Which Way to the New Weird America?;
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Though Foster’s otherworldly soprano and unusual phrasing have drawn comparisons to 60s British folk icons like Shirley Collins and Anne Briggs, she didn’t have the chance to hear much outside the mainstream as a child in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. “My exposure to stuff usually came about in weird ways,” she says. “The first time I heard Debussy was on a Barbra Streisand record…the first time I heard jazz was on Willie Nelson’s Stardust. That’s a strange way to discover that kind of music. It’s an unusual filter, and I think it affected me.”
She began writing at 12, mostly composing on piano before moving on to guitar in high school. As a student at Colorado State University she began writing and directing short plays and chamber operas, which prompted her to enroll in Northwestern’s opera program in 1998. Her stay at Northwestern lasted only a year, though. “Opera is kind of a supernatural experience,” she says. “There are these gigantic stories and big orchestrations. But at the same time I have trouble with authority, and opera is like the ultimate authority. You can’t mess around with the notes or diction, you can’t sing out of tune. There’s such a strictness there that you spend all your time trying to attain this perfection. And I thought there was a better way to spend my creative energy.”
Reviewers of Foster’s records and live shows have tended to play up her opera training, but she’s quick to point out her shortcomings as a diva. “The truth is, I wasn’t a very good opera singer,” she says, laughing. “I sang out of tune, I made a lot of mistakes. I was quite a big failure. I’m a result of all my failures. That’s why I’m here. This is the only thing left.”
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On November 11 the online label Hip-O Select (hiposelect.com) will release You’re Getting Better: The Word Jazz Dot Masters, a limited-edition set (5,000 copies) collecting four albums Nordine recorded for the Dot label between 1957 and 1960, along with unreleased tracks. Nordine was a young voice-over actor in 1955 when Dot Records asked him to narrate a poem called “The Shifting, Whispering Sands” over the accompaniment of the Billy Vaughn Orchestra. “That song ostensibly became a hit,” Nordine says. “And then the label came to me and said, ‘Have you got anything else?’ Well, I’d been doing these things in a Highland Park basement with [engineer] Jim Cunningham: I had ‘The Vidiot,’ ‘It Looks Like It’s Gonna Rain,’ all the things that were on the first LP.”
