New album THE UNIVERSAL FIRE (Fluff & Gravy Records)

Hi-Res Album Cover — HI RES ALBUM COVER (click for download)

ABOUT 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.

On September 6th of 2024 Jeffrey Foucault released THE UNIVERSAL FIRE (Fluff & Gravy), 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 all-star band with members of Calexico and Bon Iver (drummer John Convertino and producer/saxophonist Mike Lewis) 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.

In His Own Words

“I grew up in Wisconsin, and my Dad wore a tie to work and played a knock-off Gibson with a chunk of the headstock missing where he’d backed over it with the car. Mom sang along. I knew all my Grandparents well into my thirties, and I knew both my Great Grandmas. Winter Sundays were for church or ice-fishing, and summers we hauled an old travel trailer up to the north woods. School was a drag, and I drew a lot of pictures. When I was eleven I bought a cassette copy of Little Richard’s Greatest Hits. At seventeen I learned to play all the songs on John Prine’s 1971 debut in my room with the door locked and subway posters of British New Wave bands looking morbidly on. At nineteen I stole a copy of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Live & Obscure,’ and listened to it every night for a couple years. Then a girl from Iowa gave me a Greg Brown cassette. At twenty-four I made a record and start traveling around the country. I have two older brothers. They don’t sing but they both fish.

I live out in New England, in a little town with a river through the middle. I can’t get home without crossing good water. We have a chicken coop and a little barn and a truck that often runs. I like to listen to records real loud when I do the dishes, and I do most of the dishes.”

FULL DISCOGRAPHY

The Universal Fire (2024)
Deadstock: Uncollected Recordings 2005-2020 (2020)
Blood Brothers (2018)
Horse Latitudes: Solo/Acoustic Demos (2018)
Jeffrey Foucault Live in Portland (2018)
Salt as Wolves (2015)
Cold Satellite: Cavalcade (2013)
Horse Latitudes (2011)
Cold Satellite {Collaboration with Poet Lisa Olstein} (2010)
Seven Curses {With Mark Erelli} (2010)
Redbird: Live at the Café Carpe (2010)
Shoot the Moon Right Between the Eyes: Jeffrey Foucault Sings the Songs of John Prine (2009)
Ghost Repeater (2006)
Stripping Cane (2004)
Redbird {With Kris Delmhorst and Peter Mulvey} (2003)
Miles From the Lightning (2001)

THE NEW YORK TIMES:
“Contemporary and timeless”

THE NEW YORKER:
“Jeffrey Foucault sings stark, literate songs that are as wide open as the landscape of his native Midwest”

MOJO:
“Songwriting brilliance”

THE IRISH TIMES:
“Quietly brilliant”

UNCUT:
“The music of Wisconsin native Foucault is the kind so many aspire to but never attain: beat-up troubadour folk whittled to dolorous perfection”

CHICAGO SUN TIMES:
“...Densely layered tales of longing and loss, beauty and simple pleasures.”

MORNING EDITION (NPR):
“Pure songwriter”