Sun to Rise is a four-track EP by Stephen Foster, and it features songs wherein this isn’t even the kind of music that kicks the door down or even knocks politely. It’s more like the emotional equivalent of mist forming on a window. You’re not sure when it started, you’re not even entirely sure what it means, but suddenly you’re crying into your lukewarm coffee at 3 a.m. This is what Foster does best: create music that exists in the liminal space between feelings you’ve already had and ones you didn’t know you were suppressing.
The title track eases in with what I’ll call “optimistic melancholy”. It’s the sonic version of watching the sun come up and realizing you’re still awake for the wrong reasons. There’s a full band here, technically, but they’re so subtle they might as well be ghosts. A gentle electric guitar twinkle here, a soft percussive pat there; it’s like listening to someone almost talk themselves into hope. Foster’s vocals are calm, careful, like he’s afraid to ruin the moment by being too certain. And that’s the point. The song lives in the tension between wanting things to get better and knowing they probably won’t for a while. It’s like the feeling of heartbreak as a weather forecast.
If the first track is about cautious optimism, this one is about the quiet devastation of realizing you’ve missed your chance to say what mattered. “In Our Moments” is basically the musical equivalent of rereading old text messages while lying face down on your bed. Foster barely even plays his guitar here; it’s more like he nudges it every few seconds just to make sure we’re still paying attention. His voice gets so close to the mic you can practically hear his thoughts forming mid-word. This is intimacy weaponized. And yet, there’s no melodrama. It doesn’t swell; it doesn’t climax. It just… exists. Like regret. Or student loan debt.
Now, there’s also the thing that should not work and yet absolutely does: the cover of “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” Yes, that one. The one from Mary Poppins. It’s like if someone took a cheerful children’s tune and said, “What if this was about unresolved childhood trauma?” And you know what? It slaps. Or rather, it haunts. Foster slows it down to a crawl, strips out the whimsy, and somehow finds the song’s underlying sadness. It’s eerie, delicate, and probably illegal in at least three Disney parks. If the original is a lullaby for chimney sweeps, Foster’s version is what plays when those chimney sweeps start questioning the capitalist structures that exploit their labor.
The final track, which is a song so minimalist it doesn’t even have a name, is like emotional vapor. It barely exists. It’s ambient folk, if that’s even a thing (it is now). You get these ghost chords, a vague sense of time passing, and Foster kind of hovering in the background like a memory you’re not ready to process yet. He doesn’t resolve the song because he’s not resolving anything. That’s the point. This track is not a goodbye; it’s a fade-out of sorts.
So, what is Sun to Rise, really? It’s not a grand statement. It’s not going to change the world. But that’s exactly why it works. It knows it’s a tiny, quiet EP about being sad in a way that’s hard to explain to other people. Stephen Foster doesn’t really want to impress you on Sun to Rise. He just wants to sit with you quietly for 17 minutes and maybe remind you that stillness can be just as powerful as sound. And sometimes, that’s enough.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
