"Open Door" starts things off in classically Foreman style: a blues form that doesn’t sound bluesy, with a narrative at once crystal clear and oblique. The loss of a romantic partner reflects on the narrator’s own situation, physically and psychologicallyall this, with mandolins. "By Its Very Nature Fleeting" is a triptych in song, pounding tom-toms and interlacing electric guitar and piano, with three college-aged narrators ruminating on death from three perspectives.

Bill returns to Irish-flavored instrumentals with "Planxty Steve Gonzales" before "The Stray Dogs of Dakar," another slanted bluesimagine Skip James busking with an accordion player on the Champs-Élysées. Drawing on his own stay in Dakar, Bill takes a series of images of the city and frames them with the narrative of an orphaned, educated, and desperately poor taxi driver.

"El Chorrillo" stands as the album’s centerpiece, using a foul example of American war crimes in the 1989 invasion of Panama to critique the United States’ continuing military interventionism. The narrator, an American soldier, burns working-class Panamanian apartments while attmempting to dissociate from the experience with a variety of hallucinogens. The music takes an opposite tack, using an almost elegant folk-rock to throw the horror of the narrative into relief.

The mood lightens considerably with the garage-folk-rock flavored "Feeling No Pain (and Paying No Rent)," sending up the Federal Reserve’s deceptively easy credit policies in what is line-for-line the funniest song of the collection. Finishing the set out on a high note, "Eric’s Apartment" places Bill’s dear dog Eric in musical form, in what is certainly his catchiest instrumental since 1998’s "The Professah."

"Begging Bowl" is standard-issue Bill Foreman, which is to say that it is anything but standard. Few artists can offer his particular combination of talents: melodies that sound both fresh and classic at the same time, intelligent lyrics without off-putting intellectualism, all by a musician who makes every last sound on the record, every instrument and every vocal. If you’re already a fan of Bill’s music, "Begging Bowl" will not disappoint. If you’re not yet a fan, "Begging Bowl" will make you one.

If you would like more information about this music, or to schedule an interview with Bill Foreman, please call 415/264-7771 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Bill Foreman has worked the past two decades making beautiful, unique music for a small, but dedicated and growing, audience. His formative years were spent in Del Mar, California, listening to his father play Johnny Cash songs on his guitar and hearing his mother’s Beatles records. Hoping to channel his adolescent rebellion in a positive direction, his parents rented 12-year old Bill a drum kit and sent him for lessons. Their plan worked: the boy was hooked. By 18, he was fluent on drums, bass, piano, and guitar.

Though he played in rock bands and jazz combos in high school, it was as a student at Pitzer College in Claremont, California that Bill began his work in earnest. Whether playing in his own blues or rock groups, backing jazz singers, or collaborating with like-minded musicians, Bill expanded his musical vocabulary with each partnership. All the while, Bill was writing and recording music, sharpening his skills and creating demos for bands.

After releasing one CD, 1995’s In the Choir of Primates, with the short-lived and much-loved House Carpenters, Bill began his solo career in 1997. Armed with a large back-catalog of recordings and an expanding repertoire of new songs, he released a four solo albums between 1997 and 1999 on his own label, General Ludd Music, each lovingly hand-packaged in ziploc bags with photocopied artwork. Taken as a group, these discs brought Bill’s craft to new heights. The results began, more so than ever before in his career, to attract the attention of musicians, growing audiences, and a small coterie of journalists.

2002 saw the release of Seventeen Miles Past Indio, a collection of 12 songs drawn mainly from Bill's prior releases. This paved the way for 2004's Chevy w/Balding Tires, a series of 10 songs, each taking place in Bill's then-hometown of Riverside, CA. The album, by intent, crystallizes the various techniques, musical and lyrical, that Bill had developed over fifteen years of songwriting. Poison Against Poison: Recordings 1990-2003, a massive, 3-CD retrospective of his work, excepting Chevy, followed in mid-2005.

Newly-relocated to San Francisco following an 8-month stint living in Dakar, Senegal, Bill began a writing spree in April 2007 the likes of which he hasn’t had in years. To begin with, Bill released the seven-song mini-album Begging Bowl, a little gem of typically melodic, lyrically penetrating Bill Foreman music, in July 2007. Writing for his next full album should be complete by the end of 2007, to be recorded in released in 2008.

Contact: Bill Foreman
Tel.. 415/264-7771
Cell Phone: 415/264-7771
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