Freak Scene #30: Jeffrey Foucault Returns With 'The Universal Fire'
New albums by Jeffrey Foucault and the Lucky Shots, along with upcoming concert info.
A Guide to Music in Western Mass. (and sometimes Connecticut)
This week in Freak Scene, Shelburne Falls’ Jeffrey Foucault is back with his first album of new material since 2018 (he performs tonight, Friday, at the Iron Horse). It’s a beautiful album, though it was a hard one to write about. I hope I did it justice. Also, Hatfield band the Lucky Shots are back with the EP Hunter’s Heart, which is a little packet of joy.
Jeffrey Foucault is a singer and songwriter, but he could just have easily been a sculptor finding meaning in a block of marble, or a farmhand finding sustenance in the land — he comes across in his music as someone as adept at working with his hands as with his heart. Foucault’s songs have an air of earthy poetry, and they’re shot through with a wisdom that sounds wrested from lived experience. That tends to make his albums bracing, and The Universal Fire is no exception.
https://jeffreyfoucault.bandcamp.com/album/the-universal-fire
The 10 songs on Foucault’s first album of original material in six years are colored by the 2021 death of Billy Conway, Foucault’s drummer and best friend. Despite the loss, The Universal Fire is more reflective than sorrowful as Foucault considers the ideas of permanence and legacy. On “Universal Fire,” he finds a metaphor for Conway’s passing in the massive fire at Universal Studios in 2008 that destroyed the original recordings of some of the cornerstone performers of American music, among them Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters and far too many more. “Left all alone with the copies / Of the copies of the masters of the name,” Foucault sings. “Celluloid reels gone up in ashes and steel / Just the picture of a picture in a frame.” If there’s a better evocation of how memories and mementos are wonderful and also never a sufficient surrogate for the real thing, well, bring it on.
Foucault and Conway often toured as a duo, until Conway’s cancer made him unable to travel. On “Solo Modelo,” Foucault adjusts to being on the road by himself. He sounds almost bemused at how unfamiliar his familiar haunts feel, toggling between feeling “solo” and “so low” as he thinks about his friend’s ordeal. The song has an open, airy structure thanks to drummer John Convertino of Calexico, whose loose beat anchors flights of electric slide guitar that wheel around Foucault’s voice.
Not every song comes with as personal an imprint. The mid-tempo “Crushed Ice and Gasoline” sounds like a character study, full of finely observed details that Foucault delivers through curtains of pedal steel guitar and bone-dry brushed drums. He sings on “East of the Sunrise” about a woman trapped in the corridors of a life she didn’t plan and working out what comes next, and Foucault’s fingerpicked acoustic guitar and rumpled voice call to mind a sleepless night at the kitchen table, waiting for the dawn.
Whether he’s singing about himself or creating characters, Foucault’s approach is always open-hearted, which lends his songs a sense of grace. And his songs are only getting better: The Universal Fire is merely the latest demonstration of Foucault’s ever-deepening command of his craft.
Jeffrey Foucault performs tonight (Friday, Sept. 6) at the Iron Horse in Northampton. Information and tickets here.
The Lucky Shots Turn Songwriting Experiment into EP
Noam Schatz is no stranger to music: he was the drummer in the excellent early-aughts indie-rock trio Mobius Band, and has kept the beat for various Western Mass. acts in the intervening years. (The Hatfield musician also has a reputation in certain circles for his skill as a forager of wild mushrooms. This place truly contains multitudes.) Most recently, Schatz has developed his singer-songwriter side with his own group, the Lucky Shots, whose songs are the result of a writers’ circle of sorts. Schatz and some friends each write a new song every two weeks based on prompts they take turns suggesting. They’ve been doing it since 2016, which has yielded some 200 songs — more than enough for the Lucky Shots’ 2023 album Count to Nothing, as well as the new EP Hunter’s Heart.
The EP comprises five of Schatz’s favorites, and they show a singer and songwriter who sounds confident and unruffled. Opener “3rd Act” is an easygoing take on owning up to shortcomings (that’s my read, anyway), and Schatz sings in a strong, clear tenor over a deceptively intricate arrangement dominated by big, bright guitar licks. Bass and interlocking layers of drums and percussion anchor the next track, “Master of Two Left Feet,” while closing song “It’s Just Me” is an introspective piano ballad with a vintage ’70s pop feel. It’s a confessional song, and though Schatz shows plenty of depth as a lyricist, he comes across as someone who is enough of an open book that he doesn’t have much to confess. Rather, the five songs on Hunter’s Heart sound like Schatz was simply enjoying the process of playing with language and music, and it’s hard to ask for more than that.
The Lucky Shots perform Sunday, Sept. 8, with Ex-Temper and the Valley Moonstompers at the Northampton Block Party, which takes place from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. on Main Street between Center Street and Cracker Barrel Alley.
Upcoming Concerts
Here’s a big one: Jack White plays Toad’s Place in New Haven on Tuesday, Sept. 10; tickets go on sale today, Friday, at 1 p.m., but you have to have registered here. Pretty sure this marks just the second time White will have played Connecticut, along with a White Stripes show in Wallingford in 2007.
Josh Ritter plays Oct. 18 at District Music Hall in Norwalk; information here.
Folk veteran Steve Forbert performs Jan. 18 at the Iron Horse; information here. And don’t forget that Cloudbelly is there Nov. 2!
Shantyman and the Boogalistics play “an evening of psychedelic funk” tonight, Sept. 6, at the Marigold Theater in Easthampton. Yvonne Michelle presides over an evening of burlesque, drag, bellydance and live music Saturday, Sept. 7. Izzy Hagerup (a.k.a. Prewn) is there Sept. 13 with the Chris Jennings Band. Outro plays Sept. 14 with Bellwire, the Tines and Soft Fang. More information here.
Next week: The Urojets, a “one-member band from Easthampton,” recently released two new albums.
Freak Scene is always seeking submissions! You can send music for coverage consideration to erdanton at gmail or reply to this email. Check out these guidelines first.
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