Left This Town - SALT AS WOLVES - Released on 10/16/15
WEBSITE www.jeffreyfoucault.com
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A show played perfectly to an empty bar. A singer with life and death on his shoulders, swinging the microphone like Samson swung a jawbone. The real ones who die with nothing half the time. With SALT AS WOLVES, Jeffrey Foucault gives us in sound and image what poet and author Chris Dombrowski calls in the album’s liner notes, “that rare artistic combination of a voice and a world”: a tough, spare collection of darkly rendered blues and ballads, like a field recording of a place that never existed. In a series of letters to lovers, friends, heroes, and family, Foucault deftly weaves together disparate strands of sound and experience, raw love, and hard wisdom.

‘Salt as wolves’ is a line from Othello describing boldness, and a fitting title to frame a record of blues played boldly and loosely, without rehearsal or cant. In his fifth collection of original songs Foucault stakes out and enlarges the ground he’s been working diligently all the new century: quietly building a deep, resonant catalog of songs about about love, memory, God, desire, wilderness, and loss. SALT AS WOLVES gives us Jeffrey Foucault at the height of his powers, fronting an all-star band, turning the wheel of American music.

This album is not an exploration but a statement. Here is the man in full, extending his musical reach in the raw precision of his electric guitar work (as he distills a modal, hypnotic electric blues reminiscent of John Lee Hooker and Jessie Mae Hemphill), in the mature range and depth of his singing, and in the intimacy and vulnerability of his songwriting. Cut live to tape in three days in rural Minnesota, SALT AS WOLVES moves like a vintage Chess record, with an openness and dimensionality that beckons the listener further in. In language richly simple and profound, Foucault plumbs the implications of a life spent looking for the Real, in a series of epistolary songs that locate the transcendent moment or its seeking, the love we don’t understand, the thing that is lost when a great spirit dies. At the heart of the record the song ‘Slow Talker’ frames the whole in its refrain: ‘There’s one note / If you can play it / There’s one word / If you can say it / There’s one prayer / If you can pray it / And each one is the same.’

SALT AS WOLVES reunites Jeffrey Foucault with legendary electric guitar player Bo Ramsey (Greg Brown) - who produced Foucault's 2006 album GHOST REPEATER - and Cold Satellite bassist Jeremy Moses Curtis (Booker T), as well as longtime drummer and tour partner Billy Conway (Morphine). Caitlin Canty, whose breakout 2015 release, RECKLESS SKYLINE Jeffrey Foucault produced and played on, joins the band on backing vocals. It’s a hand-picked lineup whose natural affinity - Ramsey’s economy of phrase and raw simplicity the perfect complement to Foucault’s elegant lines, and Conway and Curtis's titanic gravity - is evident from first moment, the whole ensemble notable for an instinctive restraint and use of negative space. These aren’t kids copping riffs: these are grown men drawing from the deep, strange well of real American music, and they have nothing to prove.

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