Recorded in the late summer of 2024, THE UNIVERSAL FIRE: SOLO ACOUSTIC RECORDINGS is a reimagining of the ten songs on THE UNIVERSAL FIRE full band studio release, plus eight new songs written for the same recording session, featuring Jeffrey Foucault alone on guitars, bottleneck slide, lap slide, octave mandolin, banjo, and piano. 

Says Foucault “I worked mornings and evenings in my friend Maria's barn fronting a meadow and sheep pasture, with the windows open to the birds and crickets, the wind in the trees, an occasional truck lumbering up the hill. I tried to work fast, and leave things a little rough.

I started out to make a voice and acoustic guitar record, but found that leaving out the instrumental breaks made the songs wobble like a table with a short leg, but leaving them in with nothing happening was boring. So I started adding rhythm guitars, octave mandolin, bottleneck and lap slide. Pretty soon I was sitting at the little green upright in my kitchen, playing piano with one hand. I don't know how to play piano.

As I found new ways into the songs, I tried new keys and tunings and changes of time, the work took on its own life. I began to add in some of the songs that hadn't made it onto the studio version, and by the end there were seven new songs – Straightaway, High, I Miss (The Way It Used to Feel), If I Could Find It in My Heart, How Do You Know It’s Heaven (If It Never Ends), Someplace Left to Stand, and Sun Is Going Down – almost a whole second album.”

An essential companion to THE UNIVERSAL FIRE studio album, THE UNIVERSAL FIRE: SOLO ACOUSTIC RECORDINGS turns each song to catch new light, and creates newfound depth and dimension with eight previously unreleased tracks.

Release Date: September 6, 2024
Record Label: Blueblade Records
Format + Color: Compact Disc

Tracklist:
1. Winter Count 
2. The Universal Fire
3. Solo Modelo
4. Monterey Rain 
5. Moving Through 
6. Crushed Ice and Gasoline 
7. Nightshift 
8. East of the Sunrise 
9. Sometimes Love 
10. Woodsmoke

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