Parents who remain unconvinced about restricting their kids' telly-watching would do well to meet the American singer-songwriter Josh Ritter. While he was growing up in a small Idaho town called Moscow, his folks didn't splash out on multichannel TV like all the other local families - “We had this old set that only showed two channels, and neither of them had The Dukes of Hazzard, so I never knew what the other kids at school were talking about,” says a smiling 31-year-old Ritter over a beer in a West London pub.

Instead, his younger self was forced to get his kicks reading biographies of Abraham Lincoln, going for walks into the Idaho plains, and helping his neuroscientist parents with their research into narcoleptic cats. (No, I'm not sure how to identify a sleepy cat either, but he assures me it's possible.)

He is, of course, hugely grateful now for having been made the odd kid out - his parents used to tell him that the human brain was “like outer space”, and so he got stuck into exploring it, eventually becoming a songwriter of immense talent and originality. Musically, with his fast guitar strumming and tongue-twisting singsong, he gets compared to Bob Dylan a lot - he says it's a huge compliment, though he doesn't waste his time being too humble about it. (The writer Stephen King said The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter was his record of the year in 2006, and “the most exuberant outburst of imagery since Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall”.)

Lyrically, though, he ploughs his own (organic) furrow. Said album begins with the song To the Dogs or Whoever, with its opening quatrain: “Deep in the belly of a whale I found her/ Down with the deep blue jail around her/ Running her hands through the ribs of the dark/ Florence and Calamity and Joan of Arc”, leading into a wonky homage to heroines through the ages. Moons is about those “invisibles between the rings of Mars and Mercury”, while The Temptation of Adam is about a man and a woman who find lust after being thrown together in, yes you've guessed it, a missile silo. Joan Baez so enjoyed his 2003 song Wings, with its talk of fisheries and milltowns, saints and martyrs, and “episcopal philanthropists lost in their appraisal of the body of a woman”, that she recorded a cover. Six albums released in less than a decade would also make Ritter seem somewhat prolific.

Yet for one so wordy, he is a surprisingly cheeky chap on stage. He blusters, jokes and flirts, stopping mid-song to ask a bunch of giggling girls how they are doing. There is a cockiness in that butter-wouldn't-melt smile. And the pace, the endless tongue-twisting pace that leaves him red in the face but still, somehow, in control. How does he do it? He describes it thus: “On stage, you're like a bird that's going from telephone wire to telephone wire, and when the song is going, that's when you're flying. Then you land and you look around - and then you fly again. But it's good to have an idea where you're going to land.”

Ritter says he learnt how to hold his audience while plying his wares around dreadful open mike nights, years ago. And then there were gigs of his own, in dives across America so dirty and depressing that they would have sapped the spirit out of lesser mortals. As he puts it: “It's 3am and it's raining and it smells like they killed a drunk guy in there, stickers all over the wall from bands you've never heard of. It's like an elephants' graveyard for all these people's lives. All these people who are not going anywhere. So if you don't develop a talent for optimism at a time like that, then you're in trouble.”

The man is simply a walking advertisement for the school of creative hard knocks - though he did go to proper school, too, and was intending to graduate in neuroscience, like his parents. At the last minute he had a rethink, and changed his degree course to a somewhat self-invented major called “American History through Narrative Folk Music”. It was around this time he started to get serious about his own music-making, having come to it surprisingly late in life. He says he is influenced as much by the songs of Buddy Holly and Bruce Springsteen as the stories of Raymond Carver and the hip-hop of Lupe Fiasco. (He thinks those who dismiss rap lyrics in favour of rock'n'roll are making a huge mistake.) But he's also keen to stress that science is just as creative as music - something he was helped to understand by a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S.Kuhn. He thinks about its premise a lot, which is that society doesn't shape itself around science to begin with, but that science comes out of a social need.

“You invent what you have an urgency for - and that's the way with art, too, and religion. They all come out of a place where there's a need for something. And so I think intelligent people come up with designs, whether you're a writer or a scientist, to fill some sort of gap. Somebody like Newton - he was a religious guy, but also a scientist who stuck sticks in his eyes, because, ultimately, he wanted to figure out that your optic nerve crosses at the back and your vision is reversed.”

So there you have it, parents of the world - if you too want to raise a musical prodigy, turn off the TV set and send your children into the backyard to put sticks in their eyes.

Josh Ritter's single Empty Hearts is out Mar 24th (Mercury), his tour opens Mar 25th. www.joshritter.com.

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