Jeffrey Foucault Releases Title Track To New Album, Due Out June 22
New York, NY (April 18, 2018) – Following the austere electricity of the critically acclaimed 2015 album, Salt As Wolves (“A country plea, a blues reach for facts beyond sound… scary in the bend of the first note” – Greil Marcus), Jeffrey Foucault delivers Blood Brothers, a collection of reveries, interlacing memory with the present tense to examine the indelible connections of love across time and distance. The title track is an aching ballad of lost love, written with drummer Billy Conway and embroidered with the impossibly soft and near-transparent lilt of Iowa’s Pieta Brown. Blood Brothers is out June 22 via Blueblade Records and available for pre-order, along with other exclusive items, at PledgeMusic.
A departure from the darkness of his last outing, Blood Brothers sets blues aside to pull together strands of country, R&B, gospel, rock’n’roll, and folk in a series of delicate small-canvas portraits. There’s a touch more light coming through the window, a certain gentleness in play, with layers of backing vocals sung by women – including Foucault’s wife Kris Delmhorst, as well as the various partners of the band – adding hue and shade.
Cut live to tape in three days at Pachyderm Studios in rural Minnesota, Blood Brothers reconvenes Salt As Wolves’s all-star ensemble: Foucault’s longtime tour partner Billy Conway (Morphine) on drums, Bo Ramsey (Lucinda Williams) on electric guitars, and Jeremy Moses Curtis (Booker T) on bass, joined this time by pedal steel great Eric Heywood (Pretenders) to unite in the studio both iterations of the band with which Foucault has toured and recorded for over a decade. Charting a vision of American music without cheap imitation or self-conscious irony, the ensemble deploys an instinctive restraint and use of negative space, an economy of phrase and raw simplicity that complement perfectly Foucault’s elegant lines and weather-beaten drawl.
As noise and politics, fashion and illusion obtrude on all fronts, Blood Brothers is a deep breath and a step inward, with tenderness and human concern, paying constant attention to the places where the mundane and the holy merge like water. In language pared to element, backed by his world-class band, Foucault considers the nature of love and time in ten songs free of ornament, staking out and enlarging the ground he’s been working diligently all the new century: quietly building a deep, resonant catalogue of songs about about love, memory, God, desire, wilderness, and loss.
Jeffrey Foucault Tour Dates
Apr 26 – Nashville, TN – City Winery Nashville
Apr 27 – Decatur, GA – Eddie’s Attic
Apr 29 – Wilkesboro, NC – Merlefest
May 04 – Brattleboro, VT – The Stone Church
May 05 – Portsmouth, RI – Common Fence Music
May 09 – Seward, AK – Zudy’s Café
May 10 – Palmer, AK – Vagabond Blues
May 11 – Eagle River, AK – Jitters
May 12 – Anchorage, AK – Church of Love
May 16 – Austin, TX – The Backstage At El Mercardo
May 17 – Houston, TX – Mcgonigel’s Mucky Duck
May 18 – Mckinney, TX – The Sanctuary Music & Events Center
May 19 – Comfort, TX – Comfort Concerts
Jun 13 – Spring Green, WI – The Shitty Barn Sessions
Jun 15 – Iowa City, IA – The Mill
Jun 16 – Milwaukee, WI – Live at the Backroom at Colectivo
Jun 17 – Chicago, IL – City Winery Chicago
Jun 21 – Minneapolis, MN – Dakota Jazz Club
Jun 22 – Des Moines, IA – Des Moines Arts Festival
