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JEFFREY FOUCAULT Autobiography: I was born in a winter storm in January 1976, two hundred years after the Declaration of Independence, one hundred years after George Custer got killed. I have two older brothers who taught me how to fight, among other useful things? I grew up listening to my Dad play a mail order Conrad steel string guitar; he played old folk songs, and some country things. He always played in tune. He learned to play guitar in an even trade for academic probation in college, and the way that he plays has a sort of stolen sweetness. My mother wanted to be a nightclub singer when she was a girl, and I have an early memory of the two of them sitting at the kitchen table and belting out an old Rev. Gary Davis tune in two part harmony. Pop was sweating. When I was fourteen, I put Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited on the turntable, got the idea that there was something out in the world that my wide experience had not acquainted me with. When I was seventeen it was a hard year. In November my Dad got hold of a copy of John Prine's first album for me, and taught me five chords. Christmas morning they gave me a brand new guitar. When I was eighteen I stole a copy of Townes Van Zandt: Live and Obscure from my friend Cynthia. It's been years now and I don't plan to give it back. – J.F., April 2001 Fort Atkinson, WI Jeffrey Foucault
Jeffrey Foucault was born and raised in South East of Wisconsin, in a small college town in the middle of farm country. His musical career was seeded at seventeen, when he got hold of a John Prine album, played it on a hand-me-down turntable in his bedroom, and subsequently commandeered his father's beat up, mail-order guitar.
After finishing high school he settled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison where, after two years, he realized that he didn’t know how to do anything useful. He quit school, moved home, got work as a farmhand and house carpenter, and began writing songs. Eventually he returned to school and took his degree in history, dividing his time between the local tavern and whatever book he could lay his hands on, fishing and writing and driving a snow plough for the University.
After college and a brief stint spent living in the San Bernardino Mountains of California, Foucault returned to Wisconsin and continued to immerse himself in the Texas folk of writers like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark. Having waded through old country, alt country, bluegrass, and blues, he began to identify closely with the Midwestern regionalism of Greg Brown, and the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth. "When I got back from out West I moved into a little lake cottage for a few months; just a bed and a fireplace and my typewriter. At that point I had finished school and figured I had learned most of what I was going to learn, and enough to return home to the landscape of my own county, to the church steeple skylines, and the county trunk roads, to find an authentic idiom, a way of telling."
When he was 23, Foucault began to assemble the resources to record his first album. The result, Miles From The Lightning, is a collection of dark narrative ballads, starkly rendered love songs, allegories and elegies told in plain verse. Equal parts folk, old country, and roots Americana, Miles ranges from hellfire to homespun, every song edged with the desperation of the blues and tempered with a brooding sweetness. The writing is spare and intoxicating, and the compositions have a style that is both literate and rough.
The performances on Miles From The Lightning are stripped down, bare boned acoustic arrangements of fifteen original compositions, featuring contributions from fellow Wisconsin songwriter Peter Mulvey on vocals, lap-steel and high strung guitars, and Mark Olson on classical guitar, with light percussion on two tracks by drummer Joe Wong. At the forefront of each recording is Foucault’s burnished voice, smoky and sharp as whiskey.
The title track subtitled A Song For Townes Van Zandt, which laments the late Texas songwriter, resides at the end of the album and provides a natural context for the record as a whole. “What I found compelling in Townes Van Zandt’s writing is the essentially American element of the blues that runs through everything he wrote. No matter what he was playing, Townes sang the blues and he did it with such a hurtful purity. It was honest and haunting. Hearing Townes when I was eighteen had the power of revelation”
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