At first, singer-songwriter Josephine Foster comes across like a conventional folkie. But her wandering vibrato, which colors virtually every phrase she sings, is at the root of an unconventional approach. While it won't appeal to everyone, it opens a window to a valuable discussion.
On Friday, Foster streamed a 40-minute set of her post-folk songs filmed in Nashville, courtesy of Morocco's American Cultural Association, a nonprofit that offers English-language lessons to Moroccans and fosters cultural exchange between Morocco and the U.S. Backed by her latest band, Moonbrondoon — Chicago pedal steel player Matthew Schneider alongside John Allingham, co-founder of Nashville's The Cherry Blossoms, on percussion — she made a case for her fusion of art song and American folk music.
Foster sends the tonal center of her songs into an orbit that can disintegrate. During the stream, she sang a tune from her 2018 Nashville-recorded full-length Faithful Fairy Harmony called “Pining Away,” which is, essentially, a country waltz. Like The Cherry Blossoms, who use folk-like material as a disembarking station for the deconstruction of musical form, Foster and Schneider let the song slide into something like entropy. It was disconcerting, but Foster & Co. operate in a linear dimension that allows them to get outside the confines of traditional forms.
When it worked, it was beautiful. Allingham made distracted noises along the perimeters of the beat, while Schneider matched Foster’s somewhat dry guitar work with inventive phrasing. They communicated the idea that music exists in real time, and it was believable when they implied through their performance that chord changes are there to be exploited. As usual with folkies, the tension between innovation and the pull of tradition is ingrained in Foster's work. The continued effects of that longstanding conflict are worth thinking about.
