Newport Live Presents: Jeffrey Foucault at Norman Bird Sanctuary

In two decades on the road Jeffrey Foucault has become one of the most distinctive voices in American music, refining a sound instantly recognizable for its simplicity and emotional power. With a string of critically acclaimed studio albums – “Stark, literate songs that are as wide open as the landscape of his native Midwest” (The New Yorker), “Beat-up troubadour folk whittled to dolorous perfection” (Uncut), “Songwriting Brilliance,” (Irish Times) – he’s built a brick-and-mortar international touring career and a devoted following, one that includes luminaries like Van Dyke Parks, Greil Marcus, and Don Henley.

In September 2024 Jeffrey Foucault released THE UNIVERSAL FIRE (Fluff & Gravy), his first album of entirely new material since 2018. A series of high-voltage performances cut live in one room, the album is both a working wake – Foucault lost his best friend and drummer Billy Conway, to cancer in 2021 – and 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 set 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.