Jeffrey Foucault Leaves Mournful Procession of Love and Grief on ‘The Universal Fire’

Jeffrey Foucault had the late British poet Basil Bunting’s Advice to Young Poets tacked up on his desk and followed most of its treads, such as “Compose aloud” and “Put your poem away till you forget it.” The latter nugget was how the Western, Massachusetts-based singer and songwriter pieced together his twelfth album The Universal Fire, Foucault’s first release since Blood Brothers in 2018.

“Then you take it out again, and you strike out every word you dare, and then you do again,” says Foucault of how fragments of songs he’d had developed over time, based on Bunting’s principles. “I always thought that was a good recipe for a minimalist esthetic. I’ve probably been working on the same 70 or 80 poems for the last 15 or 20 years, and someday I’ll put out a book of poems. In the meantime, I take them out and revise them about 9,000 times.”

It’s how Foucault prefers to work and it’s no different with songs. The ones never completed can sit in notebooks or files until he returns to them. I’ll spend time in between records in this generative period of writing. I’ll go back and start looking for some congruent lines.”

Revisiting songs in the works and taking into account the past several years of his life, The Universal Fire turned into a mournful procession of love and grief. Named after the 2008 blaze that that destroyed master recordings at the Universal Studios lot in California, the album reflected Foucault’s confrontation with loss, following the death of friend and bandmate drummer Billy Conway of Morphine, who died from cancer in 2021 at 65.

Delivering a more sobering effect at its start the quieter acoustic ballad “The Winter Count” touches on mortality—It’s funny how you left the party early / That never happened / Even one time in your life before—before moving into the more Americana-drawn title track. There’s another reminisce of Conway on “Solo Modelo,” which reads like a nursery rhyme, says Foucault, on paper and was inspired by a snapshot in time while touring with the late drummer.

“I had this photo somewhere in my stuff, of one of those old mom-and-pop, non-chain, travel hotels on the West Coast, where you can drive right up to park right by the door,” recalls Foucault. “There was one with a turquoise wall behind the beds and a couple of cans of Modelo [beer] sitting on the nightstand between the beds, and Billy’s pack of Camels and one of about 8,000 plastic lighters he probably had, and I thought that was a great little still life.”

After Conway was diagnosed with cancer and underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment, Foucault went out to play solo for the first time with a string of shows on the West Coast. While driving up and down the coast, “Solo Modelo” started taking shape. The song was inspired by the litany of gas stations and other “stations of the cross” Foucault says present themselves on the road.

“It’s endless cups of coffee and all these things that you do over and over again,” says Foucault. “So I was doing them by myself, and I was trying to talk. I played with Billy during sound check once, and it slowly dawned on him what it was about but we never had a chance to record it, so after he was gone it took on this different cast.”

Americana grazes “Monterey Rain” and the slower picked “Moving Through,” and “East of Sunrise,” with nostalgic trips down early musical lanes on “Crushed Ice and Gasoline”—Used to be the FM dial / Never made you feel / Like you were the only / Lost or lonely one / But a part of something real—and the rockabilly-tipped “Nightshift.”

Before The Universal Fire closes on the mellowed “Woodsmoke,” Foucault revisits the oldest track on the album, partially inspired by John Prine. “Sometimes Love” starts off with a scene Prine could have written—That night we made love seven times at the Motel 6. “It cracked me up every time I sang it,” says Foucault of his opening. “I read this interview with John Prine, and he said you should start a song with an improbable first line. This is the guy who wrote the first line to one of his songs— ‘There’s a rainbow of babies, draped over the graveyard’ [“He Was in Heaven Before He Died,” 1975].”

Backed by his band made up of Calexico drummer John Convertino, who plays with the band part-time, and Don McCauley, a longtime drum tech for the Rolling Stones who worked with Charlie Watts and Steve Jordan, along with Bon Iver saxophonist and bassist Mike Lewis, Foucault excavates years of recollections and transformation.

“When the dust settled and we were going to pick 10 songs, what became clear to me was that all the songs dealt with loss or some version of losing something,” says Foucault. “So that’s kind of the theme, even though they’re disparate narratively. On ‘East of the Sunrise,’ I have no idea who the narrator of that tune is, but I must have been partly thinking about being in my late 40s, and a bunch of people I know, getting divorced. You live long enough and your phone starts filling up with dead people in your contact list and that’s just how it is. It comes with the territory.”

Foucault says there’s a different beat playing without Conway now. “When you play music, it’s always rhythm, whether you’re supplying the rhythm or somebody else is and you’re reacting to it,” he says. “And when the backbeat goes away, it changes the way you approach rhythm. It changes the way that you approach a song.”

Following Conway’s death, Foucault says the band went out without a drummer and just left an empty chair on the stage with a shot of tequila sitting atop it. After a while, the band acquired bottles of tequila gifted to them from sound techs. “We were driving around the Midwest with 12 bottles of tequila,” laughs Foucault.

“Not playing with Billy is different, because drummers all hear the beat differently,” adds Foucault. “John [Convertino], who I’ve known for a long time and started listening to in the ‘90s, hears the beat in an uncannily similar to the way to Billy. They hear it in the same place, but the difference between them is really in the accent.”

Opening a new door, musically, Foucault also remembers what his friend Conway taught him about writing and performing. Since Foucault’s 2001 debut Miles from the Lightning, Foucault still fills up books with sentences, phrases, pieces of a song, and poems that could later inform an album. “You often write songs, and then you make a point of recording them so that you can take them out on the road and learn them,” he says. “When Billy and I first started traveling, he forced me to settle down and play the same set list for about a year without changing it. It never occurred to me that I would have more freedom in the long run if I submitted to a certain amount of discipline in the short term.”

The more he played the songs, Foucault says he improved as a guitarist and as a vocalist. “All of a sudden you’re hiking in the mountains, and you get up high, and you get a completely different view of the landscape [of the songs],” he says. “Once you’ve been doing a song for a long time, there’s territory in that song that you could never get to if you only played it once in a while. There are all these little things that evolve.”

He adds, “When you think of all the great bands you’ve seen, the people you admire, they can do that with songs because they played them so many times, and it’s that constant building of the song. It’s the building and breaking down of a song that makes it go up, even more, each time.”

Photos: Joe Navas