On Josh Ritter's latest album, "So Runs Away the Worl," the Idaho-born singer-songwriter if kind of geeking out.

After a tenuous drought with writer's block, the Moscow, Idaho-born singer-songwriter was up late one night, listening to his "2 a.m. voices" he became enrapt by the vision of a mummy and his malign love affair with an archeologist.

"I got through the writer's block by doing a lot of writing. When you get writer's block it's like looking for a way into the woods and the pathway is right in front of you and when I found my way to certain, specific place and that was 'The Curse. And that gave me the pallet for what I wanted to look for as far as  subject matter and the way it was recorded. It was a good starting point for the rest of the record," Ritter said during a telephone interview.

He then went into a writing frenzy that was So much so that he didn't stop at just writing one song, not just an album, but also a novel, all the while engorging his mind with information about 19th and 20th century science, orbital decay, Martian canals, apocryphal hibernations, polar exploration and the golden ratio.

All of these topics might seem unrelated on the surface, Ritter used them to fuse an exploration of, well, exploration. Some of in the form of music, some in the form of his novel, "Bright's Passage" due next year.

"I didn't set out to write about it, but it's something I had read a lot about. It was fascinating to me in a big way. Something like 'My boyfriend's back and you're gonna be in trouble' is a smaller scope. I want to make something big. Writing is like exploring. You're not out looking for something specific you're just out looking. It's better to by surprised by what you discover than disappointed by what you don't."

Released in April, "So Runs the World Away" comes on the heels of 2007, "Historical Conquests,"  where Ritter burned his rule book and wrote and produced almost completely on raw instinct. "So Runs the World Away" was much the opposite, meticulous in every aspect. 

"Each record is different? Historical Conquests was a cut-loose affair which was recorded quickly and written quickly. It was off the cuff. LIke a real adventure and that was exciting," Ritter said. "With the new record I was taking some real, serious time and it had a larger scope. Itinitally, the record a was a painful process. I really had a writers block experience. So once I did get started it was really exciting to get a song and really work on every little note."

The writing, Ritter said, is to an oil painting, and as the recording is to sculpting.

"One of the biggest parts of writing a song is knowing when it's done. But when you're recording it you add as much as you can and then you strip away. It's more like sculpting. Writing is like painting, where you're adding colors and shapes but with the production of the album you're actually stripping layers and refining and chipping away at them," he said. "You always know when it's done. It's like being a guest at a party and knowing when it's time to leave."

Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band with Darren Smith: Tonight at 7:30 p.m. at The Knitting Factory Concert House, 919 W. Sprague Ave.

Tickets: $18 in advance, $20 day of show, through www.ticketfly.com

A version of this story appeared in today's Spokesman-Review Newspaper.