JEFFREY FOUCAULT

In two decades on the road, Jeffrey Foucault has become one of the most distinctive voices in American music, refining a sound instantly recognizable for its simplicity and emotional power. With a string of critically acclaimed studio albums – “Stark, literate songs that are as wide open as the landscape of his native Midwest” (The New Yorker), “Beat-up troubadour folk whittled to dolorous perfection” (Uncut), “Songwriting Brilliance,” (Irish Times) – he’s built a brick-and-mortar international touring career and a devoted following, one that includes luminaries like Van Dyke Parks, Greil Marcus, and Don Henley.

In September 2024, Foucault released THE UNIVERSAL FIRE, his first album of entirely new material since 2018. A series of high-voltage performances cut live in one room, the album is both a working wake – Foucault lost his best friend and drummer Billy Conway, to cancer in 2021 – and a meditation on the nature of beauty, artifact, and loss. Augmenting Foucault’s band with members of Calexico and Bon Iver,  THE UNIVERSAL FIRE sets Conway’s death against the massive 2008 fire at the Universal Studios lot in California that destroyed the master recordings of some of our bedrock American music, to interrogate ideas about mortality, legacy, meaning, and calling. Foucault will be showcasing many of the songs on the new record, as well as songs stretching back decades.

NOTES FROM JEFFREY: In college I took a course with Paul Boyer, History of American Thought, 1859-Present. Why 1859? That’s when Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which I had read in high school to impress a girl, though it was like eating sawdust, and the girl in question never knew I read it. I’m not sure what this says about either fitness or selection. I digress. The point here is that I sat in the back of the lecture hall every day with a long-haired stoner kid, and before class we would talk about music. He had interesting taste, which radiated outward in concentric circles from the Grateful Dead. One day he said that Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark were coming to town to play the East End, and he would go. Tickets were twelve dollars. I didn’t go, because I was broke. That was April, 1996, and Van Zandt died the next New Year’s Day.

A decade later I got to open for Guy Clark, and would see him here and there at festivals, looming, owlish, taller and more gaunt every time, smart as hell, and funny. But I missed my chance to see Townes. My friend said I didn’t miss much. Apparently Townes fell backward off of his stool. With a few pleasant exceptions, you don’t want to meet your heroes.

I cut my teeth on my parents’ record collection when I was eleven or twelve, on a hand-me-down Sears turntable with a built-in cassette deck. I’d go down to the basement and grab anything that looked interesting, and those records would lead me to others. I went from Twist with Chubby Checker  to Highway 61 Revisited by the time I was fourteen.

At 17 I heard John Prine. At eighteen I heard Townes. At twenty I dropped out of college and got a job on a fruit farm, and started writing songs, or what resembled songs, and for a while devoured the Texas folk and blues of Townes and Guy, Willie Nelson, Willis Alan Ramsey, Lyle Lovett, The Flatlanders, as it were literature. I bought a used cassette copy of Ain’t Living Long Like This by Rodney Crowell in the little record store in my old hometown, and I wore it out, driving the twenty miles to and from my job at the farm.

Last month I was standing in the kitchen doing the dishes when I got a text from that same Rodney Crowell. A mutual friend had sent him my new record, and he’d liked it, and she put us in touch. I knew he was coming to play nearby, so I’d told him I’d come down to catch the show. Now he was writing to say, “Don’t be surprised if I call you up on stage tonight.” I assumed he was messing with me, because we’d never met. As someone who likes to mess with people, I admired this impulse. But then a few hours laters as I stood in the back with a beer, humming along to Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight and Until I Gain Control Again, Rodney called me up on stage and handed me his guitar, and asked me to play a song. It was a strange, gracious thing. The sort of thing you think might happen when you’re twenty, and wish would happen, and if it did happen would consider evidence of your inevitable, incipient fame, and you would be wrong. At forty-eight it was another feeling.

I was a little beat up from the road and the album release, my mind what Billy liked to call ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag. I was tired of thinking about flights, van rentals, hotel rooms, and how it all works, or frequently doesn’t, trying to keep a band on the road. My ambivalence about the business part of show business had got the better of me for some days in row. But then Rodney called me up to sing and I thought, well, hell, my life makes some kind of sense.

I got down from the stage and went back to leaning against a pole in the back of the club, and a little old lady came up to me, and took both my hands in hers, and with her eyes wide, in the voice one uses with a small child or a foreigner, she said, brightly, “YOU… need to make a CD!” I told her I’d get right on it.

$29 advance / $35 door / GA / doors 7PM / performance 7:30 / no opener

Jeffrey will also play a Santa Fe show on 2/6 – INFO HERE