Holed up in Iowa City for the coldest week of the year,
Jeffrey Foucault teamed with legendary blues guitar player and producer
Bo Ramsey (Greg Brown, Lucinda Williams) to create
Ghost Repeater, a country and blues album at the crossroads of
love and lament.
Ghost repeaters are empty radio stations scattered around the country to
re-broadcast demographically tailored playlists from thousands of miles
away. Epidemic sameness, the monochrome sprawl, and a retail news cycle
of ghost prisoners and God-on-our-side create the backdrop against which
Ghost Repeater unfolds poems of love and uncertainty. There are
no declarations or easy politics, but the details of living are parsed
in language by turns elegantly plain or vividly abstract, and set
against the wider story of the times in a series of travelogues and
dreamscapes. Words like bloom and fade, truth and mercy, dream and
memory recur through the album to create a grammar, a palette of colors
that Foucault and Ramsey merge with dark washes of electric guitar and
vocals hushed or plaintive, in a visionary portrait of modern Americana.
It's a natural pairing — Ramsey's cool economy of phrase the perfect
compliment to Foucault's elegant lines and weatherbeaten drawl — and the
recording itself is a sort of homecoming, with Foucault traveling back
to the Midwest from Massachusetts where he's lived the past few years,
bringing back the new songs he'd written to record them with Ramsey's
longtime Iowa city collaborators.
Released first in Europe in April 2006 to wide critical acclaim, and now
available in North America as well, Ghost
Repeater features full band arrangements but hews close to the
line of Foucault's previous albums (Miles from the Lightning,
2001, and Stripping Cane, 2004) with dolorous, intimate songs,
and rich language, framed this time around by Bo Ramsey's signature
electric guitar work in a series of country rockers and dark blues. It
was an instinctive progression for Foucault — whose first two records
explored the landscape and characters of his native Midwest in spare and
largely acoustic terms — to broaden the focus of both the music and the
subject matter by incorporating a rhythm section and training his sights
on not only the interior but the wider world, the personal and the
profound.
In addition to Bo Ramsey's distinctive sound, Foucault has the backing
of Rick Cicalo and Steve Hayes (Greg Brown) on rhythm, along with
special guest appearances by Iowa legend Dave Moore on harp and
accordion, Eric Heywood (Son Volt, Richard Buckner, Alejandro Escovedo)
on pedal steel, and Kris Delmhorst on backing vocals.
In songs of love and empire, dream and memory,
Ghost Repeater delivers the honesty of country, the rawboned
desperation of blues, and the simplicity of folk to achieve a document
that's timeless and poignant.
