FOSTER, JOSEPHINE
I'M A DREAMER (FIRE RECORDS)
Dreamers have dreamt for as long as domes have fallen, bobbing musical swells from Stephen Foster to the Everlys.
Now here comes that beautiful dreamer JOSEPHINE FOSTER and, sugarpie, she's not the same.
She has donned her magenta vestiments, dreaming back, with mossy verses that haunt like a name never called.
It's not just Jo and her shadow, though, this time around-she's got a gaggle of Nashville cats on hand to coax spidery cathedrals from these campfire jams.
Folks will want to call this her "Harvest" - with its harp and pedal steel, its double bass and cascading piano.
And it's true, "I'm a Dreamer" beckons with a gentle hand, each note clear and crisp so that one feels each grain.
Amid such delicate charms, however, lurk muses with rotting flesh, ugly ducklings and Djuna Barnes, wooden floors upon which no babies will be rocked.
Wily is the heart that wanders filled with duende and desire, that rides the thigh like a parlor guitar when a strap just isn't handy.
These are songs comfortably at home in salon or saloon, dreams deep enough to bury your dread - as sorrowful, as sexy, as stirring a set of songs as anybody's dreamt up in ages.