In September Jeffrey Foucault released The Universal Fire, his first album of entirely new material since 2018. He calls the album ‘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’. We talked about that loss for a bit after Foucault recorded this session at TakeRoot festival, back in November 2022 – where he recorded the album’s opener Winter Count and covers of Greg Brown and Reiner Ptacek.

Augmenting his 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.

‘Everything that Greg Brown was writing felt directly applicable to my own life.’

Jeffrey Foucault: “For my money, Greg Brown is one of the great voices of the American Midwest. I started listening to him in the probably mid-90s and when I was a youngster. And he has been on the road in the States since the early 80s, something like that. He’s an Iowa songwriter, I grew up in Wisconsin.”

“He never got quite as famous as John Prine or Neil Young or Bob Dylan or Gordon Lightfoot but all those people come from the same part of the world and it’s a similar sensibility as a writer. He was really the first writer that I felt like everything that he was writing felt directly applicable to my own life and experience. I understood what he was talking about when he talked about the landscape and the weather and the people.”

“What was it like growing up there? Well, let’s see, it’s the upper Midwest so long cold winters, windy, icy, hot summers, hot and humid and beautiful fall, beautiful spring. I spent a lot of time outside, I grew up in a small town and from the time I was pretty small I could kind of go off and do my own thing. Where we lived it was like right at the edge of town and then farm fields with corn and soybeans and stuff like that.”

“And then there was a tiny university and they had a bunch of land set aside, so there was a forest and a bunch of prairie and some oak savanna. Yeah, it was a great place to just be a kid in a time where your parents expected you to come home to eat and otherwise you could just go do your own thing. Go outside.”

Reaching for something that you can’t quite get a hold of.

“Reiner Ptacek was born in East Germany, his parents emigrated in the 50s to Chicago where he heard Chicago blues growing up. And so he was real heavily influenced by the great blues tradition in America; country blues and Chicago blues both, and at some point he moved to Tucson, Arizona.” Jeffrey Foucault continues: “When people talk about desert rock, it all starts really with Reiner. He had a band called Giant Sand Worms and that band became Giant Sand with Howe Gelb. Gelb was his dear friend and Reiner was his mentor essentially. Joey Burns and John Convertino from Giant Sand became Calexico. But the beginning of that thing was Reiner.”

“He was such a cool guitar player. You know, I was playing some of his stuff – and I can’t play like he does – he’s a bottleneck slide player and he plays in a major tuning but he frequently frets behind the slide and gets a minor out of it. So even when he’s playing dark stuff, even if he never plays a major chord, he’s still tuned major and it’s a weird feeling because it’s a dark song that has this strange feeling of joy also in it.”

“As a writer, and a guitar player and just really as like a person, the way that he plays music is really attractive to me. He’s kind of getting out as far as he can, it always sounds like he’s reaching for something that he can’t quite get a hold of, you know, so it’s a real thing. He’s a fantastic musician. It’s hard to find his records in the States.”

“Ptacek had a few records come out in the UK and he was briefly sort of, not famous exactly, but when he got a brain tumor, there was a big artist tribute that had, I think Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin organized it and Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, PJ Harvey, you know, Chuck Prophet, Evan Dando. It was this crazy list of people doing Reiner’s tunes and they made a record called The Inner Flame that I think you can probably still get. You can probably find it in England, but I don’t know if you can find it anywhere else.”

“Greg Brown is the kind of music that I listened to growing up. I really didn’t hear Reiner until around 2010 and he’s probably been the most recent influence in my music. I’ve been trying to incorporate his style of play without really copying it. When you talk about influences, it’s a weird game because there’s the stuff you can’t escape. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re influenced by Bob Dylan or not, he’s like the sun coming up and going down, right?”

“And then when I started playing, I was really into the Texas guys, so Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, you know, Joe Ely, people like that. I learned to play guitar by learning John Prine songs and of course I made my way through Bob Dylan and that sort of stuff. I also listened to Ray Charles and Billie Holiday and John Coltrane and modern jazz and I think most of what I listen to right now has been Tejano and Conjunto music from Mexico, which I really love because I don’t understand the words and it makes me happy.”

‘When you play with somebody, it’s a conversation.’

I note that while Foucault’s music is often labeled as folk, it draws heavily from blues and other genres. Personally, I even liken it to the sounds of New Orleans, giving his work a distinctive feel beyond typical folk influences.

“It’s all the music that became rock and roll before it was rock and roll, so it’s like blues music, country music, gospel music, folk and traditional music. But you can’t take away that you heard Def Leppard and Whitesnake because of your brother’s tape collection, you know what I mean? It was all in there. We all know the Brady Bunch theme song and like the jingle for some car salesman and stuff like that, so it’s all in there as influence, it’s what you decide to pay attention to. So it becomes like a bouquet you can pick from.”

“The Faces are probably my favorite rock and roll band. I love it when Neil Young and Crazy Horse come at the top of their game. So I’ve played various configurations where it was just me and the drummer, electric guitar and acoustic guitar and drums and full band with Eric Heywood on pedal steel or Bo Ramsey on electric guitar or Eric Koskinen on electric guitar. I go out and play solo when I have to.”

“When you play by yourself, it’s like giving a speech, while when you play with somebody, it’s a conversation every time. It’s always a different conversation, even if it’s the same subject. When you play by yourself, you can fall into the thing where you pay too much attention to what you’re doing and whether or not you’re succeeding at something. Which is a stupid way to play music, you know.”

“For the last decade, I’ve been on the road with Billy Conway, who was the drummer in the band Morphine, and before that the band Treat It Right, which was a major label act in the 80s. And so he was about 20 years older than me, and he’s my best friend, and we were on the road all the time. For a long time it was always me and Billy, drums and guitar. And then before the pandemic, actually at the end of our last European tour, he got diagnosed with cancer. He had about a year of dealing with it, then he was better and we went on tour again.”

“But it came back, and he wasn’t going to get better, and so he knew he was going to go. A lot of the tunes in this new cycle of tunes are just dealing with, not only the fact of losing your musical partner and your best friend, but also the nature of the big picture, living and dying and grieving, which is its own subject and process. That’s a bunch of heavy shit. And he was a fantastic fucking musician, so I was just lucky to be on the road with him as long as that was.”

TakeRoot

One of the greatest pleasures of these past years, has been my collaboration with TakeRoot festival. Their crew is one of the most welcoming and easy-going bunch I’ve encountered and the 2022 edition was no different. Thank you to Joey, Arne and everyone involved. With the help of my friend Davie Lawson – who flew in from Kilkenny, Ireland – I filmed four sessions in the office of Eurosonic Noorderslag. All of these have now appeared on this website. I’m about to head to Groningen again in a few weeks to film more at TakeRoot 2024!

Photos

Keep watching

Thank you for watching and enjoying this session. You’ll probably like some other sessions from The Influences’ archive too, like these earlier ones we filmed at TakeRoot festival.