Apparently, sometime Saturday night, Jeffrey Foucault and his drummer, Billy Conway, said to each other, “Hey, let’s call Dana,” and invited Dana Colley, Conway’s former Morphine bandmate, to play with them at The Rockwell. Colley joined the band for the last 5-6 songs of the set on baritone sax and it topped off what was, from start to finish, a masterful show. The set featured most of the basically perfect 2015 album Salt As Wolves and plenty of other gems from Foucault’s catalogue. I got to talk recently with Jeffrey, and he praised Conway for always being “in service to the song.” This ethic was evident in every member of the band, starting with Foucault himself. Trading glances and grins with Conway, bassist Jeremy Moses Curtis, and guitarist Zak Trojano, Foucault shifted effortlessly from gritty blues to understated ballads, in constant and appreciative communication with his bandmates and with the appreciative crowd at the newly renovated Davis Square venue.

The show opened with “Last Night I Dreamed of Television,” from Horse Latitudes (2010), a stunning elegy for what we have lost, and will lose, through our impoverished contemporary definitions of being “connected.” He followed up with “Des Moines,” the first track from Salt As Wolves, which is framed largely around mundane aspects of life as a musician on the road, and an unremarkable night. “And we watched the house / Filling up with no one. / But God was listening, / And he cupped his ear.” This line stood out to me during the show, in conversation with the performance we were witnessing: there was the feeling that this group would have played with the same dedication and joy regardless of how many people were in the room; that they’ve honed their craft by persisting through nights when it may have felt like God was the only one listening.  

During the “union break,” where Conway, Curtis, and Trojano stepped off stage, Foucault unplugged and stepped in front of the microphone for a beautiful tribute to his father. (I don’t know the name of the song, and couldn’t find it, but it has a line about a “knock off Gibson,” so if anyone out there knows this tune, please clue me in.) He then invited Trojano out to play one of Zak’s songs, “Get Me Right,” with Jeffrey backing him up on harmony vocals and slide guitar. Trojano opened the show as well with a fantastic set; if you join his mailing list, he’ll send you a new song every month.
Sharing the “mission statement portion of the show,” the band launched into “Slow Talker,” a song that is framed mostly around two chords for the verses and uses this space to build tension toward the chorus: “There’s one note, if you can play it. / There’s one word, if you can say it. / There’s one prayer, if you can pray it. / Each one, each one is the same.”