Scott Ritcher is experienced at getting the hell out of town, and he's reaped rewards for it.
In 1994, the Louisville musician skipped out of Louisville for a rented 200-year-old adobe in Abiquiu, N.M., where he sought clarity-bringing solitude while his band, Sunspring, began to collapse back home. On his nine-day experiment in isolation, Ritcher made demos for what would become the first set of a new band. He decided to abandon his longtime vehicle Sunspring and settled on the name Metroschifter for his new project, and the band endures to this day.
What doesn't endure is Ritcher's residency in Louisville. This winter, Ritcher left Louisville for Stockholm — Stockholm, as in the capital of Sweden, across the Atlantic Ocean in Europe. It's about as un-Kentucky as one can get.
So. Sweden?
“I have been lucky enough to travel all over the United States and Europe pretty extensively, mostly thanks to playing music,” Ritcher said via e-mail. “Sweden was the place that I kept coming back to when I had a choice. The short answer is that Sweden is a beautiful, clean, smart, quiet, reasonable country, full of people who fit the same description.”
Ritcher was looking for a change of scenery, and he found it in Sweden. He argues that the Nordic state is a gentler, more sophisticated and intellectually curious country than these United States. It's an ideal, and judging from his 1998 candidacy for mayor of Louisville (Key issue: light-rail mass transit — still ahead of its time today), Ritcher is something of an idealist.
Leaving Louisville is an intriguing thing to do for a guy who is synonymous with this city, at least to a small but vocal segment of local musicians, artists, punks, coolies, scenesters and hipsters who've accepted Ritcher as an icon over the past 20 years. Really, one of the most fascinating thing about Ritcher these days is Louisville's fascination with him.
He was highly influential in Louisville punk scene during the 1990s, as frontman of Sunspring/Metroschifter and head of the small but significant Slamdek Record Company. But Ritcher hasn't released much music in the aughts. His vigorous entrepreneurial spirit built his fine reputation in Louisville, as publisher of K Composite magazine, as a graphic designer (he's done work for this magazine) and as founder of the social networking website Eggfly.com.
Excluding his tumultuous bid last year for a state senate seat — more on that later — Ritcher remains a Louisville icon despite keeping a relatively low profile through this decade. Metroschifter still draws crowds when it played rare shows in Louisville, and the band is releasing a new album after nine years of semi-retirement. There are still “Scott Ritcher, Kentucky Senate” signs and bumperstickers posted throughout Germantown and the Highlands. The man has a following — hell, Velocity put him on the cover in 2006, calling him “Louisville's Renaissance Man.”
That's a lot of cachet for a guy whose name is hardly noticeable beyond the Watterson Expressway, and who has lowered his profile the past decade. Ritcher has long professed his love of Louisville, and Louisville loved him right back. Still, Ritcher's relocation has all the marking of a permanent thing.
“Oh, nothing is permanent,” Ritcher assured. “On the one hand, and despite how it may seem from my answer to the previous question, I am still an American citizen and a resident of Kentucky. My family, my best friends, and the things I care about the most are in Louisville. On the other hand, I sold or gave away everything I owned before moving. I brought only one bag and my guitar with me to Sweden. Except for a couple boxes of photos and Slamdek archives in my parents' basement, there are no material things in Louisville for me to go back to.”
Even the impending Metroschifter album has an air of closure. Last year, Ritcher said he wanted to reform the band in part to have an excuse to visit Europe. He gathered ex-Metroschifter members Pat McClimans and Chris Reinstatler to record “Carbonistas,” which is slated to for release later this month on the Louisville-based Noise Pollution label.
“I'm not sure how long I'll be away from Louisville or what the future may hold, so I wanted to have one more souvenir of the group,” he said. “What we've done with Metroschifter has always been what made us happy first. The audience is an afterthought. So honestly, we made a new record because we wanted to have a new record.”
The new record includes a track titled “America Is a Prison,” apt when you consider the disaster that was Ritcher's last stab at participating in the democratic process.
His run as an independent candidate for the Kentucky State Senate's 35th District seat was cut short when the Democratic incumbent, Denise Harper Angel, successfully challenged the validity of the petitions he'd gathered to secure a spot on the ballot. Some of the people who signed petitions weren't registered voters in the district, an inadvertent screwup that laid waste to Ritcher's extensive and progressive platform. But Ritcher said he is not, nor was he ever, bitter about it.
“I was never so much angry as disappointed,” he said. “Denise Harper Angel did nothing but hurt herself with that lawsuit. The election was hers to have from the beginning. All she did was publicly demonstrate her vindictive nature and advertise her paranoia. … but the larger disappointment is that Kentucky's part-time legislature — and public service in general — remains off-limits to people who can't afford to buy their way into it.”
These days, Ritcher keeps busy writing and working on graphics design projects, mostly for U.S.-based clients. He's also learning to speak and write Swedish, which makes meeting Swedes and adjusting to their culture a bit easier. He's also blogging about his Swedish adventure at sweden.kcomposite.com.
While Ritcher has left town before and eventually returned, his advocacy for the Swedish way of life — and his professed distaste for how things are shaping up stateside — makes clear that as he approaches 40 (he's 39 now) he enjoys being a expat.
“There is an appreciation for knowledge, reason, and respect, rather than rewards for greed and competition,” Ritcher said. “American society and pop-culture seem to be permeated with pride and gloating. It's ‘cool' to not know, to not care, or to have more than someone else. A lot of Americans exhibit an unsavory selfishness that manifests itself in everything from fast food to banking scams to intentionally annoying everyone around you with your super-loud car stereo, motorcycle, or high-performance exhaust system. All of that excess and disregard is simply not necessary.”
