Cold Satellite (2011)

PURCHASE

COLD SATELLITE is the first of two full band recordings centered on the collaboration between Jeffrey Foucault and contemporary American poet Lisa Olstein (author of the collections Radio Crackling Radio Gone, Lost Alphabet, Little Stranger, and Late Empire, published by Copper Canyon Press), setting her language against his music to find a new, unanticipated emotional resonance.

Rising stars in their respective fields and longtime friends, Foucault and Olstein began their collaboration at a distance, with Foucault coming cold to the poems and lyric fragments, creating songs by elision and arrangement, relying on his immediate impressions to inform the music, and leaving the listener to unify the intentions of the two writers in a single experience (an idea referenced in the superimposed triangles of Renee Fernandez's delightful album cover). The result is an expansion of the notion of authorship, and an experiment in the invention of meaning.

Pairing Olstein's visceral language with the rawboned authority of a rock 'n' roll band, Cold Satellite's stripped down, dynamic sound hearkens back to records by Crazy Horse and the Faces: menacing electric guitar countervailed by delicate lines of pedal steel in short sketches and extended improvisations, Santo & Johnny-style ballads, Appalachian folk, even R&B. Featuring a lineup that includes Billy Conway (Morphine) on drums; Jeremy Moses Curtis (Booker T) on bass; David Goodrich (Chris Smither) on electric guitars; and Nashville's Alex Mccollough on pedal steel, COLD SATELLITE weaves together strands of primitive rock, blues, R&B and Country.

PRAISE FOR COLD SATELLITE

GREIL MARCUS: 

"...a drawl that sometimes grows a tail so long it curls around itself, with a country feel that puts the people who live in the Nashville charts to shame. Then a deep-ditch electric guitar takes a country song into the blues, and lets it go back where it came from. Nothing is pressed, to the point that sometimes the way the voice pulls away from a word or a guitar from a phrase is its own kind of preciousness—but not in “Twice I Left Her,” which shifts the music into a more resolute kind of quiet, a bigger emptiness in a single room. An acoustic guitar figure comes up against drums buried far away, like a memory. The story creeps out, and stops well short of its end, though you can glimpse it. Foucault drifts over the words so lightly that they seem to fade as they’re sung, and you might stop trying to hear them as words, let them come as sounds"

VINTAGE GUITAR: 

"Beautiful and often chilling...  a powerful piece of work"

THE TELEGRAPH (UK): 

**** "A powerful mix of rock, folk, and country..."

AL KOOPER: 

"...a lot cheaper than a Stones ticket and muuuuuuch younger"

ACOUSTIC GUITAR MAGAZINE: 

"12 sinewy tracks that often echo the brooding eloquence of Foucault’s earlier work, but nearly as often stretch in previously untraveled directions as the songwriter approaches his craft from a new angle and broadens his melodic palette in the process..."

Tracks

1.  Deserter's Information Center
2.  Cold Satellite
3.  Nothing I Wouldn’t Do Except Stay
4.  Voices Talking
5.  Geese Fly By
6.  Twice I Left Her
7.  Standing Ovation
8.  Call Off The Dogs
9.  Late Season (Reprise)
10.  There I Go
11.  Late Season
12.  In Our Own Country

Deserter’s Information Center

The flags on main street say
You are one
Are you one of us?

They hang in the exhaled air
Of three thousand people sleeping
Breathing deep with their eyes going round

Coding messages
Shedding messages
The night before a parade

Coyotes are lying down
In their dens
In their dens asleep

The half of each bird’s brain
That sleeps remains asleep
The corn repeats

Are you coding messages
Are you burning messages
Tonight before a parade

The ghost inside the hall
Moves from door to door
Once again waiting once again come

There’s no more movies hung
On a sheet in the park
In the school parking lot until next year

Your children will become strangers to you
They will love a picture of you
More than you every time you speak
 

Cold Satellite

In the second chamber
Of my fourth heart
Down to the left
Of the third valve
Is the room I keep for you
For me just to think of you
You are nowhere now
To be found

It’s where I find you
Drowsy half asleep half clothed
With your eyes half closed
And the lace on the curtains
But you say let me out
You say this is no room at all
Why don’t you pour me a fucking drink
You say or draw me a map
But all I can hear is the beating

Of a room that I keep for you
For me just to think of you
For you are nowhere now
To be found

A satellite passes
Every three hours
And thirty-three minutes
Through our night blackened sky
And it sees the world in a ribbon’s width
Blindly with steel eyes
And waves that read the air
Write the air we can’t read

In the second chamber
Of my fourth heart
Down to the left of the third valve
Is a room that I keep for you
For me to think of you
You are nowhere now
To be found
You are nowhere
You are nowhere
You are nowhere now
To be found
 

Nothing I Wouldn’t Do (Except Stay)

I’d run into a burning building
I’d swim out to a ship that’s sinking
There’s nothing I wouldn’t do except stay

I’d tear the mare from her yearling
Steal shelter from the freezing
There’s nothing I wouldn’t do except stay

There’s land I love
Certain waters of blue
There’s nowhere I wouldn’t leave for you

I’d turn toward guns blazing
Use my mouth to stop the bleeding
There’s nothing I wouldn’t do except stay
Except be here every day

There’s things I choose to stand for
But they’re only one or two
There’s no belief I wouldn’t cast aside for you

I’d run into a burning building
I’d swim out to a ship that’s sinking
There’s nothing I wouldn’t do except stay

There’s nothing I wouldn’t do except stay
There’s nothing
 

Voices Talking

Is it dark in there
Dark as any night
Do you fumble baby
Reaching for the light

Do you miss me baby
Are you so alone
Sitting in your kitchen
You don't notice that I'm gone

refrain:
Are there voices talking
Are they saying yes or no
Can you hear them baby
Do they tell you
Do they tell you where to go

Is your sorrow bare
Naked in the night
Where’s your makeup baby
To keep the scars out of sight

I can't see you baby
You’re slipping from the screen
I'm out here shadow boxing
Just like I've always been

(refrain) 

Do you remember baby
How it used to be
In scene after scene
When you held on to me

(refrain)
 

Geese Fly By

Geese fly by honking overhead
Leaves pitch like kites across a green sky
A great river flows nearby
Geese fly by

There I am in my state in my town
There I am in my backyard
Spade patting ghost worms down
Back into their corridors new salted with bone

Here I go calling out your name
At three a.m. this first night of a hard frost
The two of us facing off
From opposite sides of the bed

Minerals seeping in seeping out
Every time we in- or exhale
No clouds only jet trails
Every time

Geese fly by honking overhead
Leaves pitch like kites across a green sky
A great river flows nearby
Geese fly by
Geese fly by
Geese fly by
 

Twice I Left Her

Twice I left her
Twice I walked away
For the third time
I was headed home today

Pine and winter loam
And snow drifts above me
Like some kind of currency
I can’t own

Somewhere in the night
She’s out there
I think I hear her praying
I want to tell her that I’m scared

I dream and wake and dream of her hand
And the dark keeps getting deeper
I’m a ship sailing further
From dry land

Last I knew I was a traveler
I was winding my way back home
Somewhere my plan unraveled
I was winding my way back home

There’s some force
And I don’t know its name
It’s tearing at me sharp as love
And still I feel no pain

Her lips are moving
But I can’t hear her words
I can see my baby praying
In that darkness beautiful and blurred

Twice I left her
Twice I walked away
For the third time I was headed home today
For the third time I was headed home
 

Standing Ovation

All the households in this world
Are in some way like this
Each its own standing ovation

Of all of our heroic goodbyes
This will be the last
Of all of our self-proclaimed tragedies
They are not what fails us now

I wish you whatever you wish
You tell me again and again
Then cup my face in your hands
And come with me come with me

Come with me and we’ll go
To burkina faso
Or somewhere where just now
A revolution or a coup

Somewhere where we could not stay
Come with me
 

Call Off The Dogs

Day to day
I grow quiet
You grow strange
Day to day
We make our choices
And choose again
While the world
Hangs upside down
Yeah we’re hanging upside down

Day to day
You train your eyes
On the waves
Day to day
You look for
Every clue I gave
But these ships
They never sail
Well honey our ship never sailed

(ref):
Call off the dogs
Fly the white flag from your shore
I’m just looking for my opening
I’m not keeping score
Day to day

Day to day
We hang these portraits
On our walls
And to day
We scan their faces
Listen for their calls
But they don’t tell us who we are
They don’t tell us anything
Anything at all

(ref) 

Day to day
I grow quiet
You grow strange
Day to day
Well I grow quiet
You grow strange
Day to day
I grow quiet
You grow strange
Day to day
 

There I Go

There I go again
Forget reason forget fear
Pretend everything stays the same
There I go again

There is nothing you could do
I’d be afraid to know
It’s the things we do to ourselves
Makes us pack our bags and go

Listen to the wind
How it stomps and neighs
Clouds are gathering in like a herd
They rear and sway on the horizon

I was meant for better than this
You might not see it in me
But I promise i can do
Better than this
Better than this
Better than this
Better
 

Late Season

Barns are full up with bounty
The slews and the silos are full
I thought I was ready
Thought I was prepared to go

Pears and peaches in August
Turn to apples in fall
Soon the hands that pick them
Will be gone

Late in the season
We all get thirsty for the sun
We sit there sweating feel it waning
Already feel the cold that’s to come

Peaches turn to apples
The pickers travel on
Town empties out no one’s sorry
No one even knows that they’re gone

And the nights get colder
The ballgame’s off the air
I might tell you to leave but when you’re gone
I’ll wish you were still here

Around every traffic light there’s a halo
The night is as sweet as candy
It carries its stars slung low
Nothing’s like we thought it would be

You can drive to the end of river road
There’s nothing out ther but an old army base
A couple of missle silos
You can feel the moon on your face

When there’s no wind you can hear
The wires sing
The first time you might get frightened
It doesn’t sound like anything
 

In Our Own Country

Once we were happy
In our own country
As seen from above
And not even very far
This would all be a blur
Just a storm hidden state
On a weather man’s
Map of the world

Down here though
Everything peaks through
A little drunk maybe
The trees slurring their lines
The houses look pretty
The bison in the field
By the highway don’t know
They are symbols

They are animals
Out in a pen
Gathering snow
Their wooly heads
Bent down to frozen ground
Behind them the rooftops of town
Look peaceful
You close your eyes

Once we were happy
In our own country
As seen from above
And not even very far
This would all be a blur
Just a storm hidden state
On a weather man’s
Map of the world