Name Mark Foster
Best known for Being the singer and songwriter of Foster The People.
Current city Los Angeles
Really want to be in Right now I am home and there’s nowhere I would rather be. It’s a perfect day. This morning I’ve been listening to old records while our bulldog Biz is snoring on the couch next to me. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, and my phone has only vibrated twice.
Excited about We have a new album coming out August 16th called Paradise State Of Mind. Making this record felt more akin to climbing a mountain—it’s our most ambitious work to date. We’ll be starting our tour at Austin City Limits in October and it will be our first time on the road since 2018.
My current music collection has a lot of Gabriella Smith.
And a little bit of Bernie Worrell.
Preferred format There are different ways I listen to music. Sometimes I love the ritual of intentionally picking a record, getting comfortable, away from all distractions, and turning off any kind of cerebral noise so I can feel the fullness of the artist’s spirit. When I am listening like that, vinyl feels and sounds the best.
Other times, I am searching for something interesting that I haven’t heard before. My Spotify algorithm is pretty dialed in right now, so the Discovery function is my favorite thing to tune into when I’m driving. It helps me fill the well back up. Even though the compression and sample rate conversation doesn’t compare sonically to vinyl, the accessibility to everything and anything at any time is a technological miracle that I don’t take for granted.
5 Albums I Can’t Live Without:
1
Diamond Dogs, David Bowie
Bowie’s entire catalogue could be put on display in a museum and studied for millenniums, but this specific record activates me in a way that I can’t shake. From the first note off of “Future Legend,” Bowie pulls you into his haunted world of debaucherous revelry. The instrumentation throughout this record feels completely free, courageous, uninhibited, and dangerously human. When I listen to the first 20 seconds of the title track “Diamond Dogs,” I want to make an entire record with that mood — and to be honest, I feel like that same mood is what Bowie pulled out of Iggy Pop later with “Funhouse,” “Nightclubbing,” and “Some Weird Sin.”
“We Are the Dead” is the counter balance to celebration of “Rebel Rebel” and shows the vulnerable side of his heart. “Big Brother” is my favorite track though: the musicality (Bowie on sax, Mellotron, and pretty much every instrument), the arrangement, and the way this song connects in the sequence to “Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family” is one of my favorite musical expressions of anything I’ve ever heard. The delay at the end of the record, glitching and leaving a dissonant taste in the listener’s ear while fading out, is the perfect punctuation mark to this album. It’s one of the most confident pieces of work I’ve ever heard.
2
Richard D. James Album, Aphex Twin
I remember hearing this album for the first time when it came out in 1996. I was 12 years old and my best friend from 7th grade (shout out to Brian Cochran) showed it to me. As kids, we had never heard anything like it, but as I grew older and my musical taste expanded, I realized that NOBODY had ever heard anything like it. Richard James continues to be one of the most mercurial and innovative artists of all time. His techniques are talked about amongst producers and engineers on countless Reddit threads—most of it being conjecture and argumentative in nature. Nobody can figure out how he truly does what he does. This record feels like a score to a film that doesn’t exist yet. It was a cornerstone of my early musical foundation and has shaped the way I approach programming: a mixture of childlike melodic innocence juxtaposed with complex syncopation.
3
Sell My Soul, Sylvester
In my opinion, Sylvester is one of the most underrated artists of the last fifty years—as a person, a singer, a performer, and musical pioneer. This album opens with one of my favorite songs of all time, “I Need You.” The pre-chorus of this song does something musically that I have not heard anywhere else in the same way, I always find myself going back to it. The counter-rhythm of how the strings are playing against the jazz bass progression activates my brain and soul in equal measure. This record’s genius is that it feels effortless and free, but when you look under the hood, it’s as heavy as it gets.
4
Gap Band IV, Gap Band
This record could pull me out of any bad mood put a smile on my face. Their approach to drums and synth bass is a swing I’m always chasing. The way this is recorded feels like they captured the spirit of the music directly to tape. It’s not overcooked with production or rehearsed to perfection, and because of that it’s perfect.
5
From Here to Eternity, Giorgio Moroder
Giorgio’s aesthetic on this record is something that I have struggled to find anywhere else. It feels like he synthesized a rare substance found only in the deepest parts of space. My personal favorites are “Utopia – Me Giorgio” and “First Hand Experience in Second Hand Love.”