Ghost Repeater by Jeffrey Foucault
Holed up in Iowa City for the coldest week of the year, Jeffrey Foucault partnered with blues guitar player and producer Bo Ramsey (Greg Brown, Lucinda Williams) to create GHOST REPEATER, a country and blues album exploring the hopefulness of new love and the seasickness of contemporary American life.
Ghost Repeaters are empty radio stations scattered around the country to re-broadcast demographically tailored playlists, endless echoes of American market culture, from thousands of miles away. Epidemic sameness, big-box stores, and the retail news cycle of ghost prisoners and God on Our Side create the context in which GHOST REPEATER unfolds a story of love and uncertainty.
Written over the course of the year in which Foucault married, GHOST REPEATER juxtaposes a personal narrative of hope and joy against the wider story of the times in a series of travelogues and dreamscapes. The words bloom, fade, truth, mercy, dream, and memory recur through the album to create a sort of grammar, a palette of colors that Foucault and Ramsey merge with dark washes of electric guitar and vocals hushed or plaintive, in a visionary portrait of modern Americana.
GHOST REPEATER features full band arrangements but hews close to the line of Foucault’s previous albums, with darkly intimate songs and rich language, framed this time around by Bo Ramsey’s signature electric guitar work, in a series of country rockers and dark blues. It was a natural progression for Foucault – whose first two records explored the landscape and characters of his native Midwest in spare and largely acoustic terms – to broaden the focus of the music and the subject matter by incorporating a rhythm section and training his sights on not only the intimate but the wider world, both the personal and the profound.
Joined by Rick 'Rico' Cicalo on bass and Steve Hayes on drums on rhythm, along with special guest appearances by Iowa's Dave Moore on harp and accordion, Eric Heywood (Son Volt) on pedal steel, and Kris Delmhorst on backing vocals, on GHOST REPEATER Foucault lays out the particulars of love in a country contending with its own ghost. In songs of love and empire, dream and memory, he delivers the honesty of country, the desperation of blues, and the simplicity of folk to achieve a document that’s timeless and poignant.
PRAISE FOR GHOST REPEATER
THE NEW YORKER:
“An album full of gravelly, gorgeously rolling poems about weather, trains, and love. Foucault pronounces his last name "Folk-alt," which sounds something like one of those inadequate names given to the acoustic-guitar-driven musical genre of which he is an exceptional practitioner.”
THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES:
“One of the best albums of the year... there’s nothing derivative about Foucault's haunting allusions… the fundamental truths that emerge are undeniable… a harmonious minimalist sound. ”
NO DEPRESSION:
“There is no America like the one that serves as a backdrop for the songs on Jeffrey Foucault's aching new album… his spare, rootsy tunes are deceptively complex… a high-lonesome feel and ominous undertones.”
THE STRANGER (SEATTLE):
“Incisive… a contender for many 2006 Best-of lists… mesmerizing.”
Tracklist
| 1. | Ghost Repeater | 5:11 |
| 2. | Americans In Corduroys | 4:50 |
| 3. | I Dream An Old Lover | 4:14 |
| 4. | One For Sorrow | 3:52 |
| 5. | Train To Jackson | 4:18 |
| 6. | One Part Love | 4:08 |
| 7. | Wild Waste And Welter | 5:12 |
| 8. | City Flower | 3:38 |
| 9. | Tall Grass In Old Virginny | 3:27 |
| 10. | Mesa, Arizona | 5:05 |
| 11. | Appeline | 3:47 |
Credits
License
All rights reserved.
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)