Country Blues Guitarist GLEN FOSTER Releases “White Funeral” From Unnatural Tendencies Album
After four decades in the music business, Glen Foster has earned the right to break any rule he wants. And this happy iconoclast shows no signs of compromise on “White Funeral,” a whimsically morbid country-blues number that appears on his latest album, the trend-bucking Unnatural Tendencies.
Like a winking eulogy to a vanishing era, the song finds Foster chronicling the impending demise of one Old Snake, a “hardened old metaphoric character” who gets stranded in the desert just as it’s starting to snow.
It’s a sure sign of winter, the geese are flying south
A sure sign of winter, when you see that harvest moon full out
A sure sign of winter, it don’t leave much room for doubt
It’s going to be a White Funeral if Old Snake don’t make it out
Snake’s truck isn’t the only thing that’s breaking down here: It’s his life itself, as Foster’s plaintive yet sardonic vocal makes painfully apparent. All the while, the singer-songwriter-instrumentalist’s Dobro curlicues circle like hungry buzzards over the tasteful burial plot of a backing track laid down by his bandmates in the Glen Foster Group: Marg Foster (harmony vocals, percussion) Marty Steele (keyboards, harmony vocals), Colin Stevenson (bass guitar, harmony vocals) and James McRae (drums).
Playful elegia is just one of the many moods to be discovered on Unnatural Tendencies, a nonconformist manifesto of a record that plays like a defiant response to the winnowed attention spans and fixation on salability that are setting the direction of today’s musical culture. Few marketing consultants, after all, would encourage an artist to begin his album with a title track that’s nearly 17 minutes long and moves fluidly through three different songs, each in a different key but with the same chord progression and tempo. Nor would an A&R executive be turning cartwheels if said artist chose to include another number that incorporated a rapped intro, heavy guitar riffs, a satirical sitar hook, an accordion solo set to a polka beat, a bluegrass banjo break, and a highland bagpipe solo—oh, and a disco finale, complete with walking bass and falsetto vocals. Throw in some lyrical references to the plight of First Nations peoples and the pitfalls of religious obsession, and whammo! Instant anathema to the TikTok generation.
And Foster couldn’t be happier about it. This far into his career, he’s still willing to risk it all to remain genuine.
“Natural tendencies are what we tend to gravitate towards in life,” he says. “My concept of Unnatural Tendencies includes thinking outside the box and attempting things that we would normally shy away from. It involves taking risks and trying different things that could be glorious or disastrous.”
But then, it’s been that way for the Nanaimo-based rock/folk maverick since he burst onto the scene in the ’70s with his original band, Falcon, whose 1980 single “Los Angeles” won a talent contest on CKOC Radio Hamilton. Since then, Foster has worked with the likes of Daniel Lanois and Ray Materick (“Linda Put The Coffee On”) and has taught more than 20 years’ worth of students in his side gig as a professional music teacher, receiving two silver medals from the Royal Conservatory of Music in the process. But the biggest feather in his cap has been his stellar run as a solo artist, which encompasses 10 albums of music in a breathtaking diversity of styles—from the “Rockabilly Fever” of 2020’s Not Far Away to the seasonal side he explored on The Spirit of Christmas the very next year.
Now he takes another bold step into the great unknown with Unnatural Tendencies, which he co-produced with Rick Salt (The Irish Rovers, Kerplunks, Jack Connolly, Gerry Barnum, Phil Dwyer) at Nanaimo’s Mountainview Studio. It’s seeing release on Foster’s own Rescue Records label, which is part of the reason he felt the freedom to stretch out in multiple directions at once.
“This is my tenth album (which prompted the word ‘Tendencies’ in the title), and I’m making it fit for me,” he says. “It’s the way I like to hear music, in album form the way I believe my fans do. These are some of my best songs ever; I’m singing and playing guitar better than I ever have, and I brought in the best musicians I could find, rather than use synthesizers and samples.”
So even though the devil-may-care approach he took to composition this time might not have been devised expressly with the stage in mind, he and his band still have all the ammo they need to further their reputation for killer live work when they do take the new material on the road. Venues across Canada have witnessed the little miracle Glen is live, both on his own and sharing the bill with the likes of Lighthouse, Sammy Hagar, Dr. Hook, Jose Feliciano, Valdy, Jesse Winchester, and Stan Rogers. With the new album done, look for them at a showroom, festival, park concert, or pub near you. Anything else would be … well, unnatural.
Hi Glen, good to see you again. What have you been up to since you released the last song?
Well, last weekend we held our album release event by performing the entire album to a full house in our hometown of Nanaimo. That involved a lot of marketing, going on a live radio show, doing an interview for the local newspaper, and hustling to invite everyone we knew to the show. Of course, we rehearsed like crazy and I had pages of lyrics to memorize from the new songs I’d written. Just the sheer volume of work required to finalize and release a new album is a little daunting when you’re the artist, manager, booking agent, and your own record company. Plus, I’ve personally produced music videos for every track on Unnatural Tendencies and have been releasing them with each song as ‘singles’ over the last nine months.
You’ve been creating this for a while now. What keeps you going?
I believe most musicians in my position will tell you that it’s the love of music and performing that keeps us going. We all know it’s not for the money. It doesn’t take long to lose any allusions of grandeur about being a big star or composing the world’s next best-selling hit record ever. Still, there is the gratification that comes with achieving incremental degrees of success in the music business and in your own personal pursuit of excellence as a professional musician, songwriter, singer, or whatever you do. Every time you get to perform your music in front of people you get to experience how people are reacting to it and enjoy their praise and applause when you’ve done a good job. That gratification is often what keeps us coming back for more. It’s sort of like the feeling of hitting the perfect golf shot or slamming a home run out of the park.
How do you think technology has impacted the way we listen to and create music today?
I understand how technology has radically changed the playing field when it comes to creating music, in as much as being able to record an entire album on a handheld device. Digital files allow us to create sounds synthetically without having to use real musicians playing traditional instruments. Personally I embrace the new technology but I prefer to maintain the human elements of a band playing together, in tune, keeping time, adding dynamics and emotional response to what they are feeling and thinking when they perform. On my new album Unnatural Tendencies I utilized an authentic sitar, banjo, accordion, bagpipes, Tibetan singing bowl, violins, saxophone, hand drums, percussion, backup singers, etc. It’s all real.
How we listen to music today has changed and almost everyone knows what I mean. Myself, I’m making music that can be performed live on a stage or listened to in its entirety as a recorded work of art. The majority of songs on this album are longer than 4 minutes, and Suite: Unnatural Tendencies is 16:25 minutes long. The listening experience is meaningful.
What’s your go-to song when you need an instant mood boost?
I have a song called Me and Maggy that we re-recorded for this project. I originally wrote it some fifty years ago and still have my original demo. I’ve been playing it ever since because I love it and it means so much to me. I recorded it around 1978 with Daniel Lanois, Ed Roth, Bob Doidge, Sonny Del Rio, and others at Grant Avenue Studio in Hamilton, as a disco song! Whenever I play it I feel like it’s the perfect expression of who I am and what feels right to me. So I really wanted to record a modern version for everyone to hear and enjoy. I’ve also created a wonderful music video of it that expresses who I am, where I’ve been, and what I’m doing.
What are your plans for the spring and summer?
We have a few outdoor festivals and concerts that I’m playing with my band Glen Foster Group. I’m also playing smaller rooms, folk houses, and such as a duo with my wife Maggy. Other than that I plan to relax and enjoy the sunshine this summer as much as possible, do a little travelling, recharge the batteries, and prepare to come back bigger and better than ever.