Ritt Deitz CD Release Party

Saturday, September 26, 2015 - 8:00pm

Mother Fool's

Come celebrate the release of "Small Blue Green Letters."

Small Blue Green Letters, Ritt’s latest recording and his fifth on the Uvulittle label, marks Deitz’s return to stringed instruments and voices and recalls his first full-length release, Hillbilly (Bentback 1999, anthologized on the 2006 Uvulittle release Collected 1999-2000), exchanging Steve Burke’s mandolin for Deitz’s banjo and with the harmonies of backing vocalist Lindsey Hinkel Craig Totten’s dobro work.

The small-town feel one often hears in Deitz’s songs shines through. A native of Florence, Kentucky, Deitz lives in a tightly-knit block on the Near East Side of Madison, Wisconsin, which a musician neighbor (who grew up a block from where Deitz lived as a child) has called “Mayberry.” You can hear both of these on the opening track, “Here Comes the Band.” “A float goes by, the FFA / has filled that thing all up with hay / it must have taken them the whole darn day / but I ain’t sure I care / Where’s the band?”

The songs hang together like communities do in small towns, neighborhoods, even workplaces. Deitz writes like a man aware of the forces of Big Data, of consumerism, of individualism, of the have-a-nice-day shallowness that seems to define, ever quickly, what it means to be happy in America. “I know we have these things to contend with,” says Deitz (whose songs the Onion once called “well-wrought”), “but we do have these thoughts, these lives, and each other.”