Arrow

The Arrow pays homage to the time-tested virtues of well-constructed songs built on a creative foundation of emotional honesty and musical eclecticism. quot;Usually the songs I write have some kind of spooky remembrance element in them,quot; Foster elaborates. quot;Something you can't quite put your finger on. All the records I loved when I was young, whether it's the Kinks' 'Waterloo Sunset' or the Byrds' 'Chestnut Mare,' had some element that gave you shivers and took you somewhere else.quot;   The album reflects a prismatic variety of alluring moods and colors, unspooling as a deep, episodic musical trip. They range from the explosive, Faces-like rush of quot;Life Is Sweetquot; to the mysterious mix of beauty and danger in quot;Morningside.quot; There's rustic, Steve Forbert-style folk minstrelsy in quot;The Arrowquot; and a shimmering Byrds-meets-Fleetwood Mac glow to the utterly gorgeous quot;The Sun Will Shine Again.quot; quot;Young Tigers Disappearquot; erupts in a ferocious squall of guitars animating a poetic yet potent antiwar lyric. quot;Jigsaw Manquot; marries a soul-baring lyric to atmospheric dream-pop music that would do Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers proud.   quot;When I think about what kind of record this is,quot; Foster muses, quot;it almost seems like a random spin of an FM radio dial from a certain time in the past in the way it embraces a lot of styles without being too disparate or mixed up. So it's skating over at least my musical history, though I wasn't consciously thinking about it.quot;  .