by Whitney Youngs
New England settlers, most likely descendants of English Puritans, founded Whitewater, Wisconsin, a small town situated between Madison and Milwaukee, where singer and guitarist Jeffrey Foucault was raised in a Christian evangelical house.
Foucault eventually made his way to the East Coast, where he has lived for more than 10 years, and despite his worldly exposure to myriad people and places as a touring musician, Foucault remains quintessentially Midwestern in the ways of language, sensibilities and culture. He possesses archetypal Midwestern personality traits associated with the virtues of courtesy, friendliness and self-effacement, yet he’s also an unaffected throwback to southern country and blues musicians.
Foucault completed his first album, “Miles From the Lightning” in 2001, and since then, he’s recorded albums, ranging from an acoustic collection of murder ballads (“Seven Curses”) to two recordings as a frontman for a six-piece rock ‘n’ roll group to two collaborations with poet, Lisa Olstein. His latest, “Salt as Wolves,” is a dark, intense and stark blues album with smatterings of rock, country and folk. The record’s understated lyrics, imbued with precise imagery (sunset buildings/cut with shade; and now shepherd/of cigarettes and gasoline), evoke notions of loss, God, relocation, death and love. The Easy Reader recently chatted with Foucault, who’s playing at Hotel Café May 10, about his album and life on the road.
WHEN MAKING THIS RECORD DID YOU SET OUT TO CREATE A MULTI-GENRE ALBUM?
Yes and no. I know that everything I do comes out of those places [blues, rock, country and folk], especially country and blues, but not the derivative forms of those genres. The blues is mostly early country up to the guys that started to plug in. And the same deal with country music. For me, country stopped being country sometime in the ‘80s. I was trying to come up with a unified field theory of music by bringing every element of what I do to both my stage shows and the record.
YOUR DRUMMER, BILLY CONWAY [MORPHINE], HAS A SUITCASE FOR A BASS DRUM.
That’s an old trick. We always make all kind of jokes about how you need a specific suitcase to get a certain tone, but it just goes whoomp. There’s not a whole lot going on there, but it makes him mobile. We try to only play what we can carry into the club in one trip, which is a good rule because it makes us improvise. He’s got a really versatile kit: he’s playing a snare drum with a conga head, so he can get all kinds of interesting tones, and instead of a hi-hat, he has a low-boy from the 1930s. Billy is a musical of enough drummer that you could give him all the pots and pans in your kitchen and he would out class just about nine out of 10 drummers I’ve played with.
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR MUSICAL CONNECTION WITH BILLY?
Once Billy and I got together, I suddenly had the ability to do all of these things that I’d always wanted to do. By taking my electric guitar on the road (and a totally righteous amp from the ‘60s), we can cover so much territory. We are interested in the same music and we hear the beat in the same place.
THE TITLE OF YOUR ALBUM IS TAKEN FROM SHAKESPEARE’S ‘OTHELLO,’ NEAR THE LINES: ‘PRIME AS GOATS, AS HOT AS MONKEYS.’
It really had nothing to do with Shakespeare. I was reading a book by Barry Lopez [“Of Wolves and Men”]. It makes reference to wolves in western literature. I read that phrase and loved the music of it. For my money, I enjoy titles that pose more questions than answers; it leaves you with certain wonderment and I like that.
AND IT SOUNDS BETTER THAN ‘PRIME AS GOATS, AS HOT AS MONKEYS.’
[Laughs] That’s actually going to be the title of the EP.
MANY OF YOUR SONGS HAVE A DARK INTENSITY TO THEM. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOUR VOICE AND THE GUITAR?
I guess I don’t think about it too much. I was a frustrated guitar player, I think, for a long time because I didn’t learn to play until I was 17 and I didn’t write my first song until I was 19. I probably had two records out and I’d been on the road for four or five years before I got anywhere near the number of hours as a guitar player that I needed to even approach mastery. I wouldn’t say I have achieved mastery of the instrument, certainly, but I have definitely got mastery of the instrument for what it is that I do. For me, it’s a constant learning process, and I’m a much better guitar player than I was five years ago, even two years ago. I do what I know how to do when I am on the road, but when I am at home, I do what I don’t know how to do. At home, I’ve been playing a lot of bottleneck slide guitar on a steel guitar in an open D tuning. I’m really trying to learn the ins and outs of that tuning and the various ways you can approach playing the slide. Learning how to sing and play guitar, that’s a long road for me, an ongoing process, but when I go out on stage I don’t feel like there is any consciousness to it at all, thankfully. The songs pretty much take care of themselves, and on a good night, I enjoy improvising so I change how I sing and deliver them.
YOUR VOCAL PHRASING IS REMARKABLE. YOU CAN TURN ONE WORD LIKE ‘IT’ IN A BEAUTIFUL SPACED OUT PHRASE. WHO HAS INFLUENCED YOU?
I wanted nothing as much as to sound like John Prine when I was 17 or 18. I have always been a dedicated, possibly obsessive, listener. You steal tricks: you might steal timbre or the way your voice breaks on a certain line. You arm yourself to the teeth with all of these tricks, but when you really learn how to sing with your own voice, one by one, the tricks sort of drop away. The ghost of the trick is still there, but you’ve managed to turn it into something that’s not so obvious. I’ve learned a lot listening to Ray Charles, Willie Nelson. Every time I listen to Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald, it’s a master class in timing and phrasing. I’m not all that interested in elocution. I like a lot of songs where I don’t know what they are saying, but I love the feel of how they say it.
Jeffrey Foucault performs at 7 p.m., May 10, at the Hotel Cafe, 1623 1/2 N. Cahuenga Blvd, Hollywood. www.hotelcafe.com.
