Cold Satellite by Jeffrey Foucault

COLD SATELLITE is the first of two full band recordings centered on the collaboration between Jeffrey Foucault and the contemporary American poet Lisa Olstein (author of the collections Radio Crackling Radio Gone, Lost Alphabet, Little Stranger, and Late Empire, published by Copper Canyon Press), where Foucault curates her language and sets it to music to find a new and unanticipated emotional resonance.

Rising stars in their respective fields and longtime friends, Foucault and Olstein began their collaboration at a distance, with Foucault coming cold to the poems and lyric fragments, creating songs by elision and arrangement, relying on his immediate impressions to inform the music, and leaving the listener to unify the intentions of the two writers in a single experience (an idea referenced in the superimposed triangles of Renee Fernandez's delightful album cover). The result is an expansion of the notion of authorship, and an experiment in the invention of meaning.

Pairing Olstein's visceral language with the rawboned authority of a rock 'n' roll band, Cold Satellite's stripped down, dynamic sound hearkens back to records by Crazy Horse and the Faces: menacing electric guitar countervailed by delicate lines of pedal steel in short sketches and extended improvisations, Santo & Johnny-style ballads, Appalachian folk, even R&B. Featuring a lineup that includes Billy Conway (Morphine) on drums; Jeremy Moses Curtis (Booker T) on bass; David Goodrich (Chris Smither) on electric guitars; and Nashville's Alex Mccollough on pedal steel, COLD SATELLITE weaves together strands of primitive rock, blues, R&B and Country.

PRAISE FOR COLD SATELLITE

GREIL MARCUS:
"...a drawl that sometimes grows a tail so long it curls around itself, with a country feel that puts the people who live in the Nashville charts to shame. Then a deep-ditch electric guitar takes a country song into the blues, and lets it go back where it came from. Nothing is pressed, to the point that sometimes the way the voice pulls away from a word or a guitar from a phrase is its own kind of preciousness—but not in “Twice I Left Her,” which shifts the music into a more resolute kind of quiet, a bigger emptiness in a single room. An acoustic guitar figure comes up against drums buried far away, like a memory. The story creeps out, and stops well short of its end, though you can glimpse it. Foucault drifts over the words so lightly that they seem to fade as they’re sung, and you might stop trying to hear them as words, let them come as sounds"

VINTAGE GUITAR:
"Beautiful and often chilling... a powerful piece of work"

THE TELEGRAPH (UK):
**** "A powerful mix of rock, folk, and country..."

AL KOOPER:
"...a lot cheaper than a Stones ticket and muuuuuuch younger"

ACOUSTIC GUITAR MAGAZINE:
"12 sinewy tracks that often echo the brooding eloquence of Foucault’s earlier work, but nearly as often stretch in previously untraveled directions as the songwriter approaches his craft from a new angle and broadens his melodic palette in the process..."

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.
“Stark, literate songs that are as wide open as the landscape of his native Midwest” (The New Yorker), “Quietly brilliant” (The Irish Times). "Close to Perfection..." (New York Times)

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