On September 6, Jeffrey Foucault will release The Universal Fire via Fluff and Gravy Records, his first album of entirely new material since 2018. A series of high-voltage performances captured live in one room, the album is a kind of working wake – Foucault lost his best friend and drummer, Billy Conway, to cancer in 2021 – as well as a meditation on the nature of beauty, artifact, and loss.
Augmenting Foucault’s all-star band with members of Calexico and Bon Iver (drummer John Convertino and producer/saxophonist Mike Lewis) The Universal Fire sets Conway’s death against the massive 2008 fire at the Universal Studios lot in California that destroyed the master recordings of some of our bedrock American music, to interrogate ideas about mortality, legacy, meaning, and calling. P
Today, Foucault shares the title track (below) from the impeccable album. “‘The Universal Fire’ is a song about loss, a kind of elegy,” he says of the track. “The fire at Universal Studios destroyed original masters that can’t be replaced. These were the full flower of the culture that I was raised in and thought I knew as a young man, the music that my friends and I believed in, and shaped our lives around when everything else seemed false, or attenuated. Our religion was electric / Magnetic, singing on a wire.
“I wrote ‘The Universal Fire’ after the death of my best friend and long-time drummer, Billy Conway, in 2021. Billy believed deeply in the transformative power of music, and he played like a holy man. Then he was gone, and I was trying to remember what was real, and what I knew and believed in.
“Against that loss, I set out the idea of the fire in Los Angeles — a naturally occurring metaphor on par with the Titanic. If ‘The Universal Fire’ sounds like an existential proposition, I guess it is. All things pass away, and only spirit remains. But the song is more question than answer: what does it mean to lose these things, and who’s going to carry the light on ahead now? Who’s going to live in the mystery of the curve, the place between one and zero, where it’s still possible to be a human in the real world?”
Sep 05 – Exeter, NH – The Word Barn *
Sep 06 – Northampton, MA – Iron Horse Music Hall *
Sep 07 – Fall River, MA – Narrows Center for the Arts *
Sep 08 – Cotuit, MA – Cotuit Center for the Arts
Sep 11 – Galway, NY – Cock ’n Bull *
Sep 12 – Harvard, MA – Fruitalnds Museum *
Sep 13 – New York, NY – The Iridium *
Sep 14 – Gloucester, MA – The Cut *
Sep 20 – Washington, DC – Millennium Stage
Sep 26 – Bozeman, MT – Live from the Divide *
Sep 28 – Missoula, MT – Wilma Theatre (An Evening with the Black Ram Guitar)
Sep 29 – Missoula, MT – Monk’s Bar *
Oct 03 – Boulder, CO – Gold Hill Inn *
Oct 04 – Hotchkiss, CO – Delicious Orchards *
Oct 05 – Denver, CO – Mercury Cafe *
Nov 01 – Santa Monica, CA – McCabe’s *
Nov 03 – Mill Valley, CA – Sweetwater Music Hall *
Nov 06 – Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios *
Nov 07 – Seattle, WA – Tractor Tavern *
Nov 08 – Trout Lake, WA – Trout Lake Hall *
Nov 09 – Centralia, WA – Juicebox Public House *
Nov 10 – Bellingham, WA – New Prospect Theatre *
Dec 06 – Iowa City, IA – The James Theatre *
Dec 11 – Evanston, IL – Evanston Space *
* w Erik Koskinen supporting