Marc Ribot: Map of a Blue City

The genre-defying and generation-defining guitar legend Marc Ribot returns to SPACE in duo formation with multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily to celebrate his new record. 

When she was a child and he a young father, Marc Ribot’s daughter drew a map of a city in deep, rich, vivid blue. When he praised her blue map, she corrected him: It’s not a blue map, but a map of a blue city. That distinction stuck with him and eventually inspired a curious song called “Map of a Blue City.” “It’s interesting to confuse the map and the territory. A song is a kind of a map, but it’s also a kind of a city, too,” he says. “I thought of myself lost in that city, standing on a subway platform and too fucked up to find my way home—not disoriented, exactly, maybe just temporarily unable to find a reason to move. I imagined myself on a payphone with someone who’s trying to talk me down..”

Nearly twenty years later, the song anchors Ribot’s thoughtful new solo album and even lends it a title. Map of a Blue City ruminates on what it means to be lost—the confusion and fear, of course, but also the excitement of so many undreamt-of possibilities. Its history is an odd map of its own, full of false starts, blind alleys, dead ends, and one inconceivable tragedy, all leading to what may be his definitive statement as an instrumentalist, as a songwriter, and even as a singer. While it’s not a singer-songwriter album, it is his first to center his plaintive, wise voice quite so prominently.

Ribot is most renowned as a wildly inventive guitarist who has played sessions for Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, John Zorn, Wilson Pickett, Marianne Faithfull, Caetano Veloso, Solomon Burke, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, and Neko Case, among many, many others. Of course Map of a Blue City features his imaginative playing, albeit on a humble instrument. “On the title track I used a $20 guitar my friend Marc Anthony Thompson lent me about 30 years ago. I just never gave it back. It’s almost unplayable unless I tune it way down. But it has such an interesting sound to record with.” He brings every lesson from every session he’s ever played to bear on these tracks, which collide disparate traditions: blues on the title track, rhythm & blues on the slinky “Say My Name,” bossa nova on “Daddy’s Trip to Brazil,” no wave, noise, free jazz, and sounds that have no genre associations (yet).

Ribot has been living with Map of a Blue City for even longer than he’s kept Thompson’s guitar. He wrote some of these back in the 1990s and made home recordings that were all the more intimate and immediate for being so lo-fi. He sent this first sequencing to a label, but was told it was “too dark.” Other projects demanded his attention, but he never really abandoned the album. The songs just wouldn’t leave him alone. “All I can say is that I liked the songs,” he says. “I just had an affection for them, so I never forgot about them. I wasn’t working on them constantly, but every once in a while I would take another lunge at finishing them.”

In 2014 Ribot attempted to recapture that vibe in a professional studio with his old friend, the producer Hal Willner, with whom he’d worked on countless projects—including the 1989 Allen Ginsberg album The Lion for Real. “Hal of course did a great job. But it became this very big deal with strings and a real bass player and a drummer—all great musicians. But at the end of it all, I liked my demos better, so we shelved the project again for a while.” They spoke once or twice about revisiting those songs, but Willner died in 2020. (Ribot wrote of the loss in his memoir, Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist: “It’s like waking up and finding the Empire State Building gone.”)

Even as he continued doing session work and playing with his band Ceramic Dog, Ribot didn’t want to start over with these songs, but wasn’t sure how to move forward. He was, appropriately, lost, until meeting Ben Greenberg, producer and guitarist for the Brooklyn industrial band Uniform. “I didn’t know how I could reconcile the stuff I’d recorded with Willner with the home recordings that I felt were the heart of the record…whether I could make everything fit on the same record, but Ben is a total genius. We added some overdubs, but we also took a lot of stuff away, too… Amazingly, it worked!.”

Among songs inspired by his father’s death (opener “Elizabeth”) and his friendship with the documentary filmmaker Celia Loewenstein (“For Celia”), Ribot includes a handful of covers from disparate sources, including a version of “When the World’s on Fire” which places the Carter Family’s 1920’s lyrics in a contemporary landscape in which apocalyptic prophecies have become daily headlines. In fact, if these songs felt prescient in the 1990s and the 2010s, they have new and deeper significance in 2025, in particular Ribot’s treatment of Allen Ginsberg’s 1949 poem “Sometime Jailhouse Blues.” On what he calls a “sort of Buddhist blues,” he strikes a prescient balance between transcendence and dissent: “Sometimes I lay down my wrath, like I lay my body down,” he sings, his voice weary yet determined. “This poem is about something profound—something to do with regret, and acceptance…a meditation the poem’s title places in a Jailhouse— or maybe within a blues song about a jailhouse.” Ribot explains. “Allen never really connects all the dots, but you can feel the picture.”

“Optimism of the Spirit” makes for a fitting coda: an instrumental journey deeper into the blue city, its title a footnote on survival in difficult times: “The proper attitude for a revolutionary in these times is pessimism of the intelligence, but optimism of the spirit” wrote Antonio Gramsci, while imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime.

Map of a Blue City bears the weight of its history gracefully, incorporating recordings made over nearly half of Ribot’s life and reflecting on how he got to this particular moment. “Working on this album for so long, I’ve seen the world change dramatically and not really change at all. Some of the issues today are the same ones I thought about when I was just starting the album, but some are things I couldn’t have dreamt of at the time. But I think that’s why I was so determined to get the production values right. Recording production is really complicated, but it all boils down to what kind of room the listener feels they’re standing in. There are some hard truths and cold observations in these songs. I wanted the room to be small enough so that we couldn’t turn away: but warm enough to feel like you’re hearing it from a friend.”