While most folk sprites of the early 00s studied Janis or Joni or Joan for their role models, Josephine Foster was reading. On her first mature record “Hazel Eyes I Will Lead You,” which is ostensibly a carter-family-style folk project, there’s as much Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound in her lyrics and delivery as Woody or Odetta. This is what’s kept her far far away from devolving into Dungeonmaster hippie self-parody like so many of the new weird freaks who emerged around the same time period.

Here’s Crackerjack Fool from that album:

Then on what I’d argue is her masterpiece, ‘All The Leaves Are Gone’, she posits a winter answer to the summer of love, rewriting Californian 60s love-rock into a desperately bleak and angry Colorado freakout about the end of the world.

On ‘Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing ‘ she completely went off the map, into 19th Century Germany to hobnob with Schubert and Goethe. The songs on this record are almost unlistenably composed and (how you say?) unheimlich, bonding creepy Wagnerian opera imagery with modern day indie sloppy dissonance like Will Oldham raised by SCA white power pagans instead of snake handlers.

But since the release of last year’s ‘This Coming Gladness’, she seems to have come back to traditional American folk stuff a bit more. Now she’s released a record of interpretations of Emily Dickinson poems on December 7th (yesterday) called ‘Graphic As A Star ‘, which from everything I’ve heard is her most simple musical effort so far. Not that we want to her to go all Neko Case on us, but, if her career has been about wandering through different eras looking for a mythology, you can’t really ask for a more human (and less explored) landscape than Dickinson’s. Em’s the odd Capitol of Hidden Feelings, and Foster’s at her best when her modernist literary ambitions are pointed at writing about people in the kitchen making breakfast looking out the window instead of Norse trolls and Hieronymous Bosch paintings.

We talked to her on her way from Poland to England by internet mail.

BYT: A lot of the cliches of touring may not apply to you currently–is it more like traveling than work to tour Europe with a small group?

I´d say its very different–neither the idea of traditional work or leisure travel has much in common with this sort of music journeying.

BYT: Are you with a group on this tour or is it just you? What instruments do you typically bring along to cover the wide range of tools you employ on record?

Depending on the invitation, I play either alone or with a band. Regardless of the setting, I may find myself at the piano, the guitar and sometimes playing the small harp.

BYT: Your latest album interprets Emily Dickinson. This seems like a far cry from the spooky Goethe-inspired lieder of “Wolf”. Have you been planning this forever, or did Dickinson jump to mind recently?

The Dickinson album occured relatively rapidly and was very simple to record in our house. A Wolf in Sheep´s Clothing was an idea I´d had for years and when the opportunity emerged for a grant from the city of Chicago, I used the money they gave me to record that record.

BYT: Dickinson has some unique stylistic touches in her poems…oddly capitalized words, lots of–dashes…did you try to express these in the songs in some way?

I did in fact let those be subtle melodic guides, without trying to obsess over each and every one.

BYT: I know this is a too broad subject to jump into in an email interview…but is there also a new turn in your spiritual outlook to accompany the music? Things seem brighter all around these days.

There is always that element present in music making to me. If anything seems brighter I´d say the act of recording feels easier these days and perhaps that is reflected in Graphic as a Star.

BYT: Since “All The Leaves Are Gone” have you worked with electric accompaniment live anywhere? (Part II: There’s some louder parts of “This Coming Gladness”…have you played those with a full band) Would you be into doing another more rockish album or does primitive volume not feel right anymore?

Yes, I toured Italy with Alex Neilson on drums and Victor Herrero on guitar last May. We were performing a lot of the material off of This Coming Gladness. I´m pretty sure another album with rock elements will happen sooner or later, but I like to play dynamically with minimal reliance upon amplifiers. Primitive volume seems natural…its the PA volumes that seem false and abrasive and there is something wrong when people´s hearing is damaged listening to a performance, I want to avoid that at all cost. I like music when music touches the extremes but doesn´t seem esthetically bound there. Nature seems to function that way too.

BYT: A good note to end on. Thanks again!