Critical darlings often resign themselves to obscurity the moment the accolades start pouring in, since the media’s favorite artists don’t always move units.
That doesn’t bother Jeffrey Foucault, a critically acclaimed folk singer, one bit. He graciously weathers comparisons to Bruce Springsteen and Townes van Zandt, plus regular labels of “brilliant” by American and European publications.
But his name is little-known outside folk music circles, and the songwriter still plays about 130 shows a year in small clubs on self-guided tours, sometimes with his folk singer wife Kris Delmhorst.
“My feeling about the job is: You go someplace and do what you do and hope that people like it,” said Foucault, who has played professionally for 13 years. “It’s how you build a career and bring people over to your side.”
Foucault will perform songs from his new album “Ghost Repeater” when he visits Denver’s Swallow Hill Music Association tonight. His excellent new disc uses its title as a metaphor for the infiltration of our psyches with American market culture.
Ghost repeaters are empty radio stations sprinkled around the country that relay pre-recorded, demographically honed playlists. Foucault’s strong, sandy voice and gently melodic tunes seem perfectly suited for nuanced material balancing poetic cultural critiques with songs about love.
“Watching the country go haywire isn’t a brand-new thing, but plainly, as it’s been for so many people, it’s on my mind,” Foucault said. “If you don’t write about what you think about, you’re not doing it right.”
He isn’t a protest writer – a mode for which he finds limited utility – but rather an observer and documentarian, ticking off the bittersweet details of human relationships amid the decay of political ideals.
“Not to be flippant, but I don’t think ‘Blowing in the Wind’ really saved us. I do believe that art, if it’s well-rendered and it makes people think about what it means to be a human being, has a certain value.”
Approaching his subject matter obliquely prevents him from alienating people with a polarized political discourse, which he sees as the failing of protest music. He thinks it’s better to put his politics in the service of art, rather than vice versa.
Perhaps that why audiences across Europe have responded so strongly to his rendering of America.
“Our culture and the way we talk about it looms large over there. They love songs that mention little county trunk roads and that kind of thing,” Foucault said. “You can’t escape the United States because it’s the leading curve of what’s good and bad about modern culture.”
Foucault’s album, a mix of upbeat and pensive country-folk and blues, captures that mood without trying to be a definitive statement. Recorded with Bo Ramsey (Lucinda Williams, Greg Brown), it oozes a comfortably leathered vibe while also sounding like an artist moving forward, subtly modifying the folk vocabulary.
Still, Foucault knows why many Europeans dig his style.
“I’m always a little amazed when the language barrier doesn’t come into play,” he said. “I know on a musical level, anything that sounds even remotely like Bruce Springsteen will get a pretty good response in Holland.”
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
