Josephine Foster

Josephine Foster, who sings, writes songs, and plays guitar, possesses a haunting vocal quiver and unhurried compositions that echo multiple periods of American folk while inhabiting an enigmatic territory entirely their own. On the margins of the early-2000s New Weird America movement, her approach—sometimes audible on the 2004 release All the Leaves Are Gone—often found itself grouped with Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Animal Collective, and other musicians forging experimental textures from folk roots. Over subsequent years she advanced at a measured pace, issuing fresh recordings at intervals such as the woozy, theatrical saloon numbers of 2013’s I’m a Dreamer and venturing into unfamiliar territory through the synthesizer explorations and drum-machine pulses of the 2022 album Godmother or the field recordings and minimalist arrangements of 2023’s Domestic Sphere.

Colorado-born as a teenager, the singer/songwriter/guitarist honed her voice at weddings and funerals. Opera initially guided her ambitions, yet nearing her twenties she found inspiration in Tin Pan Alley and early British folk, producing demo recordings that later became the ukulele-centered 2000 album There Are Eyes Above and the 2001 children’s-song collection Little Life. She eventually settled in Chicago, teaching singing by day and performing at night with assorted ensembles that included the sparse, eerie duo Born Heller alongside free-jazz bassist Jason Ajemian and the whimsical indie-pop group the Children’s Hour with fellow Chicago songwriter Andrew Bar.

All the Leaves Are Gone, issued in 2004, assembled ghostly and occasionally abrasive folk-inflected psychedelic rock with her newly formed band the Supposed. The following year brought the quiet, rustic, blues-tinged Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You. An acid-washed reinterpretation of nineteenth-century art songs drawn from Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms appeared in 2006 under the title A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, succeeded by This Coming Gladness in 2008 and Graphic as a Star in 2009.

In 2010 Foster released Anda Jaleo, her first collaboration with singer and husband Victor Herrera; the project reimagined Las Canciones Populares, the folk-song anthology originally recorded by Federico García Lorca and La Argentinita in 1931. The pair continued with 2012’s Perlas, an analog, live-in-the-studio set of overlooked songs and poems drawn from Castilian, Basque, and additional Spanish folk traditions. Four months later she issued Blood Rushing, tracked in Colorado with her husband, the Entrance Band’s Paz Lenchantin, Heather Trost of A Hawk and a Hacksaw, and Ben Trimble of Fly Golden Eagle. Back in the United States in 2013 she recorded with a small circle of Nashville musicians, resulting in November’s I’m a Dreamer—her most conventional album to that point. Revisiting earlier material, she and Herrera captured No More Lamps in the Morning live in the studio on nylon-string guitars in 2016. Two years afterward came the eighteen-track song cycle Faithful Fairy Harmony, recorded, engineered, and mixed by Andrija Tokic (Phosphorescent, Hurray for the Riff Raff) at Nashville’s Bomb Shelter Studio and self-produced by Foster. Without advance notice, the full-length No Harm Done appeared in August 2020; again tracked with Tokic, it featured prominent contributions from guitarist Matthew Schneider on pedal steel.

Foster altered course sharply for the 2022 album Godmother. Although songs continued to revolve around her cascading vocals and folky strumming, the record incorporated programmed electronic rhythms and an array of cosmic synthesizer tones. She performed every instrument herself, yielding experiments in synths and drum programming unlike anything in her prior catalog. The following year brought another turn with Domestic Sphere, a far more stripped-down effort consisting solely of electric guitar and vocals interrupted only occasionally by field-recorded cat howls, swaying wind chimes, and other environmental sounds.