About this product

Product Identifiers

ProducerBrian Landrum^Jeffrey Dean Foster^Mitch Easter

Record LabelCD Baby, Cdb

UPC0634457166721

eBay Product ID (ePID)11046053881

Product Key Features

FormatCD

Release Year2005

GenreRock

ArtistJeffrey Dean Foster

Release TitleMillion Star Hotel

Dimensions

Item Height0.40 in

Item Weight0.25 lb

Item Length5.60 in

Item Width4.90 in

Additional Product Features

Number of Discs1

Number of Tracks14

TracksLily of the Highway, All I Do Is Dream, The Summer of the Son of Sam, Little Priest, Break Her Heart, Don't Listen to Me, Long Gone Sailor, I Know How Your Broken Heart Feels, When Will I Be a Man, Lost in My Own Town, Milk and Honey, Corner of My Eye, Everything You Say Sounds Like Goodbye, Diamond Shaped

Notes'Million Star Hotel' is easily one of the best albums ever to come out of the fertile North Carolina music scene,and it deserves the kind of exposure that the work of home-state peers such as Ryan Adams, Ben Folds and Tift Merritt has enjoyed. Parke Puterbaugh, Rolling Stone Contributing Writer. Singer, guitarist and songwriter Jeffrey Dean Foster dates his musical career back in the mid-Eighties, when he cofounded the Right Profile. One of the first and best bands on North Carolina's fertile indie music scene, the Winston-Salem-based quartet played high-energy, rootsy rock and roll. Like many of Foster's musical undertakings over the past two decades, the Right Profile were ahead of their time. (Interesting footnote: Foster's foil in the Right Profile, pianist Steve Dubner, went on to fame in the writing field as coauthor of Freakonomics.) Long before the Americana movement caught fire in this decade - before the genre even had a name - Foster also piloted an early-Nineties group called the Carneys which included Andy York (now with John Mellencamp), whose unreleased album is a veritable blueprint for Americana's synthesis of country, folk, roots and rock. Later that decade, Foster's next band - the Pinetops, released an album of protean American music, Above Ground and Vertical. It contained the wistful classic "I'm So Lonesome I Could Fly," which has been covered by Marti Jones and others. Again, Foster was breaking ground in a field that hadn't yet found the broader audience it now enjoys. After the Pinetops' demise, he cut a raw, quasi-live solo EP called the leaves turn upside down, which stood singer/songwriter conventions on their head and set a tone of fearless artistry that would find expression on his new album, Million Star Hotel. Foster has been a favorite son in his home state and a cherished find among musical cognoscenti around the country. Now, with Million Star Hotel, he's made the album of his career - spent five years of his life getting it right, in fact - and the stars have lined up in his favor. He's come tantalizingly close to tasting the big time before. The Right Profile and the Carneys had deals with Arista and Warner Chappell., respectively, and over the years Foster has recorded with such renowned producers as Pete Anderson, Jim Dickinson, Don Dixon and Steve Jordan. But he has paid a price for being slightly ahead of the curve. Not this time. With the release of Million Star Hotel - Foster's first full-length debut as a solo artist - he has surpassed himself with an album of gorgeous, moving songs that possess uncommon depth. It's 14 tracks play through like a song cycle that's moved forward not by an overt plot or concept but by an emotional arc that pulls the listener through a kaleidoscopic range of moods. These include yearning, melancholy, determination and, in the end, grateful and passionate accommodation to life's circumstances. Foster wanted to make an album that felt true to life but also a bit larger than life, and he's succeeded with this soulful, atmospheric set of shivery-good songs. "There are a lot of recurring motifs - musical approaches and sounds, but mostly lyrical and mood kinds of things - that I was not at all aware of until I see them laid out now," says Foster. "I think throughout Million Star Hotel there's some kind of longing for something that you half-remember or the way you felt when you were 17 or 27 or whatever." With it's aura of aching beauty and self-revelation, accented by organic production touches, Million Star Hotel bears gem-like reflections of such seminal influences as Neil Young, Ray Davies, Lindsey Buckingham and Hank Williams. You'll even hear occasional nods to such Seventies rock forebears as Bowie, Bolan and ELO in such songs as "Lost In My Own Town" and "Long Gone Sailor." Members of Foster's old group, the Pinetops, and his current band, the Birds of Prey, contributed to Million Star Hotel. Noted musician-producer Mitch Easter - of Let's