Blood Brothers by Jeffrey Foucault

“Home is not a place but a power,” somebody says, and here in these songs is the roving longing that makes a prayer of what is seen, no matter—desert or hill or river: I wasn’t born here but I’ve been here for a while. Jeffrey gives us the ample and aching heart, the long hunger that is life as it shimmers past, the elusive want, the face remembered. The hands. Pretty hands. The blown river. “Stay together/learn the flowers/go light” one poet writes—go light and, by god, hang on. I see paintings. Millet, maybe—a woman in a tavern and light is time and time is the light passing. Plain people. Humble. It is summer and the window is open. You are 22. You will marry. No: whatever can have been is gone from you; it belongs to the life unlived. Big open sky and a creaking fence. The chance encounter that goes electric. “I’m in crush with you,” my kid used to say—and I guess I would say they are crushing, these songs. They get to me. A warble in the heart. They feel like my favorite turn in the road, the long run of dirt when the mountains go blue and the jackrabbit beats you running. The late open mic of the soul. If you go, you go. You go like hell. Albuquerque. Eldridge. I am right there and anywhere at all. Jeffrey makes it all blood country."

- Noy Holland (From the liner notes to BLOOD BROTHERS)



BLOOD BROTHERS, the much-anticipated follow-up to Jeffrey Foucault’s critically acclaimed 2015 album Salt As Wolves (“Immaculately tailored… Close to perfection” - New York Times; “Pure Songwriter, simple and powerful” - Morning Edition, NPR) is a collection of reveries, interlacing memory with the present tense to examine the indelible connections of love across time and distance. The poet Wallace Stevens wrote that technique is the proof of seriousness, and from the first suspended chord of 'Dishes' - a waltzing hymn to the quotidian details of life, which are life itself ('Do the dishes / With the windows open') - Foucault deftly cuts the template for the album as a whole, showing a mastery of technique as he unwinds a deeply patient collection of songs at the borderlands of memory and desire.

A departure from the austere electricity 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.

'War on the Radio’ - a jangling rocker built on a Stars’n’Bars-style fiddle line carried by pedal steel and electric guitars - uses bright major chording reminiscent of Foucault’s 2006 album GHOST REPEATER, as it remarks the complicity at the heart of modern American living (‘Just lie back and close your eyes / Listen to the war on the radio’). The hushed intensity of ‘Blown’ - a duet with Grammy-nominated songwriter Tift Merritt - plumbs the nature of dislocation against lines of brooding steel and cello, while the title cut, written together with drummer Billy Conway (and embroidered here by the near-transparent lilt of Iowa’s Pieta Brown) details the sharp ache of lost love (‘How could I know that I would live through / My life haunted by your sad smile?’). Rounding out the A-side, ‘Little Warble’ memorializes the day a love affair ends, from the vantage of twenty years past, in a quiet elegy of surpassing beauty. The intimate acoustic guitar duet ‘Pretty Hands’ - which sees Foucault joined by the Milk Carton Kids’ Kenneth Pattengale on lead - closes the album with a lovely, spare poem of knowing and being known, a meditation on the nature of marriage.

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.

In two decades on the road Jeffrey Foucault has become one of the most distinctive voices in American music, refining a sound instantly recognizable for its simplicity and emotional power.
“Stark, literate songs that are as wide open as the landscape of his native Midwest” (The New Yorker), “Quietly brilliant” (The Irish Times). "Close to Perfection..." (New York Times)

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