Recorded over 15 months at the Great North Sound Society in Maine, with additional recording at Brooklyn's Saltlands Studio, So Runs The World Away continues Ritter's longtime collaboration with producer and keyboard player Sam Kassirer. Additionally, the album features the return of Ritter's core line-up of touring bandmates: Zack Hickman, Austin Nevins and Liam Hurley.

Of the record, Ritter says, "I think of the songs on So Runs the World Away like pictures painted in oil on large canvasses. It's a record preoccupied with the extremes of scale, from infinitesimal particles to the nearly incomprehensible distances between the head of a pin and a nebula. Where the songs felt large to me, I wanted them to be huge, both musically and lyrically. I wanted them to feel like the steel hulls of massive ships sliding by deeply from below. Where they were small, I concentrated in on the smallest details that I could and we tried to make the music and the words work together. I love writing, and this was the most fulfilling record I've yet written."

A national full-band tour is planned is support of the record, including two dates at New York's Town Hall on May 19 and 20.