on the whole, as the music video will further illustrate. Ritter discusses the woman he pines for as being "The daughter of the biggest big town banker/He kept her like a princess/I stole her like the Fort Knox gold." In the last verse, a jangling piano solo that conjures images of silent films precedes a further bolstering the damsel in distress anecdote, with the line: "The last time I saw her she was tied to the train tracks."
With this song, Ritter reaches back into America's past in order to appropriately articulate his feelings in the present world. This is not unusual when considering that his self-designed major during college was titled "American History Through Narrative Folk Music."
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