True self

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This article was published 28/10/2023 (730 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The interview is scheduled for 11:30 a.m., but when the landline rings at one minute past, Matt Foster is anything but disappointed by the momentary delay.

“There’s no such thing as a couple minutes late in my world,” the singer-songwriter admits with sheepish self-deprecation, acquitting the reporter of his tardiness. For Foster, the rush — of living, of singing, of artmaking — comes with the slowness, the process and the deep-rooted consideration of which step is worth taking next.

Time, and timing, is everything in Foster’s brooding brand of folk music, a simmering Americana steeped in syrup and salt.

In live performances, Foster — a non-binary performer who uses they/them pronouns — doesn’t carry their acoustic guitar as much as cradle it, rapping against it like a knock on the door, a gentle agitation that feels at once familiar and foreboding, an invitation in one ear and a provocation in the other.

But that sound — a Prairie midpoint between the ghostly naturalism of Jason Molina (Songs: Ohia) and the dreamy lonesomeness of Bill Callahan (Smog) — came as the result of two decades of intense self-exploration by the 39-year-old Foster, who says the music on their debut album, True Needs, wouldn’t have sounded quite as mature, or assured, were it released earlier in their journey. It would have rung hollow in all the wrong ways.

Foster first found success with the octet SubCity Dwellers, playing punk-reggae-Clash-inspired music with the band throughout the early 2000s as it toured the country.

“The mandate was to get people on the dancefloor from beat one,” Foster says. With two guitarists, Foster was “forced up the neck” into unfamiliar territory. “It forced (me) into a place of discomfort.”

With their next band, the Crooked Brothers, Foster began playing music that more closely aligned with their heart: roots rock that would be right at home in an issue of No Depression or a dive bar in Godknowswhere, U.S.A.

“We did some incredible things,” Foster says, reminiscing about fans in Germany singing along to tunes written in a Manitoba bedroom.

Those songs, the hirsute songwriter says, were revelatory in that they revealed the type of artist they could be, and that there was still a hunger out there for the cryptic, atypical performers Foster had always been drawn to.

“There are two types of performance. The extroverted and theatrical — a storyteller and character like David Bowie exists on that extreme. But on the flipside, there’s the kind of performer who puts no costume on and their artform is to strip away as much as possible in order to stand there and be seen,” Foster says.

“I want to live without being afraid to be seen. I make music as a bid for connection with others. It’s an intimacy thing, which is scary, but to me, feels like the one and only way for me to be.”

It took a while for Foster to find the language to describe the person they’ve always been. When they learned about the idea of a non-binary approach to gender, it immediately felt resonant.

“I love the language around it and the truthfulness of it. It really reflected to me a more accurate depiction of my reality,” Foster says.

That reality can be found in Foster’s music, with lyrics that draw on contradiction.

“I’m often intentionally cultivating ambiguity,” the singer says. “I like to incorporate the notions of bi-tonality — that two things can happen at once.”

Take the track Hospital, for example. It begins with a droning undertone created by a string instrument called the hurdy-gurdy, a hand-cranked miracle that achieves an unlikely harmony when paired with Foster’s rustic vocals. That low-down song bleeds directly into From a Poplar Near the Hayland, a track on which Foster’s vocals don’t appear; instead, it’s animated by birdsong and loon calls, reflecting Foster’s naturalistic approach to songwriting.

“I don’t mind letting (elements) stand alone as sovereign ideas that don’t necessarily have to come together,” they say.

Foster’s music, however, is cohesive and powerfully felt, as evidenced at this past summer’s Winnipeg Folk Festival, where the singer managed to bridge the gap between CSNY acolytes and the Big Thief crowd on workshop stages.

Many of the songs on True Needs have been in Foster’s repertoire for over a decade, but only recently — especially after becoming a parent to a toddler named Thunder — was the singer able to articulate them in a voice that felt authentic and true.

“The album is about meditation, stillness, self-examination and acting out of good motivation, stripping life down to what really matters,” says Foster, who released the album independently last year but is having a proper vinyl release at the West End Cultural Centre tonight, backed by Natalie Bohrn, Eric Roberts and Quintin Bart.

“Maybe what matters more than anything is openness and receptivity, meeting the moment halfway without having the audacity of thinking you understand it before you get there.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com