LOWELL, MASS. – Every April, the former mill town of Lowell, Mass., becomes transformed into a live music hub. This is all because of The Town and The City Festival, which takes place over a three-day period at numerous venues throughout the city. This year’s edition is happening from April 24 – 26 and it has the likes of Boston soul-pop act Couch, Nashville Americana artist Hannah Connolly, Brunswick, Maine indie rocker Lady Lamb and numerous local acts such as Kingshot, John David, Escape Durgin and Dead Vapor performing among many others. One of those others is Jeffrey Foucault, who exhibits a mix of folk, blues and country through his music. He’s going to be performing at Christ Church United on 180 Merrimack Street as part of the festival’s second day with his set starting at 9 p.m.
We had a talk ahead of the performance about his latest album, being from the Midwest and living in Massachusetts, and a really cool collaboration he has going on.
Rob Duguay: This past September, you released a new record called “The Universal Fire” and it was recorded in two separate places at Wavelab in Tucson, Arizona with Craig Schumacher and Wayne Napoleone and at Good Harbor Hill in Grand Marais, Minnesota. What was it like going to these two places and making the record in this fashion?
Jeffrey Foucault: The way the record was recorded, we rented a house in Tucson. I put my whole band in there and we worked for the better part of a week in Wavelab, which is a studio that I’ve always wanted to work at with an engineer I’ve always admired. A bunch of records I really like have come out of that place, and the stuff that happened in Grand Marais, that was just my producer Mike Lewis, who’s in the band Bon Iver. He’s the horn player and sometimes the bass player in Bon Iver, and he lives up in Grand Marais about half the time so he was just doing the overdubs up there and he engineered that stuff himself. He added the piano to the first tune and a few other things while working alone, but the primary recording, which is a live band recording all in one room with all of us looking at each other in a circle, was all done at Wavelab.
RD: Is that the way you prefer to record? Ever since COVID, a lot of musicians have been doing a lot of remote stuff, so do you prefer to have anybody in the same room for the recording process?
JF: Yep, absolutely. The records that I care about from American rock & roll and even from singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan or Neil Young, for the most part, those records were made in a room with a bunch of people in which you work for three or four days and then you’re done. There was a sort of baroque period of American recording in the 1970s and ‘80s where you’d spend two weeks trying to get the drum sound and when you go back and listen to those records, the drums sound terrible, so that didn’t work. They were just finding creative ways to spend millions of dollars, but really, when you make a record, you should do what you do when you make music with other people, which is sit in a room and play together. There’s a variety of ways to go about it when you go into the studio, you can pursue the illusion of reality by assembling a bunch of people playing in real time one at a time, or you can pursue the reality of illusion, which to me is always more interesting and mysterious.
RD: I totally get that. For the making of the songs, you also had a bunch of different guests come into the process including Pieta Brown, Dana Colley, Kris Delmhorst, Sergio Mendoza and Barbara Jean Myers. How were you able to get in touch with all these people and bring them into the fold? Was it just reaching out to them personally or through mutual connections?
JF: They’re all dear friends. Mike Lewis is married to Barbara Jean, so he probably shanghaied her into doing a bit of singing on that one track because he thought something needed to happen. I’m married to Kris Delmhorst, so she was pretty easy to get to work on it, and Pieta Brown is a dear friend who lives in Iowa City and Dana Colley, of course, played saxophone in Morphine with Billy Conway, who most of the record is about. I was on the road with Billy for the better part of a decade, he was the drummer. Before that he was the drummer in Morphine, and before that he was in the band Treat Her Right, so I wanted to bring Dana in and have him play on something to sort of tie the themes and threads together.
RD: That’s great. You’re originally from Whitewater, Wisconsin, but these days you live out in western Massachusetts in Shelburne Falls. When it comes to living in this part of the country being from the Midwest, what are your thoughts? I know New England probably has as much weather activity as the Midwest does, there’s probably a little more wind where you’re from.
JF: The difference is, as far as I can tell, I travel around as much as anybody. Maybe the only person who would meet more random people in more random places would be somebody who is running for President, and really in the last 30 years, the country has changed to the point where the culture is pretty monolithic in the city and it’s pretty monolithic in the country. You get minor differences culturally in terms of flavor or whatever, but the big divide now is between the urban population and the rural population. I think people in Milwaukee and people in Boston are going to have a lot in common, they’re going to shop at all the same stores and they’re going to buy overpriced coffee at the same stores. If you live in a small town in Wisconsin or western Massachusetts, you’re going to buy what you need at the farmer’s supply store, and that’s kind of how it is.
I think yankees are pretty interesting people. I live right in the top dead center of New England, the old industrial cradle of the late 19th century, in a real small town with no fast food and no stop lights or anything. There’s maybe 800 people on one side of the river and another 800 on the other, and the people here are a little buttoned down. In the Midwest, you’re going to wave at everybody and say hi on the street. There are people in my town who I’ve known for 20 years, our kids grew up together, and if you wave at them from your car they look embarrassed for you. Yankees play it a little close to the vest and it takes a long time to feel like you’re from here, but the truth is I’m not from here, I’m from the Midwest and I carry the Midwest with me everywhere I go.
RD: That’s a cool perspective to have. The Town and The City Festival is a bit different than your usual festival due to it not taking place at a centralized location, it takes place at a bunch of different venues all around Lowell. What are your thoughts on being part of it with this structure?
JF: I think the distributive model of festivals is really smart. It does a lot of good for any given town to use the existing infrastructure rather than try to island everybody off in a specific place where you could sell them everything they need. Big corporate chain hotels that are built out by the freeway don’t give people any choice but to buy breakfast, coffee and any other thing from them. If a festival comes in and it uses one place, then it has to use all the vendors and all that stuff, but if you bring it to a town and they use that distributive model where they use existing buildings and the existing structure and framework, then people will buy gasoline at the convenience store, buy dinner at the local restaurants, they pay to park and it’s good for the tax base of the town. That sort of flows into what I’ve always thought of with the “cultural capital” model, if you make cool things happen, art things and culture things, in any town, you’re going to bring people in and a lot of small towns across America can use that kind of help and anybody who is doing that kind of work I think is doing a good thing.
RD: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more about that.
JF: Lowell is a cool town. I’ve played this festival during the first year they were going and I had a beautiful Guatemalan meal. I never had Guatemalan food before and it was super cool, the people were sweet and I really liked the feel of the town so I’m looking forward to going back.
RD: I like the feel of Lowell ,too. I’ve been there a few times and I’ve always enjoyed myself. Going forward into the summer and beyond, do you have any new projects in the works or any collaborations you’d like to mention?
JF: My wife just went out on tour with half my band and she’s been on tour for most of the spring while putting out her own records, and what I’ve been working on is cleaning my barn and cleaning my basement. Now that the weather is getting good, I’m going to fish a lot and hopefully that means the water is going to come back in the well on the creative side and I’m going to go back into the studio. I have a lot of songs and I can probably make two records right now without having to write anything new, so it’s really a question of what kind of record I want to make, who do I want to hire, where do I want to work, what sort of sounds are in play and what’s the sonic grammar or palate of the album. I haven’t really decided that yet, I might make an album of instrumentals or something with electronic ambient music with a buddy of mine who’s into modular synthesizers and lives down in Nashville. I have a collaboration with the composer Van Dyke Parks who’s a Hollywood guy, and he’s worked with literally everybody for a long, long time, people like Ry Cooder, Bob Dylan and Linda Ronstadt.
I think his first paying job in Hollywood was being the guy who wrote the arrangement for “The Bare Necessities”, that song with Baloo the bear in “The Jungle Book.”
RD: Wow, that’s amazing.
JF: Yeah, he’s been around a long time and he wrote a string arrangement for a song of mine that has flutes and stuff. I don’t know when it’s going to come out, and I also have a version of “The Universal Fire” where I play everything myself. It’s a solo acoustic record with some overdubs where I play the solos on banjo, mandolin, slide guitar and that stuff. I’ll probably put that up on the streaming services sometime this year.