Horse Latitudes (2011)
PURCHASE
"I listened to this album for the first time while at home during a Brooklyn blizzard, and I wrote down that Jeffrey Foucault’s voice is like a snowstorm—soft and heavy, blanketing, pure. But I’ve listened to him on long sunny drives too, and I can tell you how well his songs mix with speed and heat. They fill every acre of a vast flat landscape.
Somehow Jeffrey brings us both the road and the home fire burning; triumph and hurt; memory and imagination; loneliness and crazy love. When songwriters are this good—that’s rare—we tend to call them poets and old souls. Sure, but there’s also a wild energy here. He can win you over with a grin, crack you open with his mind. Like all great writers, he gets inside and listens. You hear his appetite for people and places in the crackle of his songs.
I first met Jeffrey one September night in 2004 when he and Paul Curreri played the little basement stage at the old Knitting Factory in downtown Manhattan. I liked him right away. We were both in our twenties, both Midwesterners, both wandering around the country as much as we could. Back then it was especially cool to wear trucker hats. And I remember thinking that Jeffrey was the guy all those other guys wanted so badly to be: confident, masculine, rustic. He didn’t wear a hat, and he didn’t need to. He took out his guitar and told the truth for about an hour. It felt like looking out the window of a train.
Five albums later, and he still hits me in the chest. Each record has been a new amalgam of American styles and forms, yet unmistakably his. Horse Latitudes sounds like he’s rounding third and coming home. His songs have gotten simpler and truer. He’s in this for the long haul and I plan to ride along the whole way."
- Matt Dellinger (from the liner notes to HORSE LATITUDES)
The Horse Latitudes are the equatorial reaches where only ocean, sky, and desert obtain; where legend says becalmed Spanish sailors put their horses overboard as the cisterns ran dry. Places of element, and reckoning.
Cinematic in scope and movement, HORSE LATITUDES, the startling new album from Jeffrey Foucault, begins the place of reckoning, confronting the end of nature and the end of youth in a series of vivid dreams, unfolding characters from younger life and lovers lost or forgotten against dark fragments of modern time. A collision of rock, country, and folk idoms, HORSE LATITUDES alights with equal grace on full-band rockers and whispered solo pieces, delivering a collection of songs startling for their emotional breadth, and depth.
Recorded in three days in Los Angeles, HORSE LATITUDES features Eric Heywood (Pretenders, Ray Lamontagne) on pedal steel and electric guitars; Billy Conway (Morphine) on drums; Jennifer Condos (Don Henley, Sam Phillips) on electric bass, and Van Dyke Parks (Lowell George, Brian Wilson, Ry Cooder) on keys and accordion, with backing vocals and cello from Kris Delmhorst: a top-shelf ensemble that seamlessly merges the ferocity of rock and the honesty of country with the plaintive wonder in Foucault’s weathered voice.
PRAISE FOR HORSE LATITUDES
NEW YORKER MAGAZINE:
“Jeffrey Foucault’s latest album, “Horse Latitudes,” which is due out next month, is his first record of solely original songs in five years. Foucault’s voice, and his themes, are gruff, sombre, and deep, and his accompanying musicians, including the Pretenders’ Eric Heywood on pedal steel, create a sparse, dramatic soundscape.”
WASHINGTON POST:
"This is rock-and-roll in the key of country-noir: bleak visions of departed lovers, flickering TVs and empty landscapes underlined by pedal steel guitar and cello"
ROUGHSTOCK:
***** “Horse Latitudes is the kind of record that you listen to from start to finish and then sit there and marvel at how well the recording is put together… the songs are simply stunning in their breadth and lyrical scope”
THE TELEGRAPH (UK):
“HAUNTING AND POIGNANT TRIUMPH FROM AMERICAN SINGER **** Jeffrey Foucault is an original, beguiling songwriter with a marvelously expressive voice. He brings these talents together, along with fine guitar playing, to create a terrific album… John Updike once wrote of a character who was like an open window through which the rain poured. Foucault's album captures that poignancy.”
BEACONPASS:
"Praised for its tendency to combine raw, weathered emotion with measured elegance, Foucault’s music feels unadulterated and innate, with veins of pedal steel, the big-skied openness of Neil Young and the bizarre, haunting imagery that you might find in a Flannery O’Connor story.
Tracks
1. Horse Latitudes
2. Pretty Girl In A Small Town
3. Starlight And Static
4. Heart To The Husk
5. Last Night I Dreamed of Television
6. Goners Most
7. Everybody's Famous
8. Idaho
9. Passerines
10. Tea And Tobacco
Horse Latitudes
Drifting into horse latitudes
The Language of thirst
A false communion
The iron taste of blood
In your mouth
The wild blue
Dying into God's empty hands
Silver the silhouette
Of ashes on the land
The bleach white skulls
Of buffalo face the sun
The burning sand
Where the halogen halos
Shine on the refugees
Banded birds flying
Up above and endless sea
God is the mouth
Of a river going dry
God is a mouthful of rain
A tear in your eye
Singing into the belly of a whale
Leviathan's ribs
A drowning jail
The desert at the bottom
Of the sea
The Devil with his finger
On the scale
Pretty Girl In A Small Town
We used to walk to get away
There was nowhere you could stay
Safe your red ears fingers flushed
Lay them on the back of my neck
Tea with honey tell me who
Bent the branch inside of you?
A dark and silent waiting in your eyes
Promise me you'll never do it
Pretty girl in a small town
No one likes to see you down
Or hold your head too high
Or ever say goodbye
Once you've been the
Homecoming Queen
I used to wait to see your lights
Run my wall those late spring nights
When nothing else was real as trying
To keep your heart above high water
Starlight And Static
I saw you up there
Like a city in the footlights
Shining in the darkness
I couldn't see your eyes
They all thought they knew you
But nobody knew you
And I wanted no one
To know me too
I saw you out there
In the starlight and static
Singing like the spark
On a mile of coiled wire
But you looked so lonely
Like no one was ever lonely
And I wanted to be
Lonely too
I remember once you told me
You had a dream
A crowded street
You saw the ghost of James Dean
But no one could see him
No one could see him
And he cried in his love
I saw you standing
Up against a building
Smoking like a river
In the dark before the dawn
And I asked you for nothing
And you became nothing
You were just a ghost
And then the ghost was gone
Heart To The Husk
Please burn my letters
Let them writhe
The love and the lack
Let the blue meet the black
Let my words become fire
I burned your letters
Cold or kind
By a river at dusk
From the heart to the husk
Every word became fire
We dream our love
For a while
Into flesh out of dust
The rage and the rust
All gone as it came
Please tell me something
I want to know
Where does love go?
Last Night I Dreamed of Television
Last night I dreamed of television
And the stars fell down on me
In an avalanche of static singing
Darker than the sea
The great machines were dying
The slavers rust away
Last night I dreamed of television
And I wept for break of day
Last night I drank the breath of horses
Falling underneath the waves
Of an empty AM ocean singing
Silent as the grave
The moon was cold as cathode light
Rising up above the plain
Last night I dreamed of television
And my tears fell down like rain
Crying
Crying
Crying
Last night I felt like I was dying
And dying felt the same
As silver clouds of ether singing
Wild through my brain
The natural numbers burning tires
The wildness that we made
Last night I dreamed of television
And it felt like nothing
Goners Most
Peeled out in the falling dark
Hard as flint and like to spark
The saddest sinner seventeen
Windows down and like to drown
Drowners most who love to dream
So laugh it up and lay it by
Nothing else but saying goodbye
For ashes ashes for dust dust
Full of love and so far gone
Goners most who love to much
Tea with honey tell me who
Bent the branch inside of you
Dark eyed things you never told
You have to be that young
To feel that old
Wondering if you'd come around
Making love with the volume down
In the blue light falling from an LED
Love and lovers move so strange
Strangers most would never be
Everybody's Famous
Everybody's famous
Everybody's free
Everybody's broken heart
Is shining like a new TV
On the walls of a dark room
Where the world used to be
Everybody's famous
Everybody's free
There's a fire in the windrows
There's a wolf out in the corn
There's a wildness waiting
For the moment to be reborn
And there's something down inside you
Feels like it's being torn
Everybody's famous
Everything is gone
If your tongue is sleeping
Curled inside your head
Like a lion or a serpent
You might as well be dead
And if your heart is beating
Sealed inside your ribs
Upon that dark electric
The only love that lives
Everybody knows you
They saw your billboard in the rain
They heard your Mama crying
When you forgot your own real name
And she voted for your heartbreak
And she smiled at your shame
Everybody's famous
Everyone's the same
Everybody's famous
Everybody's free
The kingdom of heaven
Is inside of me
But I want to shoot the lights out
I know there's something left to be
Everybody's famous
Everybody's free
Idaho
I know it isn't Idaho
Where the sun goes when it goes
Down over the river
Strange birds on the fence line
It's going to get cold tonight
I know it isn't Idaho
How many shades of blue
Are dying from me to you?
Are the stars only soldered to the sky
Salt tears gone white and dry?
Who could leave it all behind
Metal flesh bone and brine?
I know it isn't Idaho
Horses heart blood and wine
That's the color of the sun when it's dying
Down over the river
Down over the river
Passerines
Everyone knows
No one knows
A Winter night
A hundred crows
Flying down the valley
Everyone dreams
No one dreams
The ghosts of wolves
And passerines
Crying down the valley
Crying down the valley
Everything dies
Nothing dies
The incorruptible dream
Behind your eyes
Crying down the valley
Crying down the valley
Tea and Tobacco
Tea and tobacco
Whiskey from a tin cup
When I had one good coat
I was warm
Rain on the sidewalk
Neon winking out
I get farther from home
All the time
Worn out and wondering
Traveling unraveling
Wearing out my heart
In little towns
Tea and Tobacco
Whiskey from a tin cup
When I had one good coat
I was warm