Jeffrey Foucault was born and raised in Southeastern Wisconsin, in a small college town in the middle of farm country. After finishing high school he settled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison where, after two years, he realized that he didn’t know how to do anything useful. He quit school, moved home, got work as a farmhand and house carpenter, and began writing songs. Eventually he returned to school and took his degree in History, dividing his time between the local tavern and whatever book he could lay his hands on, fishing and writing and driving a snowplow for the University. After college and a brief stint spent living in the San Bernardino Mountains of California, he returned to Wisconsin and began to assemble the resources to record his first album.

Foucault started out at seventeen playing John Prine tunes on his father’s beat up mail order guitar, and spinning old records on a hand-me-down turntable in his bedroom. When he was eighteen he stole a copy of Townes Van Zandt: Live and Obscure from a friend, and immersed himself in the Texas folk of writers like Van Zandt and Guy Clark. With the Dylan-inspired singer songwriter movement as a foundation, he waded through old country, alt country, bluegrass, and blues, and began to identify closely with the midwestern regionalism of Greg Brown. He discovered the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth, and by nineteen Foucault had begun to try his hand at writing songs. By the time he finished school he was performing regularly at the Cafe Carpe in Fort Atkinson Wisconsin.

“When I got back from out West I moved into a little lake cottage for a few months. At that point I had finished school and figured I had learned most of what I was going to learn, and enough to return home to the landscape of my own county- to the church steeple skylines, and the county trunk roads- to find an authentic idiom, a way of telling.”

Miles From The Lightning is a collection of dark narrative ballads, starkly rendered love songs, allegories and elegies told in plain verse. Equal parts folk, old country, and roots Americana, Miles ranges from hellfire to homespun, every song edged with the desperation of the blues and tempered with a brooding sweetness. The writing is spare and intoxicating, and the compositions have a lyrical style that is both literate and rough.

The performances on Miles From The Lightning are stripped down, barebones acoustic arrangements of fifteen original compositions, featuring contributions from fellow Wisconsin songwriter Peter Mulvey on lap-steel and high-strung guitars, and Mark Olson on Classical guitar, with light percussion on two tracks by drummer Joe Wong. At the forefront of each recording is Foucault’s burnished voice, smoky and sharp.

The title track, subtitled A Song For Townes Van Zandt, which laments the late Texas songwriter, resides at the end of the album and provides a natural context for the record as a whole:

“What I found compelling in Townes Van Zandt’s writing is the essentially American element of the blues that runs through everything he wrote. No matter what he was playing, Townes sang the blues and he did it with such a hurtful purity. It was honest and haunting. Hearing Townes when I was eighteen had the power of revelation."

Reservations are required.
Please contact Jeff Rice for more information.