Josephine Foster – No Harm Done
Fire Records – Out Now
Recorded with guitarist and pedal steel player Matthew Schneider during a trip back to Nashville from her adopted home in Spain, the high-voiced Colorado-born singer-songwriter Josephine Foster delivers a laid-back collection of folk-blues Americana with often enigmatic lyrics. A case in point, is the lazily rolling, piano-backed acoustic album nature imagery opener, Freemason Drag, where she sings “Jesus/Reborn on Easter:/A Resurrection Erection/Came from the West, but now he’s Eastern/A Universal Conundrum”.
Pedal steel is to the forefront for the more direct countrified open range waltzer The Wheel of Fortune (“No place to go, nowhere left to run/Got time to kill, got time to heal someone”), from whence the album title stems, and the lovely autoharp accompanied hymnal-like descending scales melody (and some slightly discordant notes) of Conjugal Bliss with lyrics (“I’ll be yours and you’ll be mine…In he I blend, in me he binds…I’m your fruit and ye my wine”) that sound like some old fashioned wedding vow. Indeed, she apparently often performs it at such ceremonies.
The romantic thread continues with the trillingly sung, retro jazzy coloured country tones of Love Letter (“I can read you like a book/Your eyes speak volumes in one look/And I can read between the lines/all the detours of your mind”) although the line “At least you got what you deserved/in the sentence that you served” does strike a somewhat ambiguous note.
Written twenty years ago, around the time of her debut, set to circling deep and moody acoustic guitar notes, Sure Am Devilish is a slinky bluesy folk gospel confessional of sorts (“Don’t let me be ornery anymore/Oh, I wish I could be a star, shinin’ all my light”), giving way to the meditative hesitantly picked, noodling acoustic frame of the dreamy Leonine with its distant pedal steel, autoharp sweeps and wordplay lyrics (“You govern me my Governess./So pry on me, my Prioress”).
Again summoning a retro feel, the simply strummed campfire blues How Come, Honeycomb? has a vaguely erotic air (“How come I succumb when you come and comb my honeycomb?”), sung with the narcotic laziness redolent of some late-night Harlem reefer bar. She ends with the seven-minute repetitive chords of Old Saw, tapping into her spiritual concerns as, over acoustic strum and pedal steel, she intones “Holy Spirit/I would like to talk to You, bowed mirror of my Soul”, that being the “Holy Spirit of Love & Rock & Roll”. An album to savour and immerse in rather than seeking out immediate pleasures, at one point she sings “I’ll never be in season, I’m forever ripinin’”; a heady fruit indeed.
Order via Bandcamp: https://josephinefostermusic.bandcamp.com/album/no-harm-done