Louise Landes Levi


An Interaction with Josephine Foster's NO HARM DONE


                             
                  No place to go,no where left to run.
             Got time to kill, got time to heal someone    fr. Wheel of Fortune
                 NO HARM DONE. Nashville, 2020 
                       Vocals & lyrics: Josephine Foster

 
       JOSEPHINE is in a category of her own,
She’s a diva but an anti-diva too, recent appearance
on One Million Tongues, courtesy Steve Krakow
in Chicago, clearly revealed both her non -
chalance & her excellence as lyricist, 
stylist & performer. Lines like :
             
I can read you like a book.
Your eyes speak volumes in one look.
And I can read between the lines all the 
detours of your mind.
                                              fr. Love Letter

show her a master of poetic idiom in song. 
She’s studied, carefully, & recorded Dickinson 
(Graphic As a Star) & the great Spanish poet, Garcia Lorca
(Blood Rushing) on her tours w. former music partner 
Victor Herrero & it shows. 

She's a master of stylistic formula—
Josephine once said to me “I’m a failed opera singer’, no,
It’s that opera has failed to find an idiom, so unique,
so close to the heart, to her private,
her inner experience.

She is mature but she’s fresh, like a 
woman you might meet if you were to wander 
through the wood of dark female experience, but
also the natural wood, the forest, the tree,
the old Oak Grove, sacred.




I’ve come I’ve come to worship the sun.
Mother Earth, Mother Earth, shall we give birth-

Without sentimentality, she re invents 
the idiom, the lyrics fortified by her vocal
renditions, at times, on the album, we hear her lower
octave, supporting, even more poignantly,
The register  & sensibility
of 
experience.

The independent woman does not expect recompense,
she does not serve, but is served by her vision, she draws her bow. 
She is the new warrior. Josephine is the new warrior in song.
I wish I could be a star, shinin’ all my light from afar.
Oh, I wish I could be a star. Shinin’ all the night, forevermore.

Josephine in NO HARM DONE has come home. In Nashville, 
on guitar, electric & acoustic, harp, auto harp, piano, w.Mathew
Schneider on 12 string & peal steel guitar & bass, the American
idiom sings through her lyrics. Years of travel have 
taught her to observe, closely,  Freemason 
Drag Don’t tell me there’s no reason, O
I could give you one: 
                                          fr. Freemason
         
& to trust, to respect  her perception.
 
Poetic, lyrical & acute. the musical lines
on NO HARM DONE are impeccable, familiar & in parts 
archaic yet as new as the recording itself. No Harm’s a Nashville
classic from a  world traveler & other worldly dreamer, come home.
Thanks for returning, just when you were needed 
	 Josephine.
 
at the wheel of fortune.
No harm will come if there's no harm done
                                                           fr. Wheel of Fortune

      
NO HARM DONE is available through Bandcamp.     



Louise Landes Levi is still in Kyoto - having been placed

   There by co-vid fate/ in NYC she is the

      Recipient of the 2020 Kathy Acker Award

     For excellence in the AVANT GARDE. Forthcoming

  WHERE I STAND IN ANGEL. Cool Grove Pr.
  
        & sound-art recordings:
        
          Opacity & Oblivion, Sloow Tapes,
              & Mad Song, Oaken Palace.
 
 

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