***
Little Life is a home recording made by Josephine Foster in 2001. Although she had been writing songs for years, the idea to record something was new to her as she had previously notated her music longhand. Inspired by her work as a music teacher to young children, she recorded this collection of miniature songs to 4-track. Little Life helped to usher in a reformed and more personal manner of singing and songwriting for Foster, leaping down from her opera stage training to the hermitage of the classroom.

1 Shimey Chuck Down - Written-By Cherry Blossoms, The
2 Shaker Tune - Written-By Josephine Foster
3 These Were Our Woods - Written-By John Allingham
4 Deepest Woods - Music By John Allingham and Peggy Snow, Lyrics By - Peggy Snow
5 Way Up The Neck - Written-By Cherry Blossoms, The
6 Tahitian Lullabye - Written-By Cherry Blossoms, The
7 Old Girl - Written-By Cherry Blossoms, The
8 Surf Prelude - Written-By John Allingham
9 Center In The Center Of It - Written-By Josephine Foster
10 In The Alleyways - Written-By Peggy Snow
11 Can We Trust The Waters - Written-By - Josephine Foster and Peggy Snow, Lyrics By - Peggy Snow
12 Down The River To Hell 2:20
13 Anytime You Go Back Home / Better World 2:45
Lyrics By - Peggy Snow
Written-By, Lyrics By - Josephine Foster
Performer - Allen Lowrey , Chris Davis (7) , Chuck Hatcher , Corey Shea , Dave Maddox , John Allingham , Josephine Foster , Peggy Snow
Producer, Recorded By - Chuck Hatcher

***
Josephine Foster’s voice, a gravity-defying instrument at the best of times, has been pressed into all kinds of service over the past decade, since she first broke cover with the soured folk-rock of All The Leaves Have Gone: children’s music, Tin Pan Alley, settings of Emily Dickinson poems, German lieder. Her recent turn to Spanish folk music has much to do with her personal life (her partner is Victor Herrero, and she has relocated to Spain from America), but there is also something in these songs that suits her singing, a natural poise that Foster can wrap her idiosyncratic pipes around, equal parts sadness, grace and play.
Perlas is the second set of Spanish folk songs Foster has recorded with her partner’s band, after 2010’s Anda Jaleo. Where its predecessor drew from the songs of Federico Garcia Lorca’s banned folk song collection Canciones Populares Españoles (perhaps best known from the stunning performances by Flamenco dancer La Argentinita on the 1931 album on HMV), here Foster casts a wider net. And though Perlas was recorded down south, in Puerto de Santa Maria (the Port of Saint Mary) in Andalusia, the songs primarily draw from the folk traditions of the northern autonomous communities of Spain.
These kinds of albums often risk wooden, overly reverent performances, but Foster and her crew play with great ease and charm, the live and analog recording burnishing the set with open-air warmth, and the players connecting with the intuitive spark of natural improvisers, but in service to 10 beautiful folk songs. Things excel when the group stretch their limbs and take their time, as on the opening “Puerto De Santa Maria” and the penultimate title track, where strings tangle with the knotted and chipped varnish of flamenco, and Herrero and Foster trade lines and verses, before his blunt drawl of a voice sets a bed for Foster to hold the language tightly in her maw.
Other songs hold subtler surprises, like the Dylan-esque harmonica that jets through the splashing cymbals and rickety percussion of “Cuando Vienes Del Monto,” or the driftwood melancholy of “Dame Esa Flor,” or the darkened twists and turns of “En Esta Larga Ausencia,” inhabited as it is by the spirit of the duende. Perlas is a lovely, understated album, sure in its stride but happy to wander, and somehow peaceable and playful, even as the songs hymn broken hearts.

The story of Josephine Foster's musical development is one of self-discovery and remarkable tenacity. Midway through her classical training as an opera singer, the Colorado born musician found her voice sitting uneasily between that of a soprano and a mezzo-soprano, an idiosyncrasy that typecast her into a small set of potential roles for the remainder of her career. Instead of resigning herself to this operatic cul-de-sac, Foster forewent the completion of her training, moving to Chicago in 2000 in the hope of indulging her musical passion outside of the restrictive confines of the classical tradition.
Foster's latest album Blood Rushing appears to represent something of a monumental juncture in her output. The album should perhaps be viewed as a completion of Foster's tireless creative explorations of the last twelve years: the drawing together of disparate musical threads into a unified artistic identity. Where Foster has had a tendency in the past to hide herself behind overt gimmickry and artifice (for example, 2006's A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing saw songs by 19th century romantic composers set to pummelling waves of guitar noise), Blood Rushing is instilled with the swagger and unpretentious sincerity of an artist with the confidence simply to play it straight.
A tangle of fingerpicked acoustic guitars, off-kilter violins and rudimentary drums, this album is a set of joyously ramshackle folk songs, capturing the electric spontaneity of community music making. The production is spacious, but not unnaturally so, affording the music room to breathe whilst retaining the compressed intensity of a band playing in a small room. This music has the intangible quality of appearing at once both earthen and ethereal, teetering on the brink of disorder, Blood Rushing's songs pulse with untamed energy, the album's seemingly polite façade of unassuming acoustic instruments and well-worn song structures is undercut throughout with an intoxicating ambiguity. As such, Blood Rushing is an endlessly engaging, subtly nuanced collection, revealing surprising depth of character over repeated listens.
As a trained opera singer, one might expect of Foster a relatively anonymous, if technically proficient, vocal delivery. Yet, it is in her voice that Blood Rushing holds its most lasting appeal. Traversing an endless terrain of timbres and inflections, Foster's voice, like the instrumental performances throughout the album, seems constantly on the verge of collapse. By carefully treading the line between unity and rupture, ecstasy and melancholic fallibility, Foster's singing communicates a remarkably complex and fragile emotional state without ever resorting to overwrought emotive gesture. Whilst there are certainly superficial similarities between the vocalisations heard on Blood Rushing and the contrived eccentricity of some adherents of so-called freak-folk, Foster's vocals eschew any hint of self-conscious affect, radiating a rugged authenticity and candour.
Despite its stripped back directness, Blood Rushing is not immune to Foster's affection for high concept: the album has been billed as a glimpse into the world of the artist's alter-ego, Blushing, in the form of a "ballet chanté" (or, a sung ballet). Despite running the risk of suffocating her songs with an imposing overarching theme, Foster prioritises the importance for personal musical communication throughout the album, using her concept to unify and augment, but not dictate, the development of the record. Recorded in Foster's hometown, Blood Rushing is a beautifully lilting, melodious album: this is an album about beginnings, about processing the past and tentatively forging ahead into the void of the future. Or, as Foster sings on the title track: "In Colorado did I begin again / Did I begin to begin again."
***
Even as he handed over his flash drive with five-odd Josephine Foster projects to which he’d listened to obsessively, my roommate was surprised to hear she was American, having believed the Colorado native was “Spanish or European or something.” I can’t exactly blame him: borrowing alternately from Romantic classical, art-rock, and Appalachian folk and indulging in album-length adaptations of poetry by García Lorca and Emily Dickinson, Foster has sung variously in German and Spanish as well as in English. Her nebulous, nation-state-defying voice returns on Blood Rushing, a “story within a story” concept album that narrates the account of her author-insert Blushing.
Under stars, through the Great Divide of the Rocky Mountains and amid many forms of surging water, Foster-Blushing navigates a fertile world of birth and rebirth. For a musician who frequently works with the lyrics of others (the new record is her first collection of original material since 2008’s This Coming Gladness), Foster is a surprisingly competent and natural songwriter; freed from the constraints of tonal faithfulness owed to giants of poetry like Dickinson, Foster is able to draw from disparate genres to play with whatever form she’s interested in from song to song. That might mean aping Ennio Morricone for ode to the American West “Panorama Wide,” shaping a meandering lazy-river tranquility for ballads “The Wave of Love” and “Underwater Daughter,” or assaulting the listener with the sudden fuck-you psych of “Geyser.” It makes for a slightly unbalanced listen, but the variety is welcome after the relative stylistic uniformity of her last few releases.
Foster’s known for her collaborations with other musicians, whether she’s working with Jason Ajemian as Born Heller, the psychedelic backing band The Supposed, or her husband Victor Herrero, with whom she released a collection of Spanish folk songs earlier this year. Herrero is back on guitar for Blood Rushing, joined by A Hawk and a Hacksaw’s Heather Trost on violin, but it’s Foster’s singing that really stands out above the arrangements, above her own carnal lyrics and menstrual imagery, to constitute the heart of the album.
Much has been said of Foster’s failed aspirations to sing for the opera, which has left her the rare coloratura soprano who performs loamy, experimental folk music. But perhaps we should be thankful she couldn’t cut it with the lorgnette-clutching snoots in the high boxes of opera houses. And as difficult as it might normally be to place her voice regionally, the Josephine Foster of Blood Rushing embodies a wistful, washed-out Americana that’s right at home among the America-of-old’s fecund landscapes and pristine rivers, an America without pollution of light or noise or waterways, to make the statement, through Blushing, that this is who I am and this is where I’m from.
By Ben Rag
***
More musically learned than any folk musician likely to come your way, the Colorado born Josephine Foster has kept fans and critical interest ablaze with different stylistic shake ups placed into each of her releases. The fact that Blood Rushing is the first solo effort released under her own name since 2009 shows how unpredictable and experimental the sometimes psychedelic rock, sometimes German ‘lieder’ singer songwriter can truly be.
The record is written as a potent cross between a character study and a concept album, wherein our country singer inhabits the mind of ‘Blushing’, a heteronym persona used to explore the inner workings of the artist’s homeland, symbolized by her self-supplied front cover. It’s eerily appropriate given Foster’s exploration into pan-Spanish folk music and culture in 2010’s Anda Jaleo, with our heroine’s origin story as a “valley child in a” “Panorama Wide” leading to a “Child of God” who is “living in the city getting high on the hawk“. Well that’s one guess, as Josephine’s operatic vocals (stunning as they are) might leave you straining to decipher a word or two. In some cases that’s not a great effort, with title track “Blood Rushing” repeating its four or so lines with regular interludes, but if the entirety of the lyrics in “Wave of Love” hadn’t been spelt out in its title, the high pitched singing might have disguised the latter word as ‘laugh’.
If all this sounds daunting, in actual listening Blood Rushing is easier than its lyrical concepts set it up to be. Teaming up once again with her partner, Spanish guitarist Victor Herrero, and musicians Paz Lenchantin (The Entrance Band), Heather Trost (A Hawk and a Hacksaw) and Ben Trimble (Fly Golden Eagle), she exposes a delicate singing voice that’s never assaulted or undone by the accompanying percussion, string work or rare uses of electric guitar. If you were desperate for a technical summation of Josephine’s sound you’d best skip to “Underwater Daughter”; a track in which every note and beat strives for beauty, outdone only by the occasional deliberate silence. Be careful you don’t travel one song too early though, as preceding track “Geyser”, marked by the opening screech of deliberately misplayed violin, is the album’s single foray into the psychedelic region Foster previously occupied, and it’s irritably noticeable.
Despite this choice nitpick, Blood Rushing succeeds thanks to ample pacing and the comfortable arrangement quickly established through a sober form of expression. There are minor flaws in the delivery of its lyricism, but these tracks somehow succeed in telling a complete story by a more ethereal definition. The words and music are used to evoke a romantic interest in the atmosphere a location or object brings, with language itself matching the elegance of what is conveyed, such as “the sweet little pearls in the waters of mankind”. If for nothing else, marvel at the fact that the opening track “Waterfall” utilizes the normally silly twang of the jaw harp without killing the mood like the instrument has done to every other folk song it’s in.
***
I do love it when you get drawn into someone else’s world from the very start of listening to a record. You know that if you stop then you will end up missing something special. The new album Blood Rushing by Josephine Foster has that effect as you instantly get swept away by the sheer beauty and elegance of her voice.
Blood Rushing shows Foster pushing the boundaries and proving her worth as a musician and vocalist. Whilst there are beautiful folk songs on this album, Foster also lets her avant-garde soul loose and the end result is mesmerizing. Blood Rushing is like a psychedelic wave that pushes you through to a beautiful place.
Opening track Waterfall is full of joy with its jangly guitars and Foster’s voice clear as crystal cutting though. The effect that this has is magical. Panorama Wide and Child of God are two of the standout tracks on the album, as they are full of beautiful layers of guitars, percussion and hauntingly pretty backing vocals. The psychedelic hard-hitting Geyser is absolute genius. Its powerful sound stems in the growling guitars along with Foster’s swirly intoxicating vocals, making you feel like you are in within an inferno. Underwater Daughter has the vintage feel of a 1930s Hollywood musical. You can imagine a girl singing alone looking up at the stars. Her voice is sweet but strong and has the same Americana soulful tone of Alela Diane mixed with the strength and power of Laura Nyro.
Foster is an old soul in the way that she writes. Her words are historian like as if she is on a mission to help the lost and lonely with wisdom collected from the past. Her songs are full of truth that weave a spell over you, leaving you captivated and completely at her will.
Cat Norris
***
Whilst it would be a slight exaggeration – as a critic of some 15 or so years standing – to say that it’s an occupational curse being exposed to too much music before it hits the stores, the fact that music is so readily accessible 24/7 and the fact that it’s almost too easy to release it in one form or another means that focusing time and attention on just one new release is harder than ever. This a situation that almost unfairly prevented this album from Josephine Foster reaching the top of this writer’s ‘to review’ pile. Although given to this scribe by the irrepressibly enthusiastic Fire Records a good few weeks ago it moved to the bottom of the promo CD stack until some well-timed memory-jogging airplay on Cerys Matthews’ 6Music radio show exposed the errors in this listener’s review filtration system.
With Blood Rushing elevated in said pile for a fresh airing it has revealed itself as a record of near-uncorrupted earthiness, melodic warmth and stealthy beauty that should by rights put Foster more visibly on the multi-cultured Americana map. Not that it is a straightforward folk-slanted singer-songstress affair. With her formative operatic training, her teenage years as a wedding/funeral singer and her past dalliances with concept albums (such as 2010’s Graphic As Star, which interpreted the work of American poet Emily Dickenson) as well as psychedelic-rock (with The Supposed for 2004’s All The Leaves Are Gone), Foster doesn’t approach things in a straightforward fashion anyway. Yet although Blood Rushing is not an obvious record it is possibly Foster’s most approachable collection to date; one which distils much of her convoluted past into an accessible welcoming present, albeit without conformist compromise.
Beautifully recorded by Alabama Shakes producer Andrija Tokic in the unconventional environs of Cherryvale Art Farm in Boulder, Blood Rushing has a wonderfully unvarnished yet professional aesthetic that lets Foster and her multi-instrumentalist ensemble – which includes her Spanish partner and collaborator Victor Herrero – colour the songs with a palette that is diverse yet not overly-rich.
Thus the opening lilt of “Waterfall” invites us in with a laidback strum-along before the more widescreen drama of the Morricone-shaded “Panorama Wide” gives Foster’s soprano room to roam free-range. A little later in proceedings with “Child Of God” her band supply a slowed-down unplugged Velvet Underground groove and add empathetic backing vocals to gorgeous uplifting effect. With the mid-point placed title-track, things are stripped-down to a more minimalistic backdrop ahead of being built up again with jazz-slanted guitars and stirring violins. For “The Wave Of Love” things are stripped-back again to largely just Foster’s vocals and strings before a more sprightly setting is given to the soaring “O Stars.” In its wake comes the only misfire of the album with the near-atonal “Geyser,” which feels like an early PJ Harvey demo that’s become uncomfortably warped by age. Thankfully the record’s finale soon after, in the form of the exquisite shimmering “Words Come Loose” – replete with radiant call and response vocals – more than makes up for the minor misdemeanour.
Although Josephine Foster may remain an acquired taste to some, the blossoming Blood Rushing is definitely an album that repeatedly rewards a little patience for the previously unconvinced. Moreover, fans of Joan Baez and Tarnation’s Paula Frazer should certainly seek this out immediately. All told, this is undoubtedly one of 2012′s most unexpected pleasures.
September 4, 2012 by Adrian P.
***
After the foray into arcane Spanish folk music represented by her last album, the prolific Josephine Foster is on another musical trek involving a slightly more rustic grip and a flowing cantina. This time, the liquid is blood – per Foster’s representative, Blood Rushing is “a story within a story; a glimpse into the world of Blushing, a heteronym of the artist Josephine Foster. (It’s) a rock-ballet chanté – the music… set to a Pueblo drum’s meta-pulsing, Pan-American heartbeat.”
Victor Herrero is back on guitar. Paz Lenchantin provides Indian flute, bass, and violin. Heather Trost contributes violin and Jew harp. Ben Trimble handles New Mexican skin drums. From the instrumentation, one might expect a sound somewhere between Yma Sumac’s and the Boswell Sisters’. If you’re that one, you’d be pretty on–target. Foster’s soprano vocals tremble through a variety of instrumentation with a more or less “indigenous” or “exotic” folk influence. At best, the effect is that of an otherworldly folk music that might provide new inspiration for Werner Herzog.
Bizarro takes on more traditionally styled folk, such as “Child of God,” are also here. But Foster seems at the apex of this journey with the title track, an inspired, partly instrumental submerging in feeling that, to some degree, recalls work by Fraser & Debolt as well as that of Kate Bush.
By Mary Leary
***
In an unpredictable recording career that has bent and warped just like her distinctive operatic vocals, we’ve heard an array of impulsive musical approaches from the American born singer songwriter. From raw acid soaked psychedelic rock, warping Germanic ballads to musical interpretations of the poems of Emily Dickenson and more recently traditional Spanish-sunshine songs on her previous 2012 release with The Victor Herrero Band, ‘Perlas’ (Review here) .
Given Foster’s American origin, an academic take on that album of ‘Spanish music’ calls to question the ‘authenticity’ of the music, although you have to admire the musician’s integration into Spanish culture. However, the whole ‘authenticity’ argument seems to fall apart when you listen to the music and open your eyes and ears to this modern age of Internet free information-access and budget airlines. It seems that our cultural background is only limited to our ability to access the almost unlimited information that’s available to us. The appreciation of Music has a multitude of paths. While an academic approach might get you to places that you otherwise wouldn’t reach, I can’t help but feel that it blocks out most other routes and when it gets down to it, the appreciation of music is essentially a spontaneous guttural reaction that manifests its self as emotion and when taking this into account, academia + music can seem like a contrived, negative and perverted approach. Almost like a filtering system preventing you from being emotionally affected. With this in mind we come to the conclusion that the only true expression of our mish-mashed culture comes from the inspired love of a thing. Which, to be fair is where all ‘traditions’ start.
However this time round, it seems that her inspiration has come full circle and we are taken on a musical kaleidoscope tour of her American heritage. This includes, inner city dwelling blues in ‘Child of God’, sweeping panoramas in ‘Panorama Wide’, which contains a prairie roaming musical break that suggests a distinct South American touch and Native American flute on ‘O Stars’. While America is present, there are also songs about her own journey, such as the inescapable emotion of true love in ‘The Wave of Love’ that utilises some gorgeous violin rendering.
If you ever find your self in some far-flung random location at night, look up to the sky and you will usually see some familiar friends shining down on you.
It seems that the many adventures that we are taken on in ‘Blood Rushing’ the stars are with us, from the stars in the front cover artwork to the songs ‘Sacred is the Star’ and ‘O Stars’.
The cover of ‘Blood Rushing’ painted by Josephine Foster seems like a hallucinogenic rearrangement of the American flag, simultaneously celebrating and criticizing the country. It utilizes the good old red white and blue colours, with parting white clouds giving way to a red river waterfall with stars shining though the deep blue universe beyond. The stars however, while obviously representing the States are in an uneven arrangement that doesn’t seem to project the regimented ownership of borderlines. In fact, they seem happy peering though at us, like Van Gogh’s stars in ‘Cafe Terrace at Night’ and perhaps these guys represent the free-roaming cowboy attitude that flows though the folk-rock anthems on the album. While the red river spilling into an ocean of blood could denote the butchering of Native Americans that was involved in founding the country and the continued pointless butchering in other wars further afield.
One thing I’ve learnt in my thirty years on this globe is that nothing is black and white. Take that red river on the cover art and the album title ‘Blood Rushing’ for example. As I just supposed, this could be a river of blood spilling into an ocean of blood representing the spilt blood of all the unnecessary American wars, but if you read the lyrics to the song of the same title we learn that, blood is rushing, in the veins of someone blushing. The song itself seems to be about reinventing oneself, which if you’ve been following Foster’s musical career you’ll be well aware that she’s never stopped. Also, if you analyze the lyrics in ‘O Stars’
O stars O stars they shine they shine
like the big dipper over-flowing wine
They suggest that its not blood, but wine flowing from the stars representing their ever-giving power, there are multiple sides to everything and its left open for us to run off with whatever we think works.
Whilst filming with Josephine in Spain just before recording this album she mentioned she was planning on going back home to record after a seven-year hiatus from her country. I said, “Going back to your roots” and she responded “before they completely dry up”. After listening to ‘Blood Rushing’ it’s apparent her roots have drunk well and beautiful revelations of her attitude to the country have blossomed in these songs in the form of a whole trippy encyclopaedia of mish-mashed emotions.
I’ve been eagerly following Josephine Fosters’s musical career since 2003. I remember the first time my ears where injected with such glorious vocal tones whilst on tour listening to Devendra Banhart’s compilation ‘The Golden Apples of the Sun’ sitting in a van hearing this other worldly voice come out of the half busted stereo of our broken-down van. I got hold of the first album I could get my hands on, which was ‘All the Leaves are Gone’ where she’s heard being backed up by ‘The Supposed’. Whilst enjoying the unpredictable twist and turns of her glowing output over the years I’ve been secretly waiting for a return to the riotous rock and roll psychedelia of that album and ‘Blood Rushing’ goes some way to fulfil this fantasy, all I need now is the full band to go on tour with a gigantic lighting rig and a bottle of fine whisky. ‘Geyser’ is the most raucous tune and has a fantastic crazed Beefheart madness to it, plus some genius lyrics
Fertile, I’m so fertile
I’d concieve of anything
Which in context with the music seems like it’s referring to an explosion of ideas flowing out with uncontrollable chaos.
‘Underwater Daughter’, a song title that rolls off the tongue with satisfaction has a blissful dreamy quality to it. Personally I feel that it’s an ode to motherhood and plays with the natural feeling a parent has to regard their offspring as almost holy sires. Simultaneously, an offspring’s natural conclusion is that their parents are kings and queens and after all when you think about it, from a child’s perspective, they are the Kings and Queens of their reality. Further more, if you are going to responsibly enter a child into this world you should regard them as treasures. However I feel the notion of motherhood goes beyond the parent/child dynamic and playfully suggests with the idea of who mothered life on earth. Evolution teaches us that all life originated from the ocean, so we have to conclude that the ocean is our mother.
There are some real lung busting screamers on this one too, such as ‘Child of God’ which is about the ridicules, over crowed and polluted urban situation we have found our self’s in. Singing along to these blues can exercise demons of uselessness, religious shackles and poor social living standards. I particularly enjoy the lyrics:
Don’t it feel silly
don’t it feel odd
bein’ just a bitty Child of God
Which seems to be a statement of the troubled predicament of humans trying to understand the world through organized religion.
A fair number of these songs contain spine tingling backing vocals often utilized in a call and response manor sung by Hether Trost and Paz Lenchantin. Hether Trost, being the other half of A Hawk and a Hacksaw who naturally applies her expert approach to the violin, plucking and bowing her way though the songs accentuating the emotion with finesse. She can also be heard playing a bouncing Jaw Harp on ‘Waterfall’, which is a song about dreaming of a goal and longing for it. While Paz Lenchantin of the Entrance Band, ZWAN and sometime PAPA M collaborator, twins up the violin action and executes some stunning Indian flute on ‘O Stars’ as well as getting her bass grooves out.
It must also be noted that as well as some excellent Spanish guitar that we’ve come to expect from Victor Herrero, the album features some smooth electric guitar handling where he pulls out all kinds of wonderful sounds such as aquatic bubbling in ‘Underwater Daughter’ and some inexplicably satisfying slide movements in ‘Child of God’. All this is backed up by some pounding New Mexican skin drums by Ben Trimble of Fly Golden Eagle.
All things considered ‘Blood Rushing’ makes for some pretty additive folk-rock-pop melodies with top-notch musical performances all round. Led by one of the freshest front woman of our time.
Review by: Harry Wheeler