Jeffrey Foucault – new album

Jeffrey Foucault

Blood Brothers, the much-anticipated follow-up to the critically acclaimed 2015 album Salt As Wolves by  Jeffrey Foucault is a collection of reveries, interlacing memory with the present tense to examine the indelible connections of love across time and distance.

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, a decidedly Midwestern amalgam of blues, country, rock’n’roll, and folk. He’s built a brick-and-mortar international touring career on multiple studio albums, countless miles, and general critical acclaim, being lauded for “Stark, literate songs that are as wide open as the landscape of his native Midwest” (The New Yorker), and described as “Quietly brilliant” (The Irish Times), while catching the ear of everyone from Van Dyke Parks to Greil Marcus, to Don Henley, who regularly covers Foucault in his live set. Blood Brothers is the sixth collection of original songs in a career remarkable for an unrelenting dedication to craft, and independence from trend.

Jeffrey Foucault was 17 when he learned to play all the songs on John Prine’s eponymous debut on his father’s mail-order guitar, spending long evenings in his bedroom spinning piles of old records on a hand-me-down turntable, lifting the needle to transcribe every line of ‘Desolation Row’. At 19 he stole a copy of Townes Van Zandt: Live And Obscure from a friend, and a few years later, having quit school to work as a farm-hand and carpenter Foucault began writing the songs that became his first album (2001’s Miles From the Lightning). Since then he’s been everything from solo country-blues troubadour to frontman for a six-piece rock ‘n’ roll band, along the way compiling a discography notable for its visceral power and complex poetics. Yet it wasn’t until he paired with drummer Billy Conway (Morphine) that the final piece fell into place and Foucault found the Luther Perkins to his Johnny Cash, the truly sympathetic collaborator to frame and fire his terse brand of Americana.

Since 2013 Foucault and Conway have toured across the United States and overseas together, refining a primal, stripped-down stage show: two men, two chairs; a beat-up Gibson J-45 and an electric guitar tuned low and played through a 5-watt amp; a suitcase kick drum, a low-boy cymbal, a snare drum. The pair plays only what they can carry into the club alone in one trip, covering all the territory from blues and country, to rock ‘n’ roll and folk with a laconic ferocity and timeless cool. Their dynamic partnership – as nimble as it is sonically powerful – is the bedrock on which Blood Brothers builds its nuanced and poignant lament.

Artist’s website: https://jeffreyfoucault.com/

‘Blood Brothers’ – the single:


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