Jeffrey Foucault – Blood Brothers
Blueblade Records – 27 March 2020
Around two years ago, this site posted about the Pledge Music pre-order campaign for Jeffrey Foucault’s forthcoming new album, noting that it was due out in June. Since then, nothing. The reason for this being that, while it duly appeared as scheduled in America, it never had a European release. Until now. So, somewhat belatedly, here he is, sat behind the wheel of his truck on the cover while, within, variously joined by such names as pedal steel player Eric Haywood, Kris Delmhorst, Pieta Brown, Tift Merritt and Kenneth Pattengale from Milk Carton Kids, the music retreats from the blues landscape of Salt as Wolves back into his earlier, folksier realms.
Both musically and lyrically, appropriately featuring wife Delmhorst, there’s an air of relaxed domestic contentment in the opening track, Dishes, opening with the lines “Do the dishes/With the windows open/Soak the dirt from under your nails/Pour a double/Put a record on the table” and conjuring a tranquil spirituality as it proceeds.
By musical contrast, War On The Radio is a far more strident full band number with its ringing guitars and steady drumbeat, its deceptive opening call to “lie back and close your eyes” giving way to a state of the nation commentary where “there are so many things to buy/Desolation chief among them” and a condemnation of greed and administration that’s seen “the sun going down/On everything we’ve ever known”. However, while simply strummed Merritt duet Blown finds him “a stranger now” from where he came, the prevailing mood is one of acceptance of a life of “cut with wonder/Cut with pain and love”. The title track, co-written with drummer, Billy Conway and featuring Brown on harmonies, has an air of a slow Bruce Cockburn ballad as it reflects on loves and friendships past (“how could I know//That I would live through/My life haunted by/Your sad smile”) while, pedal steel and brushed drums setting the tone, the second Conway collaboration, the relaxed twilight dream state feel of Little Warble, is also about an old flame, of remembering it sparking and growing but then falling apart (“All the words I could give you/Could never meet your price”), looked back on as a faint echo, some twenty years later now “doing the dishes with my little girl”.
Turning to his father, Cheap Suit sketches a tender, Springsteen-spare affectionate and tellingly detailed portrait that ranks up there with such raw emotion soaked father-son memories as My Father’s House and Michael McDermott’s Shadow In The Window.
Riding a warm, rippling, steel and dobro-soaked melody Rio is, no more, no less, a simple love song about driving across the desert with your lover by your side, keeping it romantic and taking the pace up for the shuffling rhythm and chiming guitar note cascades of I Know You, a reverie of lasting love and of wanting every morning to be like the first time.
Dying Just A Little widens the lens somewhat for an impression of a family – or more particularly maternal, life (“you hear all their confessions/You tell them what to do”) with a smalltown America backdrop struggling with both the passing seasons and the corporates “every time they try to kill/Your little town”. Ultimately though, it’s a song of survival, of keeping the heart from freezing, of a “kind-hearted woman/Just trying to stay alive”.
It ends pretty much back where it began, Pattengale on the circling fingerpicked acoustic guitar for Pretty Hands, another love song for his wife with dirty nails and wedding band and a heart like a city while his is a small town where “most of the best parts are hard to find”.
It’s taken a while to make its way over to these shores, but now that it has you should welcome it with open arms.
https://youtu.be/_XAttAP5Ucs