Ghostly echo of Americana

THE ARTS:Jeffery Foucault's latest album touches on the hollowness of modern American life, but he's got no time for protest songs, he tells Siobhán Long

'I don't really have much use for protest songs," Jeffrey Foucault declares with uncompromising conviction. "I don't think they change much of anything. I guess they're useful in certain, and very limited ways. When Bob Dylan wrote Hurricane and Hurricane Carter was still in prison, there's a song with a very specific message. Too often, though, you get a bunch of people in a room together who agree with one another, and the people who don't agree with you aren't going to come anyway. I think there's nothing more frightening than being in a room full of people who all agree with each other. So I try to write as obliquely as possible, to get at the feeling, rather than at a particular 'message'."

Foucault grew up in the town of Whitewater in south-eastern Wisconsin, but now lives in western Massachusetts, on the foot of the Berkshire hills, with his wife, singer/songwriter Kris Delmhorst.

A late bloomer, Foucault didn't learn to play guitar until he was 17. "My dad brought me home a guitar earlier than that, but it just sat around. There was a deficit of patience between the two of us for teaching and learning." With his latest and third CD, Ghost Repeater, bagging critical plaudits, and his spare, dry-boned live performances luring listeners in, one by one, he's seen his audience's steady growth blossom over the past couple of years. His last visit to Ireland in 2006, when he supported Dar Williams on tour, was a master-class in minimalist performance, with Foucault setting out his stall of songs (many of them reflecting the road in all its peril and pathos), which are refreshingly bereft of the baleful self-absorption that can afflict singer/songwriters whose best friend is the road.

Jeffrey Foucault's approach to songwriting mirrors his attitude to live performance. He holds little truck with tortured artistry, opting instead for the less-mysterious but ultimately more-reliable route of a disciplined work ethic to populate his songbook.

"When I started out, I would avidly write anything down, because I didn't have a process," he admits, "and I was just making it up as I went along. Lately though, I've been working on finishing rough lyrical pieces before I sit down to add a musical part, because I think it's easier, from the standpoint of writing architecturally sounder melodies, if you've already got the lyric. At least that's what I'm trying right now."

Two years in gestation, Ghost Repeater takes its title from the countless empty radio stations scattered across the US that broadcast computer-generated demographically-tailored playlists across the American plains, with barely the touch of a human hand (or ear, for that matter), much less the intervention of anyone as eccentric as a music-loving disk jockey. It's the musical equivalent of an Orwellian netherworld, where listeners are fed never-ending and homogenised musical diets, designed according to the laws of marketing and retail, rather than by the passions of the musician or a music lover. It's a terrain with which Foucault is terrifyingly familiar. Touching that void is what he does with impressive facility on Ghost Repeater.

"There's a certain hollowness and monoculture in everything," he explains, "from how we produce our food to the way we get our information. In my writing, what I try to do is capture what that feels like, rather than the particulars of a given side of the political coin, by using abstract language. If you listen to Bob Dylan's Desolation Row, he's using the power of icons, from pop culture and history. Each of them have an atomic weight in the collective memory, and he's manipulating them really deftly. I wasn't trying to do exactly that on this record, but I was trying to use players from my own life and my own experience. So I mention Willie Mae on Ghost Repeater. That's Willie Mae Thornton, Big Mama Thornton, the first blues player I ever heard, who really slew me; that was the first time I was really moved by music. I guess I was trying to take an interior iconography and draw on that."

DELVING DEEP INTO places that don't often catch the light of day is a pursuit that has preoccupied Foucault ever since his earliest years of listening to musicians such as John Prine, a key influence on both his listening and playing.

"I learned to play guitar by listening to John Prine's first record," Foucault recounts. "Later, I was really into Townes van Zandt. Now here are two guys who aren't great singers in the technical sense, although I do love how they sing. They're not complicated guitar players either. They're great writers and they have a really distinct faculty with language, and that's what impressed me."

Admitting that "nothing makes me quite as happy as a really sad song", Foucault has had no shortage of subjects to populate his songs, and in particular the events of the past four years have left their mark on his writing.

"I find that I need to be able to write about, not necessarily politics per se," he offers, "but contemporary American living. You can't pick up a newspaper without reading about all these terrible things that are happening, and a lot of them as a natural extension of our tax dollars. But I'm not sure that it's the songwriter's role to always kick against the traces. When I listen to Ray Charles singing What Would I Do Without You?, that's one of the most insipid lyrics you'll ever come across, but he sings it with such beauty and conviction and nobility and pathos; he's not kicking against anything but the human experience, right there. So on a political level, the Republicans and Democrats are all the same guys wearing different colour ties. I worry more about things like the weather, not the window dressing that they try to keep us preoccupied with."

Foucault's got his own bottom line when it comes to making a living in music, and it's one that didn't take a whole lot of soul-searching to work out. He's not a writer given to concrete imagery, but his weakness for the subliminal is precisely what brings listeners back again and again, uncovering tiny little insights and observations with every repetition.

"The litmus test for me," he says, "for good art, for good painting, sculpture, poetry, literature or music, is that it tells the truth on some basic level. That doesn't have to be on a literal level, but it resonates, not necessarily with everybody, but with the big, middle part of the bell curve. So as long as I'm doing the musical side of things right, I can get away with some subliminal messaging."

Jeffrey Foucault's tour kicks off in the Cobblestone, Dublin on Thursday, and tours to Enniscorthy, Cork, Kildare, Galway Limerick and Dublin. Ghost Repeater is available at www.jeffreyfoucault.com