Josephine Foster is a modern American folk singer-songwriter and musician from Colorado. As an adolescent she worked as a funeral and wedding singer, and aspired to become an opera singer. The new album “No More Lamps In the Morning”, released in February 2016, is a new folk route for Josephine, a stripped down starsailor vector connecting heller to highwater. Foster, on nylon string guitar, weaving intimate readings of songs spanning Foster’s songwriting career including selections from recent albums “This Coming Gladness” (2008) and “I’m a Dreamer” (2013) and back to Born Heller (2004).

Foster’s new route is a free, chromatic music, a tuneful montana of mind–an expansive harmonic space dominated by Rif mountain on the horizon. As highwater as the music is, as broad the stylistic palette of the musicians, the music really exists in service of the lyrics. Two of the songs on No More Lamps are poems by Rudyard Kipling and James Joyce given musical settings by Foster. The rest arguably are musical settings of her own poems strengthened in a fiery crucible of guitars (and on 2 tracks Gyða Valtýsdóttir’s cello) in which dissonant notes bend and quaver as wirefork embers, dying without affecting the glowing tonal fire which unites contrary forces in a Moroccan speakeasy.

She has performed, for an audience of burros, concerts of Federico Garcia Lorca poems set to music. A music of wandering and a music of roots. An impermanent tradition passed down for generations. Let your loved ones know. ~ Written by Chris Davis