Little Life

Blurring the lines of traditional folk with just enough legitimately cracked perspectives and hints of psychedelic atmospheres, Josephine Foster has quietly amassed a sprawling discography of magical and pure recordings, rooted in folk but made unique by the odd lines, mismatched colors, and faraway dreamy-eyed moods of Foster's singing and songwriting. While contemporaries like Joanna Newsom and Will Oldham rose to acclaim with similar updates of the folk vernacular, Foster's equally brilliant body of work grew in relative obscurity, shifting organically over the course of many years and stretching out in various directions as Foster's muse evolved. Little Life is a collection of home recordings made in 2001 at the very beginning of her exploration of songwriting. Formerly documenting her songs only in written annotation, setting up microphones and putting songs down on four-track cassettes in the spare room was a new concept to Foster, and that spark of naive excitement is electric throughout the 11 songs on Little Life. With a brilliant and soaring voice that has some of the same dusty character of Karen Dalton or pastoral solitude of Anne Briggs, Foster accompanies herself with spare fingerpicked guitar or banjo, and even the occasional flute or piano twinkle. There's a dazzling intimacy to these recordings, with the wistfully rambling "Francie's Song" sounding like a friend playing a song in her bedroom for an audience of one, while playful shorter songs like "Warsong" and "Charles in the Park" feel like demos happy to not take themselves too seriously. The early-oughts recording date of these songs happened right as freak folk was forming, and the lushly woozy double-tracked vocals and formless autoharp strums of "Stones in My Heavy Bag" definitely fall in line with the salad days of the New Weird America scene. This soft and offhand collection of songs closes with the gorgeous title track, and even in her most unassuming and insular early days, Foster created some delicately powerful and transportive sounds. Little Life captures the same inward beauty as some of the most important records of the psych-folk genre, reflecting shades of the freewheeling exploration of Linda Perhacs' Parallelograms as well as the youthful sense of possibility found on Karen Dalton's In My Own Time. ~ Fred Thomas|