Singer-songwriter Josh Ritter wrote the rollicking rodeo he wanted to read

In 2006, Paste Magazine named him one of the 100 greatest living songwriters for works like “Girl in the War” off of his acclaimed album, “The Animal Years.”

But the musician has more tricks up his sleeve. Stephen King compared Ritter’s “compressed lyricism” in the 2011 novel “Bright's Passage” to that of Ray Bradbury.

Ritter’s latest novel, "The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All," is out this week. Set in the fictional timber town of Cordelia, Idaho, readers follow a 13-year-old boy named Welden Applegate who comes of age among lumberjacks at the turn of the 20th century. His story is told in the late 1980s through the eyes of Applegate himself — but at 99 years old.

Raised in northern Idaho, Ritter was surrounded by “the ghosts of early logging,” he says. In the book’s afterword, Ritter thanks his parents for their decision to live in Idaho, a place that he now understands shaped his life as he knows it.

His novel brings an old timber town to life through the magic that once existed there — an enchantment from an era he missed out on.

Applegate has always been a character living in Ritter's head, he says, to the point where “I feel like I could think about him as separate from me.” The same goes for the fictional town of Cordelia and the region of St. Anne, which eventually became a real ecosystem in his mind.