EUROPE – In the first week of November I'll join my old friend Gregory Alan Isakov on the first leg of his fall 2022 European tour, opening for his band at Le Trabendo in Paris, France (11/2), Het Depot in Leuven, Belgium (11/3), Tivolivredenburg in Utrecht, Netherlands (11/4 SOLD OUT) – then performing my own set at Take Root Festival in Groningen, Netherlands (11/5) – and at Die Kantine in Köln, Germany (11/6) (full details at the TOUR page). I’m looking forward to catching up with GAI, getting to hear him again, and covering some ground in countries I've missed.
UNITED KINGDOM – I'll spend the balance of November headlining my own tour in the United Kingdom, joined by my longtime accomplice, the undisputed champion of the crying table, Mr. Eric Heywood, on pedal steel and electric guitar. Blueblade recording artist and bon vivant Dietrich Strause opens the first two-thirds of the trip supporting his great new record, You and I Must Be Out of My Mind. These are going to be great shows, and you should buy tickets now.
MIDWEST – In December I will achieve tax-deductible status for Wisconsin Family Christmas by playing two shows, the first at SPACE in Evanston, IL (12/7), and the second at The Back Room @ Collectivo in Milwaukee, WI (12/8). Minnesota's Erik Koskinen, a bad man who wears his sunglasses on the hotel gym treadmill, will open both shows, and join me on electric guitar. If you don't know his work, you should. If you are a millennial, terrified of conviction and obsessed with reverb, you should pay real close attention.
THE RIVER YOU TOUCH – I spent a month of summer forenoons locked in a little semi-finished barn recording the audiobook of my friend Chris Dombrowski's new offering, The River You Touch, a masterful lyric memoir detailing the strict wonder, and occasional terror, of a life lived in direct relationship to the rivers and mountains of the Montana landscape that claims him, and which he and his family call home. The audiobook is available now on all platforms, so if you would like to hear me talk for nine hours straight you no longer need to join my band, you can simply download The River You Touch at Audible, or Audiobooks.com, or wherever, and then order your hardback copy right now. You should probably buy three more copies right away and hand them out at Christmas. That’s what I’m going to do. (There's also an excerpt available this week via Orion magazine, if you'd like to test-drive the prose, and you can hear the first five minutes of the audiobook, here)
FRIENDS – My old friend Peter Mulvey has a new album out called Love is the Only Thing – recorded at our old home bar, the Cafe Carpe, in Fort Atkinson, WI, the town where I lived at the turn of the century – and maybe you should go listen to it, and buy it, and then see him play live. The same goes for my friend Pieta Brown, who recently released an EP of collaborative instrumental compositions called The Less I Needed the Better I Felt, along with Don Was on bass, John Convertino on drums, and CARM on horns, under the moniker Sylvee and the Sea.
That about covers 2022. I've been home less than four aggregate weeks since the fourth of July, and getting back on the road has been an interesting cocktail to choke down, equal parts deep joy and real ambivalence. But I love to make music with my friends, and I'm lucky to do it.
Jeffrey Foucault