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April 11, 2011
War is hell, and so is Henry Bright's homecoming from the trenches of WWI in songwriter Ritter's appropriately lyrical debut. Bright is a half-shattered veteran whose ordeal in combat continues with the death of his young wife in childbirth. Spurred on by an angel who speaks to him through his livestock, Henry torches the cabin where his wife died, using the family Bible to spark the blaze. Soon, the angel tells Henry his infant son is the Future King of Heaven, a replacement for the one "who has soaked the world in blood." Henry's desolation is believably crushing, sometimes darkly funny, and rendered with a lyricist's delicacy: against the backdrop of the forest fire sparked by the cabin's blaze, Henry, the child, horse, and a goat make their way to town, dodging his wife's psychotic family, who blame him for her death. "The sky was too dark for afternoon, and where the sun should have hung there was now only an undulating black curtain of heat, which pulsed through the windowpanes upon his face like the throb of an open furnace." As the fire threatens Bright's friends and enemies, Ritter evokes war, violence and the fearful and numb responses to trauma, squaring them up in a hopeful, humble revelation.