The New Yorker once called Jeffrey Foucault’s music “Beat-up troubadour folk whittled to dolorous perfection.” Now try all that with electric guitars.

Foucault, a Wisconsin native who now lives in Shelburne Falls, will appear with his band Friday night (Sept. 6) at the Iron Horse, a record release for his new album “Universal Fire” from Fluff and Gravy, Foucault’s first collection of new material in six years.

He has some things to get off his chest. Foucault lost his best friend and drummer Billy Conway to cancer in 2021. Conway, who earlier beat the skins for bigtime acts Morphine and Treat Her Right, formed a duo with Foucault that toured for 10 years.

The album sets Conway’s death against the 2008 fire at Universal Studios that destroyed countless master recordings of bedrock American music.

It’s an introspective album that deals with loss but this ain’t no dirge, kids. This is a rock ’n’ roll record.

Here’s an exchange I had with Foucault just over a week ago.

Bob Flaherty: Jeffrey, the album is great, a batch of songs that has Friday night written all over it. A rock ’n’ roll record with atmosphere…

Jeffrey Foucault: Thanks very much. I wanted to land somewhere between “Tonight’s the Night” by Neil Young, and “Brothers in Arms” by Dire Straits, but those are just reference points. Like Denis Johnson said about writing a novel, “You get in your teacup and take your oar and strike off for Australia, and if you wind up in Japan, you’re ecstatic.” Where we landed is closer to whatever my own thing has become, which isn’t very easy to put into a genre. Certainly it’s a rock ’n’ roll record. That’s broad enough to describe what’s happening, and the drummer can shuffle.

BF: “Solo Modelo” has gotta be a hit. “Solo black coffee / solo green room / so low at midnight / and I’m still low at noon.” Life after Billy Conway …

JF: I don’t know what a hit would look like in my very marginal experience of the music industry. We just sort of leg it out on the borders of relevance, playing to rooms of fewer than two or three hundred people, the way our heroes did. I never had a hit and I guess I don’t expect to have one, but hopefully people will like it, and it’s fun to play. It was important to me to write a record that was fun to play, and that song has a kind of jaunty, nursery rhyme simplicity, for being as heavy as it is. I wrote it as a postcard to Billy when he got sick and had to stay home dealing with chemo and radiation, and I went on the road solo for the first time in a decade. All the stations of the cross — the perpetual green rooms and gas stations, black coffees and hotel rooms — I was seeing them alone for the first time in a long time, and it turned out everything rhymed.

BF: Billy Conway was your best friend. You played 120 dates a year for about 10 years. There’s the best friend one plays golf with every Saturday and the one who lives and eats and sleeps and breathes with you every day and night for weeks at a time — this is astronaut stuff. Did you at any point want to wring each other’s neck?

JF: I never once got mad at Billy Conway. I might roll my eyes because he only ever bought his cigarettes one pack at a time, and we’d end up wandering around some strange town trying to find an open gas station and what he called “fluorescent shopping,” at one in the morning after a gig. It could be that he wanted to wring my neck now and then, but I don’t think so. I grew up with two old brothers, and Bill grew up with two sisters and moved around a lot, so they were real close. We both knew how to be part of a team, and being on the road with people, like marriage, requires above all what Jim Harrison called, “elaborate courtesy.” Billy and I took care of each other, and I loved him to pieces.

BF: You two jawed after gigs and deep into the night, “an endless, meandering river of talk,” you’ve written. How did you talk about his cancer? Is “Monterey Rain” one of the songs you sent him when he was dying?

JF: He heard the first verse of the song and told me to finish it, which I did after he died, but the song relates to an earlier time. We spoke frankly about his illness, his life, and his death. I’m sure there are things he never told me, but the things we did talk about we talked about in blunt terms, and with some humor. I remember drinking coffee on the stone patio of his farmhouse in New Hampshire toward the end, on a day when we were stacking about five cords of oak for the winter. He took a sip and, “We have to decide what to do with my carcass,” which began an hour long discussion of green burial and the county regs, medical science body donation, cremation, and metaphysics. That was typical.

BF: On the title track, a red-blooded rocker, you sing of the 2008 fire at Universal Studios where hundreds of thousands of master recordings were lost. Copies remain, but “just the picture of a picture in a frame.” How vital is original work?

JF: Well, that’s one of the questions in the song. There’s the physics of audio capture and the idea of loss implicit from the first copy of the master, and then there’s the metaphysics of object and idea. I didn’t want to write an anthem, or make a statement of philosophy and tie it up in a bow. I don’t like that kind of thing — it’s why I find political songwriting so criminally dumb — and questions are more interesting than answers. What I wanted to ask is, what does it mean to lose these things?

In geologic time we barely exist. At our own, human scale, most people don’t know more than the names of their Great Grandparents, and we more or less disappear after a generation or two. Where does it all go? Why are we here? What’s going to stick around? Rock ’n’ roll was our religion — mine and Billy’s, maybe America’s — the closest thing we had to a transcendent communitarian experience, even in the service of freedom, or license. Losing those masters felt like a metaphor, but for what? I was trying to understand what it meant.

BF: “Solo Modelo” was just released as the album’s second single, “Streaming,” you write, “anywhere expensive music is treated as free.” Do you mean to say that our God-given right to steal, I mean, download, anything and everything is not a technological miracle we should exalt?

JF: The big server corporations dominate the economy by running vast machine algorithms to predict trends and patterns in real time, on the basis of information they steal from us by requiring that we sign baroque end-user agreements which allow them to spy on us. They know what you see, who you know, what you buy, and they sell this information to third parties. The value you represent in the economy is fractional, but it adds up, just like music streaming. The question is, who realizes that value, the person who creates it, or the corporation that exploits it? And who determines a fair rate of compensation?

We live in a time where the big spy servers pass off their decisions — whether or not to pay artists fairly for their work, for example — as downstream artifacts of the technology, when in reality these decisions are essentially political. They screw us because they can, and we all get convenience in the short term, and a cultural desert in the longer term. The middle class in every creative field has disappeared, like the middle class of the economy more broadly. They’ve already nearly destroyed my job, and they’re coming for yours next.

BF: Your band is dynamite. The steel and lead guitar, jeepers. Are they this good live? Of equal importance — how are they to hang with?

JF: Thanks. They’re even better live. The rule in the band is you have to be an A+ hang first and foremost, and each of these guys is just aces to be with, low-key, funny as hell. They’re like family, and playing with them has been one of the grace notes of my life. It’s not easy to keep a band on the road, any band, and I’m lucky to have had some of the best musicians on their instruments in the last 40 years of American music — Eric Heywood on steel, Erik Koskinen on guitar, Jeremy Moses Curtis on bass, Billy Conway, and now John Convertino on drums — in my band, a couple of them for 15 or 20 years. They sure as hell aren’t in it for the money.