A Joyous Return

If we can go ahead and name the year’s best album, it’s clearly Ruthie Foster’s Joy Comes Back. The album title cuts many ways, of course: she’s glad to be back after some personal struggles over the three years since her last album; it’s a joy to have her back ruling the roost with her down-to-the-bone soul songs; and she’s discovered the joy she thought she’d lost and she celebrates joyfully with us on the new album. You can feel her defiance, her standing-in-the-face of despair, and her exultant rejoicing in every note of every song on Joy Comes Back, and by the end of the album we’ve also been drained and revived, but we’re laughing and embracing the bright port we find even in sailing life’s dark waters.

Foster recorded the album at her former neighbor Dan Barrett’s studio, and between the two of them, they chose ten songs that touched Foster and expressed both the depth of her wounds and the bottomlessness of her healing, as well as the hopefulness of a newly discovered love. Joining Foster on the album are Barrett on guitar and percussion, Joe Vitale on drums, Willie Weeks on bass, Derek Trucks (who plays slide on the title track), Grace Pettis on guitar on “Good Sailor,” and Warren Hood on fiddle and mandolin on “Richland Woman Blues,” Samantha Banks on spoons (“Richland Woman’s Blues”) and Larry Fulcher on bass (“What Are You Listening To?”), as well as others, including Brian Standefer, Eric Holden, Frank LoCrasto, Nicholas Ryland, Red Young, and Sheree Smith.

Coming out a fallow songwriting period, Foster wrote only one song on Joy Comes Back—“Open Sky”—but the other nine she and Barrett selected for the album range from Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and Chris Stapleton’s “What Are You Listening To?” to Ivy Jo Hunter and Stevie Wonder’s “Loving You is Sweeter Than Ever” and Shawnee Kilgore’s “Abraham.” As you’d expect from Foster, she finds the vulnerability, the power, the humor, the courage, the joy, and the love in every song and delivers them with her just-right phrasing and canny ability to make the song her own.

Maybe the most unexpected song on the album is Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” but this may also be the most fun you ever have singing or listening to the ‘70s anti-war anthem that’s been recorded already by artists as various as Cake, Gov’t Mule, and Rockabye Baby! Lullaby. Black Sabbath’s original plods along, urging defiance with an angry, though often addled, tone; it’s as if they could urge resistance simply by yelling angrily. Foster straps on her resonator guitar and howls resistance in a blues jam that features a call and response among her vocals, Simon Wallace’s harmonica, and Foster’s guitar. It’s dark and forceful, with a wink-and-a-nod playfulness in the music itself, laying bare the gleefulness of judgment on the “war pigs” in the final verses.

“Good Sailor” opens with a guitar riff reminiscent of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” and the Grace Pettis-Haley Cole co-write dives deep into an ocean of hurt and healing. The song opens with a sedate desolation that gazes at the broken pieces of life scattered around: “Standing in the middle of the wreckage of the life we made…plan waylaid.” Standing in the midst of brokenness, Foster declares that although she’s “been tossed around the deep end and almost drowned a time or two/easy living never did [her] no favors.” Her defiance rises to a mighty swell as she urges, in a powerful call-and-response with a gospel chorus, the ocean of misery to “bring on, bring on the crashing waves” since she’s found a way to embrace, endure, and overcome them and since smooth waters never made a “good sailor.”

On the title track, written by Sean Staples, Foster returns to her gospel roots. The song opens with Red Young’s jaunty church piano that’s augmented quickly by Trucks’ slide guitar. From those opening bars on, the spirit moves us along as Foster declares that she wants to “be ready/when joy comes back again.” Built on a blues structure, the power of the song builds from its repetition, its gospel shouts, and the call-and-response of the instruments as Trucks’ slide guitar answers Young’s Hammond organ on the bridge. Foster adds a verse to the song where she joyously proclaims that she’s risen again: “Spirit get low, Lord/Spirit get low, sometime/Spirit get low, Lord/But I’m gonna rise again.” By the end of the song, she’s preaching deliverance and proclaiming in true Sunday fashion as she fills the air with gospel shouts “whoa, I’m gonna rise again/here comes my joy.” Foster’s joyfulness is palpable as she celebrates the movement from the humility of despair to the bliss and rapture of pure joy.

Foster’s own song, “Open Sky,” recalls the beauty of Ashford and Simpson; its powerful beauty grows out of its simple melody and its soulful lyrics. It’s fitting that the song follows “Joy Comes Back” on the album since it celebrates the vulnerability and tentativeness that falling into a new-found joy brings. Now that joy has come back, Foster is ready to fall into it, yet she’s still unsure and apprehensive about moving too fast or opening up too quickly: “something in my heart won’t say what the rest of me knows/every little moment of the day tells me that it’s so.” Although Foster doesn’t have a clue” where she wants to go, she knows that one thing for sure: “it’s you I want to know/this time don’t ask why/trust an open sky.”

On Joy Comes Back Foster lays open her heart and soul, carefully exploring the delights and pleasures of the return of joy, baring her soul to the wiles and ways of love and the uncertainties of hope, and exulting in the beauty of a world seen anew through the eyes of joyfulness. You can’t listen to this album and be unmoved by Foster’s pure musical genius and her way of singing these songs with such power and grace that they touch and change our hearts. Joy, indeed.