Jeffrey Foucault at One Longfellow Square
Longtime disciple of the rich and strange music that sings behind the American veil, Jeffrey Foucault has spent the last decade mining the darker seams of country and blues, producing a string of spare and elemental albums of rare power while garnering accolades across the United States and overseas for a tersely elegant brand of songwriting set apart by its haunting imagery and weather-beaten cool.
Foucault started in music in his teens playing his father's acoustic guitar, and doing John Prine songs. A stolen copy of Live and Obscure by Townes Van Zandt led Foucault to immerse himself in Lone Star singer-songwriters like Van Zandt and Guy Clark, as well as the distinctive Midwesterner Greg Brown. By 19, he tried his hand at writing his own songs, and by the time he graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in history, he was performing regularly in coffeehouses. He released his self-distributed debut album in 2001, and followed that up in 2004 with Stripping Cane, which did have national distribution. He has been touring extensively, and with Kris Delmhorst and Peter Mulvey also was part of a trio of Bay State singer-songwriters called Red Bird, which released a pleasing recording of acoustic covers of other people's music.