music roundup #3: Jeffrey Foucault / The Junkers
Jeffrey Foucault
Miles From The Lightning
Jeffrey Foucault makes music that you'd probably find shelved under "folk" (if you were to find it at all). The designation works, especially if you think of American folk music as a very broad, very old category, roots-music that borrows from the blues and branches into country. This is folk music before pop got hold of it, country music before it got Nashvillified: one smoky-voiced guy and his guitar, playing on the front porch, with a couple of friends who were walking by and stopped to sit for a spell. It's got that sound, that intimacy. The whole album's great driving music, by the way -- especially good on backroads, or roadtrips late at night.
Jeff Foucault is in his late twenties, but sounds much older -- old enough that "Ballad of Copper Junction" (the album's opening track), narrated by a character who went to Vietnam at 17, is entirely convincing. It's not the best song on the CD, but it introduces the melancholy and sense of exhaustion that characterize much of the album, and it also introduces Foucault's elliptical storytelling and eye for the telling detail. The allusions in these songs range from Shakespeare ("now is the winter of my discontent / made glorious summer by your sun") to racehorses, Rodin, and the Civil War, not to mention a good deal of the Bible. A number of these come together in "Secretariat," a beautifully twisted not-quite-love song: "Love is patient, love is kind, but let's be honest / love is a catalogue of deadly sins."
"I'm Alright" is the only song here that could really be called upbeat, but for every song of loss and lostness -- "Dove and the Waterline," "Californ-i-a," "Buckshot Moon" -- there's one that's hopeful: "Walking at Dusk" and "Sunrise in the Rearview" begin with yearning but end with their narrators setting out in search of change. "Highway and the Moon" chronicles a couple struggling to hold themselves together (and does so in some of the album's most beautiful imagery), and ultimately concludes that "we go tearing our love down / to build it up again / from different directions: we mean the same, / we are the same as we've always been." And no account of this CD would be complete without a mention of the title track, one of the loveliest and most moving of Foucault's songs, and a beautiful tribute to Townes Van Zandt as well. It's a gorgeous evocation of the physical world, what it means to leave it, how it feels to be left behind, and how to go on living.
The CD is nearly impossible to find outside of Wisconsin, but you can order it via Jeff's website, where, conveniently, you can also find several .mp3s available for download. The website also offers a list of his tour dates, and please believe me when I tell you that if you get a chance to see this guy play live, you really shouldn't pass it up.
The Junkers
Hunker Down
While we're on the subject of local-for-me music, let's take a weird little side trip to The Junkers, because how can I pass up the chance to spread the word about Wisconsin-based honky-tonk with a side of bluegrass, a punk sensibility, and a gay lead singer?
Now, full disclosure: I know all four guys in The Junkers, since I've taken classes with 3 of them (we're grad students in the same department) and a couple of them live in my neighborhood as well. I run into one of them on the bus with great regularity, and have been commissioned to knit a baby blanket for the daughter of another. So this isn't exactly an unbiased review.
On the other hand, it's also not a complete review. Most press about The Junkers references their locally infamous live shows, at which everyone gets exceedingly drunk, the better to sing along with hilarious Junkers originals like the undeniably catchy "It's Hard To Win A Woman (When You're Working For The Man)" and the sorta-feminist anthem "The Susan B. Anthony Dollar Rag," as well as covers of tunes by Hank Williams (Sr and Jr), Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, Elvis Costello, and Madonna (yes, you read those last two right), not to mention a pile of others that you can find on the set list. I don't like getting drunk, so I've never gone.
I also don't, as a rule, like the kind of country music you hear on the radio; but then I don't like most of the rock music I hear on the radio either, and for pretty much the same reasons. I do tend to like old-school country (what little I know of it), not to mention bands that are designated as "alt-country" -- which is to say, I like music made by witty and/or cranky people who sound like they might have dirt on their boots (a descriptor that covers quite a lot of blues and folk as well). I grew up in Texas, surrounded by the glossy country sound of the '80s (and apparently subsequent decades as well) -- you know, the stuff that's basically sugary pop overlaid with twangy vocals, some slide guitar, and lyrics that feature bad puns and pickup trucks. The social stratification among the white kids at my high school included an entire large group of people who listened to this stuff, and who wore boot-cut jeans (before they got trendy again north of the Mason-Dixon) and cowboy boots (ostrich-skin cowboy boots were a big fad my last couple of years in high school, although not so much among the kids who had actually been within spitting distance of a cow).
Fortunately for me, The Junkers are pretty much anti-glossy, and while their songs do feature a number of terrible puns, they're often terribly clever as well. This CD isn't one that takes up residence in my stereo for days at a time; it clocks in at 33 minutes, which is all the honky-tonk I need for weeks, even months, at a time. On the other hand, sometimes you just really need to hear an album whose first track is entitled "Let's Commit Adultery," and the chorus of "Buckeye Mile" has a real tendency to get stuck in my head: "I think you're sweeter than saccharine / And your boyfriend's smokin' crack in Akron / Baby, forget Ohio, remember me." Plus, I have a heretofore unknown soft spot for any song that rhymes "nutritious" and "expeditious" ("Thank You, Coffee") or references Marxist theory (the aforementioned "Hard To Win A Woman..."). And if you're going to listen to songs about beer, you might as well head straight for "The Pint of No Return."
To check out The Junkers' inspired lunacy, visit their website for downloadable .mp3s and CD ordering information.
Y'all have fun now.