Photo by Laura Wilson

Although Josh Ritter has spent nearly 15 years telling stories in song, he’s never been particularly interested in telling his story. That changed on Ritter’s latest release, “The Beast in Its Tracks,” a collection of songs more autobiographical than any he had released before as the singer and songwriter works through a wrenching divorce, meeting someone new and falling in love again.

“It started in a tough time and carried through to a really great time,” Ritter tells Listen, Dammit, on his way to Northampton for a performance Thursday, May 9, at the Calvin Theatre.

It’s just one of many facts we learned about Ritter, who revealed a new one last week after an interview, when he called out Messiah College on Facebook for an anti-gay stance. Ritter had been booked to play the Pennsylvania school before he knew that students there are required to sign a pledge asserting, among other things, that they won’t engage in “sinful practices” like homosexuality. Instead of canceling the gig, Ritter used it as an opportunity to talk about why he views Messiah’s policy as wrong. “I hope to have made the best of a difficult situation,” Ritter wrote, promising not to play at Messiah again while their anti-gay policy remains in place. “I’m donating the fee I received from Messiah College tonight in its entirety to The Trevor Project (thetrevorproject.org), the leading national organization providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth.”

Here are three more facts about Ritter:

1. Ritter felt compelled to write personal songs for “The Beast in Its Tracks.” When his marriage to singer Dawn Landes fell apart in November 2010, writing about it seemed the a way for Ritter to be true to himself. “This was an important moment for me, it was a big moment in my life, and I felt like if I didn’t write about this I was betraying what it was to be a writer,” he says. “To get to this point in my career and not write about that, felt foolish.” He also tried not to censor what he was writing, which led to some raw moments.

“It was important to me to get all the different emotions, there was some anger and some spite and bitterness, and I wanted that in there,” he says. “It was important to have, but I also wanted to make sure there was stuff that was happy, because divorce can happen, and it can certainly come out and be for the best. It was in my case.”

2. Writing prose requires different headspace than writing songs. Ritter in 2011 published his first novel, “Bright’s Passage,” and he says writing the book occupied a different part of his mind. “ I consider them to be two different fields, and one is fallow while the other is kind of growing,” Ritter says. “I need to be able to empty out my head, you know? Like anybody else, I think, I need to be able to put it out in the street and let people take it away, and the book was certainly a new way to feel like I was doing that. I could go to sleep at night with an empty head.”

Although writing songs and writing books have a “performative aspect” in common, there’s a difference in terms of the immediacy with which audiences absorb them. “With a song, people are sitting or standing, you can see everybody’s faces, and you can see them change in the moment,” Ritter says. “With a book, the audience is sitting a long ways away, at the other end of the room. You can’t see them, but they’re there. . . . I’m really excited about this next one for that very reason: I feel like I know where the audience is now, I know where they’re sitting.”

3. Writing isn’t magic. Although he acknowledges the importance of inspiration, Ritter tries not to be ritualistic about how he writes. Instead, he focuses on the discipline required of the craft, whether he’s writing songs or fiction. “It’s a mistake to get too precious about where you write or when you write,” he says. “Unless you sit down every day and write, nothing happens. There’s so much more geography to cross.”

Josh Ritter performs with the Felice Brothers on Thursday, May 9, at the Calvin Theatre, 19 King St., Northampton. Tickets are  $38.50 and $28.50.

You don’t hear a lot of clarinet in rock ‘n’ roll, but there it is, winding its way through “Marry Me Annie” on Modern Merchant’s new EP, “For the Fields.” Although part of the Brooklyn indie band released a three-song demo in 2011, “For the Fields” is the full group’s proper debut, and it’s a promising one at that.

The quartet — John Parson, Mike Skaggs, Jesse Stanford and Sydney Weiss — plays lush, low-key songs structured around bobbing waves of melody. Singer Parson surrounds his understated voice with dreamy layers of guitar, keyboards, bass and drums, adding touches like the clarinet on “Marry Me Annie” or trebly spikes of guitar on “Like-Minded.” A wash of noise swells up behind his vocals on “Unending Afterthought,” and a descending whistling part evokes Andrew Bird on the slow spiraling title track.

“For the Fields” is bookended by a pair of songs that encapsulate everything Modern Merchant does well. Opener “When the Markets Crash” makes excellent use of space, piling up layers of wordless vocals over an ebb-and-flow beat that occasionally recedes to leave Parson’s voice standing alone. On the back end, closing song “Necessary Evil” emphasizes a bold rhythm that dissolves into a warm, drifting expanse of guitars and harmony vocals on the refrain.

What Modern Merchant needs, now that the band has released a compelling studio recording, is to follow it up sooner, rather than later. It’s one thing to leave listeners wanting more, as long as you don’t leave them waiting too long.

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Apparently Chicago has something called a “pyschedelic-newgaze” scene, and though the size or scope of that scene isn’t really clear, the term is certainly an apt description of Secret Colours, a band that would have to be a primary anchor of any such scene. The group pairs a classic swirling psychedelia with bright elements of ’90s Brit-pop  for a sound that’s often flat-out riveting.

After releasing a self-titled debut in 2010, the band has been working on their second album with producer Brian Deck (Modest Mouse, Iron & Wine) on the follow-up. The result is “Peach,” which is due May 28. Listen to a pair of tracks that show what Secret Colours have been up to. “Blackhole” piles guitars, piano and murmuring vocals atop a swift, relentless rhythm, while “Blackbird (Only One)” ratchets up the guitars into trebly spikes over bold, punchy drums.

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If rock ’n’ roll tends to exist in the present tense, John Murry’s songs live in the aftermath. The Mississippi-born California transplant sifts through shards and fragments on “The Graceless Age” (Evangeline Recording Co.), a powerful solo debut anchored by the weight of memory.

Murry writes songs like a novelist, building dramatic conflict toward wrenching, inevitable conclusions that can be brutal in their impact, and hypnotic in their effect. Like all good storytellers, he’s searching for deeper truths, and the memories weighing him down are vivid and direct: The songs on “The Graceless Age” came from a grim period in Murry’s life, when he was strung out and estranged from his wife and young daughter. (He’s since cleaned up, and they’ve since reconciled.)

He sings of ghosts and ashes with palpable regret in a drawn-out drawl that scatters flecks of Mississippi dirt through songs he wrote in the Bay Area. Murry is not concerned with the strictures of time, letting his stories unfold at the pace they need, whether it’s five, eight or even 10 minutes. The last, “Little Colored Balloons,” slides by as if no clock is ticking at all as Murry recounts a heroin overdose that nearly killed him. “This ain’t what I am, this is what I do,” he insists, and his anguish can’t fully obscure the longing in his voice while the music behind him swells from simple piano to subtle, groaning strings and gospel-like female backing vocals. By the end, he’s roaring, “I still miss you so much,” and it’s not clear whether he’s singing to his wife, his addiction or both.

As harrowing as the song is, “The Graceless Age” isn’t an album about drugs, or even, particularly, remorse. In literary fashion, it’s an album about choices and their consequences. While Murry pores over the decisions that left him with only fading snapshots on “Photograph,” or the cinders of a life he torched himself on “Things We Lost in the Fire,” he accepts them as his own, without excuses.

Murry recorded “The Graceless Age” with Tim Mooney of American Music Club and Sun Kil Moon, and the album was the last Mooney worked on before his death last year, apparently of a blood clot. The pair created open, enveloping arrangements, with steel guitar drifting like slow exhalations over fingerpicked acoustic guitar on “Things We Lost in the Fire,” tangles of electric guitar and piano knotting on opener “The Ballad of the Pajama Kid” and a woozy bassline that circles slowly through the clutter of buzzing guitars, keyboards and percussion on “California,” another album standout.

“This city’s a dream, but I’m wide away,” Murry sings. He sounds determined to keep his eyes open wide, whatever may come.

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The Dirty Projectors play with a chaotic precision that’s somehow almost menacing. At Pearl Street Monday for their first Northampton show since 2007, the band turned rock ‘n’ roll abandon upside down, reveling instead in rigid order as they marched through complex songs full of interlocking parts layered one over the other into dense arrangements that paired taut, angular rhythms with discursive melodies and female vocal harmonies at once ethereal and machine-like.

The Brooklyn band focused on its most recent albums, last year’s “Swing Lo Magellan” and 2010′s “Bitte Orca” in a 14-song set. A chopping rhythm burst into a booming beat on “Offspring Are Blank,” blurry keyboards sped up and slowed down over secret, crumbling rhythm parts on “See What She Seeing” and leader David Longstreth sang at the delicate high end of his vocal range over bursts of drums and guitar on “Useful Chamber.”

Longstreth ceded lead vocal duties to guitarist Amber Coffman on “The Socialites,” backing her with a guitar part that called to mind a malfunctioning Simon game. He played brittle guitar lines over a straight-ahead beat on “About to Die,” and added sinewy, twisting leads over polyrhythmic handclaps on “Just From Chevron.” The band pared back to drums, bass and prismatic layers of eerie harmony vocals backing Longstreth’s animated lead on last year’s discomfiting single “Gun Has No Trigger,” and took a more delicate turn on “When You Wake Up,” with a curtain of keyboards glimmering as if stirred by a breeze.

The group only got stronger as the show progressed, culminating in the strangely funky “Stillness Is the Move” midway through a three-song encore. With Coffman singing R&B vocal lines refracted through an avant-garde indie lens, Longstreth added slippery, siren-like guitar parts over a deep, comparatively simple rhythm part. It was an utterly arresting performance from a band thoughtful enough to bring the crowd down gently afterward with the simple, emotional “Dance for You” to close the show.

Photo by Talia Gordon

When Nick Jaina isn’t busy composing ballets — three of them so far — or writing music for film and the dramatic stage, he’s making deft albums full of smart, catchy chamber-pop songs like “Don’t Come to Me.” It’s from Jaina’s forthcoming sixth album, “Primary Perception,” which is due April 16 on the evocatively named Fluff and Gravy records.

“Don’t Come to Me” is a lush song, wrapping sinewy guitar lines around swells of synthesizers, cascades of tinkling piano and Jaina’s vocals, which are pleasant and tuneful. If the song isn’t enough to tide you over until “Primary Perception” is out, there’s always the Portland, Ore., musician’s back catalog: “A Bird in the Opera House” and “The Beanstalks That Have Brought Us Here Are Gone” (which features contributions from Laura Gibson, Jolie Holland and more) are excellent albums.

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Don’t Come to Me mp3

Whether he’s talking or singing, Todd Snider is mostly likely in the middle of telling a story. That’s what he did for close to two hours Wednesday night at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, where the singer and songwriter imparted folksy wisdom, funny asides and poignant reminiscences that he sometimes accompanied with music from an acoustic guitar, and sometimes not. A song would inspire a story about the song, which would inspire another story and then another song, all of which stemmed from years’ worth of travels and experiences.

“I’ve been driving around this country forever making this shit up,” Snider cracked early in the first of two sets.

Alone on a stage decorated with footstools shaped like psychedelic mushrooms, and a little cloth-covered table adorned with a vase of flowers, Snider played guitar and sang songs spanning a catalog that dates back to his 1994 album “Songs for the Daily Planet.” He had the crowd whistling along on the blackly comic opener “Sunshine,” drew laughs when he referred to himself as an “evangelical agnostic” on the wry philosophical treatise “Happy New Year” and inhabited the distinctive, knowing voices of  underachievers on “Lookin’ for a Job,” “The Very Last Time” and, well, pretty much everything else.

After closing the first set with the crowd favorite “Conservative Christian, Right-Wing Republican, Straight, White, American Males,” he returned for a second set that included requests from the audience. Selections included the sing-along “Beer Run,” a long story explaining the song “Don’t It Make You Wanna Dance?” and the self-deprecating “Can’t Complain.” Snider inserted a snippet of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” into “Play a Train Song,” explained long-since dated pop culture references in “Alright Guy” and cracked up the crowd again with the droll “Statistician’s Blues,” which posits that “64 percent of all the world’s statistics are made up right there on the spot.”

With that in mind, it seems fair to say that 99 percent of the packed-in audience had a good time watching a performer who was funny, generous and inviting with his music.

The coming and going of bands is an inevitable part of music — sunrise, sunset and all — but the Connecticut music scene has been hit with some lamentable goings, from New London punk veterans the Reducers to Hartford chamber folkies Heirlooms and, now, Titles, which is readying the release of “Modern Sounds in Science Fiction,” an album that mastermind Brad Amorosino says will likely be his last as Titles. (A very limited vinyl run of the album will be available through Safety Meeting Records.)

Actually, Titles has been gone from Connecticut for a few years already: Amorosino moved to California after the group released a stunning 2010 album, “Dirt Bell.” He’s pretty much the only full-time member left on “Modern Sounds,” which Amorosino recorded on his own in San Francisco before sending the songs back to Connecticut for additional contributions. The album expands on “Dirt Bell” with intimate, entropic songs that are catchy and charmingly cluttered. Guitars and keyboards tumble over each other in thick layers that surround Amorosino’s drowsy voice, and the effect is like being enveloped within some whirring mechanical creation with its own internal logic and beauty.

Atmospheric synths complement chiming guitars and a swooping slide part on the wondrous “Stone Boat,”  gritty, bell-like guitars ring out on “Starry Night” and keyboards pulse like a rapid heartbeat  on “Mountain.” There’s a different sort of pulsing on “Nothing,” the longest song on the album at nearly six minutes, with waves of guitar noise washing over a softly insistent beat topped with a repeating keyboard figure.

While much of “Modern Sounds in Science Fiction” feels like a meditation on distance, there’s a low-key optimism in Titles’ elegy when Amorosino sings “be not afraid” on a song by that name. It’s a reminder, in its way, that even reluctant farewells need not be sad.

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Photo by Joshua Simpson

Garage-electronica band You Scream I Scream has signed on to open a string of shows for Seattle alt-rockers Presidents of the United States of America and Eternal Summers.

The Connecticut/Nantucket/New York rockers will join PUSA in April for concerts in Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston and Asbury Park, N.J. The group last year released its latest album, “Zookeeper,” and it’s a quirky and propulsive set of songs that ought to fit right in with Presidents’ music. That band has released six studio albums since 1994, including a platinum-selling self-titled album in 1995 that included the hit single “Lump.”

You Scream leader Floyd Kellogg sees a certain symmetry in joining Presidents on tour. “PUSA I used to watch on MTV in the morning before I would go to middle school when I was young, so it’s definitely a gas having something musically come full-circle and to play with a band that I remember being impressionable on my young rock mind,” he says by e-mail.

Here’s You Scream I Scream’s itinerary with Presidents of the United States of America:

4/10 Philadelphia — Union Transfer
4/11 Boston — Paradise Rock Club
4/13 Asbury Park, NJ — The Stone Pony
4/16 Washington D.C. — 9:30 Club

Is it getting hot in here, or is it just Daphne Lee Martin’s sultry new video for her song “Belly?” Directed by Jimi Patterson, the clip features a dancer rendered in high contrast, moving sensually in time to the music. The song has a sexy R&B feel accentuated by Martin’s tousled voice, the slinky ooh-ooh background vocals and atmospheric keyboards that swirl past the deep, steady bassline.

The song is different from, but in keeping with, the tone of the tunes on her previous full-length, 2011′s “Dig & Be Dug,” which the New London, Conn., singer recorded with her collective ensemble Raise the Rent. “Belly” is one of 10  songs on Martin’s new album “Moxie,” which came out last month on the Telegraph Recording Company.