Diana Greene Winston-Salem Monthly March 2008 Artist in Residence: Jeffrey Dean Foster

Growing up, Jeffrey Dean Foster remembers Saturdays sitting in the parked car, listening to the radio while his mother shopped. Rock and Roll captured him. There was something primitive, something he loved. The Rolling Stones. David Bowie. Fleetwood Mac. Dylan. He wasn’t a musician yet, but he listened closely, learning the vocabulary he’d need for the road ahead.

Since college, the Winston-Salem singer, guitarist, and songwriter has been creating songs with what he calls “a grounding in rock and roll.” He doesn’t write his music down. No need. What works when collaborating with musicians is the “shorthand” of calling out a reference and taking off from there.

He recently released the album, “Million Star Hotel.” It’s his first full length solo album and it weaves together lyrics, music and sound into a richly layered tapestry worthy of that million star rating. National reviewers went wild for the work. This fall the North Carolina Arts Council awarded him a fellowship in songwriting. Going solo is showing dividends for Foster, who, in his early days as a co-founder of The Right Profile, cut an album with Arista records. Along the way, he’s had several “near fame” experiences, playing with other bands with other names.

Foster’s solo album is truly that – a wholly realized anthology of songs that move together, nothing extraneous, nothing wasted. As an art form, the album is something Foster reveres, perhaps more than ever in this era of the download. When talking about influential musicians, he focuses not on their songs or their technique but on their albums.

Foster spent five years making “Million Star Hotel.” It’s elegantly crafted, loaded up with longing and packed full of surprises. “I love the producing,” he says. “I love the weird studio thing.” The album opens with a long, solitary note on a keyboard and, 14 tracks later, closes with the gentle verve of an amplifier. Traversing between those two sounds, Foster taps into everything from sweat-through-your-shirt rocking fun to delicious elegies that crack open like confessions.

“It’s a twilight-ish record,” Foster says, sitting in an unoccupied downtown office he uses as a makeshift studio. “There are a lot of shadows and some light peaking in.” To conjure that evocative twilight feel, a time when day slips into night, Foster added “layers” to the songs. “There are a lot of sounds and music. You hear the front stuff, the obvious stuff, but then there are the other things, the mystery, the spook factor,” he says.

The song, “The Summer of the Son of Sam,” opens with crickets, followed by Foster’s acoustic guitar and plaintive voice singing about memory. Before long, though, the mood shifts into an open ride, the music builds, Foster’s high tenor soars, singer Lynn Blakey joins in, a bawdy piano shows up, and, ultimately, the lyric “I feel my troubles slipping away” comes true.

Many of Foster’s songs carry the spell of an incantation. Something of a lyrical minimalist, his repeated lines lead a path toward light. And no matter how sorrowful or tinged by darkness, the lyrics usually close with an assurance that is well-earned, never trite. In the tenderly mournful song, “Milk and Honey,” the chorus, “There is no promised land, no milk and honey tree” concludes with what feels like a new awareness that “I’m not alone but surrounded. I’ve seen the end and it’s okay.”

“My songs are like little self-help letters,” he says, smiling. “I think of Ray Davies from the Kinks. He wrote these little songs that were like pep songs to himself – you know, ‘get up, things will get better.’”

There is that possibility, considering Foster is sensing the start of a new album. What will it be? Unclear exactly, other than it will push and pull and play with what Foster says “may be America’s best art form, rock and roll.”

When did you realize you were going to live a creative life?

You kind of fall into it and then you’re there. It wasn’t a conscious decision. One day you’re just driving in a van, traveling, playing a show.

Where do you find your inspiration?

It’s in the air. You have to be ready to hear it.

What do you do to overcome a creative block?

With a regular life that we all have, you can’t dwell on that or worry. Songs usually come back. A song will just pop in at the most inconvenient time and suddenly you’re rushing off to a little room to sing a little line into a tape recorder.

What do you think of failure?

It’s inevitable. It helps you weed out things. Get on with it – fail as many times as you can, and as fast as you can.

What do you most admire in other artists?

I guess the person who seems completely natural.  Not sincere, that’s not it - but natural.  Like David Bowie, or Neil Young – it’s like he grew out of the earth and his songs sound that way.  And people who are not driven by commerce.

Which artists inspire you the most?

People who wrote a huge catalogue of songs.  Stephen Foster, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan.  When they were writing it was pop music, but it seems like folk music now.