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Josephine Foster.
 "Dear Lenin, I am sorry about the disappearing interview [questions-. Here we go while they are here in front of me. It's a late night here in Italy but somebody gave me a frog tonight so I got some extra energy!"
The question I want answered is: did Josephine Foster eat the very frog she was given and thus is bounding with energy, or is it sitting next to her in a tall sweaty jar? Such is the disadvantage of the email-interview; you can never be sure exactly what's going on...
Based in Chicago and part of the very excellent Locust Music label (Michael Hurley, Henry Flynt, Alan Watts), Foster is one of the brightest and gutsiest in a gaggle of new folk wonders from the USA. Her song Little Life was handpicked by Devendra Banhart for his 2004 'Golden Apples Of The Sun' compilation disc and she was rightfully chosen to support 60s folk icons Incredible String Band. Her first solo record 'Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You' (2005) pushes her smoky vibrato-tinged voice to the front of sparely-dressed lullabies that sing like fairytales and old rusty shanties. Her trusty nylon string guitar holds a steady line between sitar, zither, harp, kazoo, percussion and more. "Instruments are tools to me, not collections... What comes my way is enough and it is usually just what I need anyhow."
Her voice's expanding tone swoops sensually from her upper to lower registers, sometimes-scuffed, moistened, breathless, always luring in its lolloping lope. Comparisons to Jefferson Airplane-era Grace Slick and English folk gamins Shirley Collins and Vashti Bunyan aside, Foster's breadth of vocal sound is what makes her irrevocably unique, be it with the springy mountain twang as on the self-titled Born Heller LP (2003) with Jason Ajeman, or the shimmering dark blues and chirruping psych glissando as on 'All The Leaves Are Gone' (2004), her album with elastic folk rock band The Supposed.
"I was in a proper opera school for one year. I grew up in Colorado. Music was important but it didn't stand out above, say, art or my childhood 'projects' until I was like 12, because I felt like it was a bit abstract and I didn't play a proper instrument. I just had a xylophone at the time. I just kept busy doing stuff like drawing maps of the sidewalks of my neighbourhood, writing stories and poems and stuff, tape recording with my friends our funny variety shows, pulling pranks." It reads like a variety show, that little section of hurried stabs of prose. Foster's operatic training rears its regal head on occasion and she professes to prefer progressive sounds and lyrics that rhyme, "They create a knot that strengthens the song to me," she writes. She likes to start and finish a song in the same day, like a kid with a jigsaw puzzle. "Maybe I get the verse or chorus when I wake up, and I get the frame of the rest, and then work on it for an hour or so later in the day, and wrap it up. That's the best."
Over the course of the 14 songs on 'Hazel Eyes' I ponder whether the theatrical tone of some of the pieces, the almost Olde Worlde, 'Punch'n'Judy'-style playfulness is in fact a vehicle for Foster to create different characters to sing their stories while her hand hovers above them like a puppet master's. "Well, I did a lot of theatre, it is a part of me and so I suppose there is a freedom there. Part of what gives people the urge to act is the hidden sides of themselves getting aired, so anyhow I don't regard these as characters at all whatsoever, just facets of myself if I do say so. I wrote all the songs from my own emotional experiences and such, so it is not a play, but I don't see why I should have one colour to show the world when I feel many different moods and emotions etc. So I give them their space. If they wanna call out, sure why not? The emotion calls the song, and I just catch it and frame it."
While Foster's live shows are often genteel pastoral affairs, a recent set at the inaugural Arthurfest in San Francisco found her strumming along to the step of exuberant dancers. "I had this hope I could get people to shake, but people were just a bit like 'huh?' So I invited some dancers up to lead the crowd. I dunno if it worked but it was fun for them and me at least." Like some barefoot Maypole celebration, the image suits the sounds of the ripe musical mind of Josephine Foster.
Lenin Simos
 | Josephine Foster plays at the Jade Monkey on Fri 14 Oct with Headdress of Neon Flames and Jon Dale. |
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