Ritt Deitz (album release) with Wilder Deitz & John Minnich, Sophie Delaney

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Wilder Deitz

Wilder Deitz, left, and Ritt Deitz with instruments.

Wilder Deitz, left, and Ritt Deitz.

Sept. 10 is release day for Transients and Strangers, an album of new songs by longtime Madison musician and writer Ritt Deitz (plus a pair of instrumentals by his son, Wilder Deitz, who also accompanies on piano, mandolin, bass and vocals). Deitz is a master of putting a lot of story in a song with an economical amount of lyrics, as in “Along the Old River,” featuring a musing soldier on the long road home. Other new songs tell human-scale tales of folks thinking about home, and sometimes a long way from it. With Sophie Delaney.

media release: On September 10, roots rocker Ritt Deitz will release his eleventh full-length album of original music, Transients and Strangers, featuring his son Wilder Deitz on all songs and Disq drummer Brendan Manley on three songs.

Record Release Show: Thursday 9/10/26 at North Street Cabaret, with guest bassist John Minnich and opener Sophie Delaney of Jewelweed (from Berea, Kentucky)

In progress for three years, Transients and Strangers will come out on vinyl, CD and on streaming platforms just under a year after Ten16 Press published Ritt’s first novel, Settle Down, and four years after his last full-length record, Hinge.

Madison-area fans of Ritt’s music—and, more recently, his fiction—will not be surprised by the outsized roles played by both Kentucky (Ritt’s native state) and Wisconsin (his longtime adoptive home) in the story-songs that make up this record. “Line” follows a migrant from Kentucky who finds himself far from home just as his addictions are knocking hardest at the door. “I’ve Got Things to Do” imagines a diner conversation between a traveler in town for a job and a much older waitress who grew up nearby; the traveler reminds her of her son, long gone from town. More lyrical tunes include “Fly,” in which writing names on walls of remembrance leads to the famous “moonbow” you can see above Cumberland Falls on clear full-moon nights, and “Mighty Old Wheel,” which Ritt wrote to welcome his first grandchildren, who began arriving in late 2023 to join their close and very musical family tree. The record also includes two instrumentals written and arranged by Wilder, “The Rose Cottage” and “La Belle Iseult.”

Fans of Ritt’s performances and recordings will recognize Wilder’s lush piano and mandolin work undergirding Ritt’s steel-stringed acoustic guitar and haunting vocals. Playing with his dad has long been a side hustle for Wilder, who has been running a growing musical school on Madison’s north side for five years now and spends hours every day playing and teaching his instruments. Fans will find two full albums of Wilder’s music at https://wilderdeitz.bandcamp.com/. Roots music fans talk about “blood harmony” (imagine fellow Kentuckians the Everly Brothers and you’ll know what this means), which fans of Ritt and Wilder’s live performances will recognize on Transients and Strangers. Co-producer Bruce Kasprzyk recorded this album on all-analog open-reel tape, as he did on Ritt’s two previous albums, Horses and Smoke (2018) and Hinge (2022).

Ritt Deitz grew up in Florence, Kentucky, and has taught French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2000. He is the only local musician who is both a commissioned Kentucky colonel and a knight in France’s Order of Academic Palms.

Wilder Deitz grew up playing music with his dad, going on his first tour with Ritt’s quartet at the age of thirteen, and is founding director of the Wilder Deitz School for Creative Music in Madison, Wisconsin.