by Josh Ritter
~ Retrofitting a song to a movie ~
Josh Ritter sings plenty of heartland tunes that are straight out of the Springsteen / Mellencamp / Seger playbook. folks that can’t wait to get out of a small town and make it in the big city, and can’t wait to expand their horizons, even if it means they’re expanding beyond everyone they didn’t want to leave behind.
In this case though, it’s not the singer who took off. It’s his old flame come back to town and he’s hoping to rekindle it all. Now, when it comes time to retrofit this to a movie, it doesn’t fit perfectly. There’s two movies where it can tie in, but in both cases she stayed home and he left town, which is the opposite of the song.
Jason Bateman came home in This Is Where I Leave You and found his long-lost romance with Rose Byrne. Robert Downey Jr made his trek home in The Judge for his mother’s funeral and eventually to rescue his dad from some pretty bad legal trouble. Vera Farmiga is the love interest for this one and again, it’s rekindling an old love affair.
Given the small town nature of both settings, you can totally see Josh Ritter being a weird kid at the local high school who ended up writing songs about all of his friends, including these guys.