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Graphic As A Star

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Download links and information about Graphic As A Star by Josephine Foster. This album was released in 2009 and it belongs to Rock, Alternative, Songwriter/Lyricist, Psychedelic, Contemporary Folk genres. It contains 27 tracks with total duration of 44:15 minutes.

Artist: Josephine Foster
Release date: 2009
Genre: Rock, Alternative, Songwriter/Lyricist, Psychedelic, Contemporary Folk
Tracks: 27
Duration: 44:15
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Tracks

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No. Title Length
1. Trust In The Unexpected 1:56
2. How Happy Is The Little Stone 1:00
3. She Sweeps With Many-Colored Brooms 2:30
4. Ah, Teneriffe! 1:14
5. Who Is The East? 0:37
6. They Called Me To The Window 1:45
7. This Is The Land The Sunset Washes 0:54
8. Like Mighty Foot Lights 1:08
9. Exultation Is The Going 0:46
10. In Falling Timbers Buried 2:36
11. With Thee In The Desert 0:29
12. I See Thee Better In The Dark 2:09
13. Your Thoughts Don’t Have Words Every Day 0:52
14. My Life Had Stood A Loaded Gun 4:49
15. Eden Is That Old-Fashioned House 0:59
16. Beauty Crowds Me Till I Die 0:34
17. I Could Bring You Jewels 2:12
18. Wild Nights - Wild Nights! 1:54
19. Only A Shrine, But Mine 2:26
20. Tho’ My Destiny Be Fustian 1:28
21. What Shall I Do - It Whimpers So 1:49
22. Heart! We Will Forget Him 1:20
23. Strong Draughts Of Their Refreshing Minds 1:01
24. Tell As A Marksman 2:51
25. The Spider Holds A Silver Ball 2:42
26. Whoever Disenchants 1:13
27. Touch Lightly Nature’s Sweet Guitar 1:01

Details

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When Josephine Foster released A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing in 2006, she provocatively recorded the lieder of composers like Schumman, Brahms, and Schubert in a unique framework. She sang them in German and played acoustic guitar, piano, and harmonica with improvising electric guitarist Brian Goodman accompanying her for a contemporary feel. Though her music exists in a unique space, she echoes such risk-taking classic folk performers such as Shirley Collins. On Graphic as a Star — her debut album for Fire Records — she has written music to the poems of Emily Dickinson, and the fit is seamless. She conceived the 26-song cycle while living in a remote region of Spain and had brought very few books with her. Dickinson’s poems provided comfort. In her liner notes she claims these songs came together in a matter of weeks. Musically, this is more sparse than anything she’s ever recorded — accompanying herself only on an acoustic guitar, sometimes with a primitive-sounding harmonica added. She also she sings a cappella (“Wild Nights - Wild Nights!”) or with only the sounds of chirping birds in the background (“What Shall I Do - It Whimpers So -”). While all of Foster’s work is provocative, this proves the warmest, loveliest, and most beautifully articulated recording in her catalog. These poems (which were also written in solitude; Dickinson was a self-imposed shut-in) easily lend themselves to Foster’s song forms, due to the poet’s keen sense of time, rhythm, and space. Dickinson's writing is often wonderfully elliptical in image and meaning; Foster underscores this here: there are no choruses. These songs are small but evoke the vast emptiness surrounding them. They don’t feel melancholy, even when they are, such as in “My Life Had Stood - A Loaded Gun.“ Instead they are evocative of an America at once imagined and longed for — and this sense of homesickness is evident in the reedy beauty of Foster’s voice — which is more controlled and tempered than ever before; she seems to have found the exact pitch and timbre she’s sought since the beginning. While the entire cycle is gorgeous and the tunes nearly inseparable from one another, a couple of tracks lend themselves to singling out: the lilting early American folk melody in “Tho' My Destiny Be Fustian -“ and the languid, bluesy stroll of “I Could Bring You Jewels - Had I a Mind To -.” Graphic as a Star is exquisite.