In September 2024, New England-based singer-songwriter Jeffrey Foucault released his latest album, The Universal Fire. His band members had flown from across the United States to record the album at WaveLab Studio in Tuscon, Arizona.

Now touring in support of the album, Foucault and his band gathered in The Current studio for a session hosted by Radio Heartland’s Mike Pengra. Following the music, Foucault stuck around for a chat with Pengra, talking about the making of the album — and spending a long time on the life of his best friend, the late Billy Conway, whose memory influenced the songs on The Universal Fire.

Watch and listen to the music and the interview using the video players above and below, respectively. Beneath the interview video, you’ll also find a full interview transcript with additional photos and links.

Interview Transcript

Mike Pengra: I am extremely happy to be in the studio with Jeffrey Foucault again. Jeffrey, it's great to see you.

Jeffrey Foucault: It's great to be back. Thank you.

Mike Pengra: And congratulations on this album. I love it.

Jeffrey Foucault: Thank you. Yeah, it was, it was really, it was beautiful to make. It took a long time to get out for a variety of reasons. It took longer than usual.

Mike Pengra: Why?

Jeffrey Foucault:  Well, it was just a bunch of things, without getting too far into anybody's business. There were some health issues, and it just took a minute. It's funny, you know, like, you want to make a record and put it out, you know, Bob Dylan style, like, a week-and-a-half later, or something, like Positively Fourth Street, but you can't, it's just because you got to wear all the hats. That's part of it.

Mike Pengra: Yeah. So The Universal Fire, it took me a while to realize that what you're talking about was Universal Studios in Hollywood. It burned down in 2008.

Jeffrey Foucault: Eight, yeah, and I didn't know about it then, because that was the year my daughter was born, and I was not paying any attention to things like the New York Times. And I read about it later, and I was sort of floored by it. But, and this often happens to me in the cycle of making something, you know, I'll write down phrases, and that, just the phrase "the Universal fire," was really musical and interesting. And then, in the event, years later, having sort of revolved that in my mind for a long time then, my friend Billy Conway, who played on this program with me twice, and who we were on the road together most of a decade, just the two of us, and then sometimes with the full band, Bill got sick and died. And so essentially, I used the Universal fire, the idea of losing all that music, the masters of a bunch of American music that was really bedrock and sort of important to me and to him as the stocking horse or whatever for just the idea of losing anything, right? What does it mean to have something? What does it mean to lose it? And every song on the record, and this sounds, I'm sure, totally rock and roll and thrilling, but every song on the record deals with the idea of loss from a different vantage point. And I didn't realize that until I had already made the thing and cut away everything that wasn't going to be on the record. And then I realized there was this sort of coherent thematic thing, which is lucky, because you have to talk to publicists and stuff.

Mike Pengra: And radio guys.

Jeffrey Foucault: Right!

Mike Pengra: Last time you were in the studio, Billy Conway was here with you playing drums on that tour. I've never met a more friendly guy. That man just, he just is so easy to talk to. He's so interested in you as a person when he talks to you; he just looks in your face and asks questions like, "What books are you reading these days?" No one's ever asked me that before!

Jeffrey Foucault: He loved to ask that.

Mike Pengra: Tell me about Billy. He's from Minnesota, and you've been playing with him for a long time.

Jeffrey Foucault: Yeah. So Billy was born in northeast Iowa. He lived around Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin, until he was probably in the junior-high range, and then he moved to Owatonna, and he had been a speed skating phenom. He won a race on a pair of figure skates because that's all he could afford, and won a race, and they started running him, and he joined a team, and he beat Eric Heiden. He was apparently very good. His parents didn't have any money. And then when they got to Owatonna, there was no speed skating, but everybody was playing hockey. So he became this great hockey player.

Mike Pengra: Of course.

Jeffrey Foucault: Right? And then he was the captain of the team at Yale playing hockey, and he was supposed to go to the '80 Olympics, and then he got hurt. And those were all his buddies on that team. And that was sort of this interesting turning point where he decided not to try to do things. I mean, I don't know how conscious it was, but I remember he said, like he worked so hard for that Olympic thing, and it didn't happen when he got hurt. And he sort of turned away from the idea of trying for things and just wanted to see what would happen next. And so he was a public school teacher in an inner-city school in Boston, working with really at-risk kids. And he ended up working as a cowboy on a ranch in Montana, and in between times, he was in two famous rock and roll bands: One was called Treat Her Right, the other was called Morphine. But you know, if you want to talk about Billy as a person, he just had this astounding ability to make people feel like he approved of them, and they wanted his approval, right? I mean, everybody from sound engineers to, you know, waitresses, or whatever it is, people, he had this interesting magnetism. He sort of looked like, like, think about how your grandma looked at you, right? Like you could do nothing wrong. That's how Billy looked at you. And it was, you know, it made people want to live up to that thing. He had a really beautiful impact on people.

Mike Pengra: He was your best friend.

Jeffrey Foucault: My best friend, absolutely.

Mike Pengra: How do you write an album of songs about your best friend? Especially after he's gone?

Jeffrey Foucault: I probably wrote two albums. You know, he came along in my experience of music at a point where I was really ready to just walk away from it, because I was playing by myself. I was deeply tired of hearing myself sing and play and talk, and that's easy to have happen when you're out by yourself, because music, when you play with other people, music is new every night, as you know, it's always a conversation. But when you play by yourself, you know, inevitably, there's an element of doing what you know how to do, which is kind of death to the experience of being up there and really inhabiting the thing that you're trying to do. So I felt like I was about ready to give up on it. And then we started traveling duo, and I learned so many things, just traveling around with Billy, about how to approach music, how to be in it, how to have the discipline to stick with, you know, say, like, I think he wouldn't let me play anything but the same set list for like, a year. And I'd be like, I'd get restless and antsy; I'd be like, "What if we add this song?" He'd be like, "No." And he was, you know, he had 20 years on me. He graduated high school the year I was born, so he had had all this time on the road, and I'd had, at that point, 10 or 12 years on the road, but nothing like the sort of categorical sense of the whole experience. And both sides of it, right? He would, this was a guy that had had all the help in the world; the two busses and the fancy, high-powered managers and the private planes and stuff, and he was perfectly willing to go play for 12 people in a town you never heard of. And he'd carry all of his stuff into the club by himself, and he would never once complain. And that's a real good way to be.

Mike Pengra: Billy moved to Montana, as you said, and now, since his passing, there's the Billy Conway Artist Fund I've been reading about, helping Indigenous artists in Montana to make a record or do a career or... 

Jeffrey Foucault: Yeah, it's run by his partner, Laurie Sargent. And there were a couple people who approached right after Bill died and said that they were interested in donating a certain amount of money toward whatever was going to be the memorial to him. And Sarge felt like it should be back in Montana and it should be related to two Native American contenders in the arts and music, because Billy — I took a minor in American Indian Studies, and Billy had an independent study with a Lakota man named Henry — and so we'd had a similar experience, and a lot of our reading lined up, going back to books, about that part of our history, our combined history, and which is just the darkest, you know, as dark a chapter as America has. And so it was something that I think he would have been very proud to do anything for anybody living on a reservation, or having grown up on a reservation. It's the poorest people in America, and he had a deep affinity for poor people, because he had been poor himself coming up and also various times through his whole life.

Mike Pengra: Talking with Jeffrey Foucault about his latest record, The Universal Fire, came out in September.

Jeffrey Foucault: Yeah.

Mike Pengra: Now I'm reading about a Universal Fire acoustic album.

Jeffrey Foucault: Yeah, that is a desperate attempt to make enough money to tour a five-piece band, is what that is. So I made a fantastic full-band record—

Mike Pengra: All by yourself.

Jeffrey Foucault: ...in Tucson.

Mike Pengra: OK.

Jeffrey Foucault: Well, I made the one in Tucson with the full band, and it cost a great deal of money, and I took it to a label, and they spent a bunch of money on it. And then this summer, I was looking at the at the fall, and we're going to be out half of every month. And I was like, "There's no way I'm going to ever bring home any money." So I sat down and re-recorded all the songs by myself. And I started thinking it's just gonna be me and a guitar.

Mike Pengra: The same songs from the album. 

Jeffrey Foucault: Same songs. And then what happened is, you know, the songs were built for a band, so there's all these, the architectures based on things happening, solos and such. So I started playing, I'm not a lead player, but I started playing slide guitar and acoustic guitar and octave mandolin and I found the old — my real banjo was up at my studio in the in the hills, and the local kid—

Mike Pengra: Piano, too.

Jeffrey Foucault: ...lives right there. (I did play some right-handed piano!) [The local kid] had snapped a string off, so that was out of play. I was letting him go in there and play all my guitars. He's like 13 or something. Anyway, so I went down to the basement and found some old banjo. It must have been Kris's, my wife Kris' and I put that on there, and I did play some one-handed piano. And it was a really interesting process. And over the course of doing it, I added in seven songs that were part of the same batch of songs that didn't make it out of the album.

Mike Pengra: OK. Yeah, right.

Jeffrey Foucault: And so I made that available. It's not released. It's just available. If somebody goes to my website and they go to the mailing list page, and they join the mailing list, then they can get this download for free. And it's like, I used a different version of the cover, or the same cover of the album. This is a color version. And I thought that's what really I was trying to do, is just show, you know, like you pick a piece of glass up and you hold it up to the light, and you get the prismatic thing, where it shows you different colors. That's what I was trying to do with those songs.

Mike Pengra: What's next after this? Rest for a while, right? This has been a long tour.

Jeffrey Foucault: I can think of any number of things that are next, but musically, I really don't know. We're gonna go out in '25, I know we're going to Europe with the full band at the end of the summer. And what parts of Europe, I'm still not sure, and I'll have some running around. You know, Eric is in Ani di Franco's band this spring, so we'll lose Eric for a little while, but hopefully when she's off the road, then we can be on the road a little bit. It'll just depend on how that lines up. But the USA push for this record has been September to December, and this is the last leg. So we've been out just having a ball. And you know, it's inevitable that you talk about money, but money's not, I mean, we all could have gotten completely different jobs if that's what we were after. So we're just out trying to make its swing.

Mike Pengra: Yeah. Well, congratulations on this record. It's a fine one. It's one of your best.

Jeffrey Foucault: Thank you. It was so fun. It was so fun to make. You know, we went down to Tucson to work at WaveLab, at least partly because of the records that came out of there in the '90s and the early aughts, including the Calexico records that John worked on — John Convertino, our drummer.

And John also played with with Rainer Ptacek, who was one of my favorite slide players and a really beautiful musician who is sort of the father of that desert-rock scene in Tucson. And Rainer passed away in the '90s, but I had these records that John — John and Joe from Calexico were the rhythm section on at least one Rainer Ptacek record that didn't come out till after he died. And I was familiar with his work from Richard Buckner, and there was something about Tucson. We all had to fly, right? We got one guy in Rhode Island, one guy in Montana, one guy in Minnesota, one guy in El Paso, and I live out in New England, so we were gonna fly somewhere, and we were working in January. Seemed right.

Mike Pengra: Didn't you write a song about Tucson? 

Jeffrey Foucault: Yeah, there's a song called, "Here Comes Rainer."

Mike Pengra: I thought so. 

Jeffrey Foucault: I wrote that just, I don't even know where that came from, but I just, I've been dedicated to his — you can't play like [Rainer Ptacek]. Nobody's gonna play like him. But learning how to phrase and create some of the textures and some of the non-linear looping that he does that tends to occur uneven to the beat. And he was a real early guy with the loop stuff, not the sound-on-sound, some real wanky stuff that you always hear, but like he found a new way to play slide guitar, or a new way to use a looping station. So he had these two, two of those old Digitech pedals, the PDS 8000, and he'd have one going and the other one going, one go off. And now you have, you know, one pedal that can do all that stuff. But at the time, he was definitely ahead of his ahead of his game. He recorded with Robert Plant. He recorded with Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top. 

Mike Pengra: Yeah.

Jeffrey Foucault: Robert Plant was driving through the desert with Jimmy Page, and heard him on public radio, and drove to Tucson to meet him.

Mike Pengra: Wow.

Jeffrey Foucault: Right? And then they ended up doing stuff together. He was just like everybody that's great at this, you might not ever hear of them, right? He was the kind of person that's going to influence a lot of people. I know he had some records out in England, but he never really stuck it hard in the States. But if you go to Tucson, everybody remembers him.

Mike Pengra: Jeffrey, thank you for coming in. Congratulations on the record. It's always a pleasure. 

Jeffrey Foucault: Thanks so much. Yeah, always a pleasure.

Gallery: Jeffrey Foucault in studio

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Songs Played

00:00:00 The Universal Fire
00:04:46 Monterey Rain
00:10:02 East of the Sunrise

All songs from Jeffrey Foucault’s 2024 album, The Universal Fire, available on Fluff & Gravy Records.

Musicians

Jeffrey Foucault – acoustic guitar, vocals
Erik Koskinen – lead electric guitar, vocals
Eric Heywood – pedal steel
John Convertino – drums
Jeremy Moses Curtis – electric bass

Credits

Host/Producer – Mike Pengra
Video Director – Evan Clark
Camera Operators – Evan Clark, Josh Sauvageau
Audio Mix – Cameron Wiley
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor

External Link

Jeffrey Foucault – official site