Homecoming: Josh Ritter performs with the Boston Pops tonight.
“It’s an amazing thing to be offered, like, 50 extra musicians,” said Josh Ritter.
A folk singer who left Boston for his native Idaho, he’ll enjoy an extraordinary homecoming tonight, when he plays at Symphony Hall. Ritter’s usual band will be supplemented by the Boston Pops and a former poet laureate.
“All our families are gonna be around,” he said. “It’s a big prove-to-your-family-you’re-a-musician type deal.”
In choosing songs for his Pops concert, Ritter wants something big and dramatic.
“I wanted to pick some where the orchestra would be able to push the song farther,” he said, “rather than just playing with an orchestra.”
Sean O’Laughlin, who has orchestrated the gentle rock of Belle & Sebastian and the Decemberists, is arranging the material with input from Ritter and his band mates. The orchestra will be brought in and out, leaving him with just his band for some pieces and just a violinist for the logorrheic epic “Thin Blue Flame.” And Boston University professor and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky will read during an instrumental piece.
While his recent, lighthearted folk-rock album “The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter” may provide plenty of ebullient, Pops-ready material, live staples “Girl in the War” and “Thin Blue Flame” are, if not outright political songs, fraught with anxiety about war.
“I’m not a political theorist, and I definitely think there’s too many musicians that think they are,” said Ritter, who has been charged with occasionally channeling Dylan and Springsteen. “I think you can do service to politics by giving people new ways to think about it. But I don’t think preaching to the choir is art or does service to your art.
“Most political songs I know, they’re just self-affirmations. There are, of course, exceptions: ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,’ ‘Bourgeoisie Blues,’ Paul Robeson’s rendition of ‘I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night’ and more recently ‘Hurt Me Soul’ by Lupe Fiasco. But I feel like politics and art kind of move along the same but parallel tracks.
“So writing those songs and performing those songs I think is very touchy,” he continued, “because you have to make sure that you actually believe everything you’re saying, but also that you’re not beating the audience up. It just doesn’t make for a very interesting show.”
Still as useful a place to come home to, Boston was where Ritter moved to start his career.
“There was so much music going on, so many places to play,” he recalled. “That was the important thing, you know, just that you could play everywhere. The Burren and the Kendall Cafe and the Druid were all places of learning. Some of them were open mikes and some of them were shows and some of them were just, like, jams. It was like going to college all over again.”
Having since returned to play triumphant shows at Club Passim, in Copley Square and now at Symphony Hall, are there any other historic landmarks that Ritter hopes to serenade?
“It’d be fun to play on the harbor,” said Ritter. “I’d like to do a tea party.”
Boston Pops and Josh Ritter, at Symphony Hall, tonight at 8. Tickets $21-$76; 617-266-1200.
