“Girl In The War” by Josh Ritter

"Girl in the War" comes from The Animal Years, Josh Ritter's fourth album and his first for V2, which reached British shops in March 2006 and American ones that April. Ritter wrote it alone, words and music, and it's one of those songs that slipped out of its maker's grip on the way to the page.

Before playing it at the Center for American Progress annual dinner in Washington that year, he explained that he'd set out to write about the United States, only for the whole thing to come out sounding like a love song. That tension is the heart of it: a tender love song with a whole country's worries pressing in at the edges.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.