root salad Josephine Foster
The American-born, Spanish-resident, left-field songwriter talks to Jeanette Leech.
“I
find poetic connections between these songs,” says Josephine Foster, of her new album No More Lamps In The Morning.
“It’s a gathering. If you think of making a composition, in art or flower arranging, it’s all gathered somehow.”
Josephine Foster is one of modern
music’s treasures. She’s primarily thought of as an experimental singer-songwriter; but her impressive body of work has taken in psychedelic rock, German lieder, Spanish folk song, and poetry setting. She can easily slide between her own compositions and those of others. “I grew up singing other people’s old songs, other people’s new songs, and also making up my own songs,” she says. “There’s nothing out of the ordi- nary about that [mixture], to me.”
Josephine originally wanted to be an
opera singer, and trained at Chicago’s North- western University to that end, but was made to feel that her style, and her persona, was too unpredictable for an operatic career. However, although her voice lacked textbook perfection, it has expressiveness to spare. She quit her opera training and found herself with other musically capricious souls. One of those was jazz bassist Jason Ajemian. Their duo, Born Heller, released an under- stated self-titled album in 2004.
One of the songs on that record was No More Lamps In The Morning, which Foster has now re-recorded for her latest album. Indeed, the whole project is new versions of songs that already exist in her back cata- logue. Generally, when artists do this, critics bellyache about how it’s a pointless exer- cise; but there’s considerable artistry on No More Lamps In The Morning. Josephine explores how perceptions and experience can alter performance.
“I think that sometimes I record things
when the song is new,” she says, “and then it starts to stretch, and fit me better. I’ll feel at home. Songs evolve, and this [album] is sharing those subtle changes that happen to the songs over time.” She finds that the intimate and sometimes precarious atmo- sphere of a gig will bring about more ease to her songs, away from the formality of a studio. “Sometimes I approach a record like it is its own world, thinking about the tex- tures, the instruments, and my relationship to them,” she says. “But later, maybe live, it’s representing my daily life. There is an informal quality to this recording.”
Josephine has a history of capturing and sharing these unfettered moments. Begin- ning in 2000, she released a series of self-
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released CDRs; they contain sparse songs, a few of which she would go on to record, but others that simply remain a private secret between her and her most devoted admir- ers. Track down 2005’s A Diadem and marvel at Wondrous Love and the Clive Palmer cover, Oh Bright Eyed One. “I think you can find beautiful things in very raw material,” she says of the CDRs, “and I’m not afraid of showing that side to the songs.”
J
osephine has now released ten albums in addition to all those unprocessed recordings. Her first official solo work, 2005’s Hazel Eyes I
Will Lead You, is still astonishing, even more so for coming straight after the full- band psychedelia of 2004’s All The Leaves Are Gone with The Supposed. Hazel Eyes explored the death of Josephine’s birth father when she was a baby. The recurrent tree imagery on Hazel Eyes is directly relat- ed to the mystery and fascination he held for her. Its mastery of symbolism, along with its bare emotionality, ranks it as a masterpiece of the mid-2000s US explosion of free-folk music.
Josephine now lives in Spain, and has recorded two albums of Spanish folk song with the Victor Herrero Band: Anda Jaleo in 2010, and Perlas the following year. “I think I have a romantic connection to Spanish music
from when I was a teenager,” she says. “I studied the songs of Manuel de Falla, abso- lutely stunning folk song arrangements. When I moved over to Spain, I wanted to learn all I could.” She fell in love with the work of Federico Garcia Lorca. “I felt there was a sort of alien quality to him, especially in the recordings I heard with [flamenco singer and dancer] La Argentinita. There was something I could reach towards. He’s uni- versally loved, and to me, his musicianship felt very familiar. I guess he’s not a virtuoso pianist, he’s got an approach that’s in between a classical and a folk approach. And that spoke to me.” Her next record will be another Spanish album, but this time of original material. “The whole thing has just become more free and for me, feeling at home. Like I’m nine years old or something.”
No More Lamps In The Morning comes, as with many of her albums, housed in a fairly inscrutable cover: a prone statue, with a hazy rainbow rectangle looking down on it. “It was this object that I found very beau- tiful,” she says. “It is very personal. It’s a memento of what I was living at that moment. I think the house the photo was taken in has been torn down, so it’s disap- peared. It’s just a moment in time and I think that’s what the whole album is.”
josephinefoster.info F
Photo: M Borthwick
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