Joe Henry Albums (11)
What The Critics Say
Blood from Stars is the album Joe Henry's been getting at since Scar. He's worked with jazz musicians often, but he's never made a record that employs the form so prominently. His band includes Marc Ribot, Patrick Warren, Jay Bellerose, David Pilch, and now his son Levon on saxophones and clarinet, as well as vibist Keefus Ciancia. Engineer Ryan Freeland is as important as the players: he managed to give this record its strange yet welcoming sound. It begins with the short "Prelude," played by Jason Moran. It introduces all the characters here, with a note or two here, a chord flourish there. Some are immediately identifiable; others you've never met before and perhaps hope never to. Henry's love of traditional jazz has blossomed -- the album sprawls over history, genre, and song forms, but there is no consciously retro aspect in its presentation and it is not a jazz album. Many of these songs are based on the blues (and even folk-blues); some are standards-style pop; some walk out the jazz of New Orleans, St. Louis, and Kansas City from the early 20th century; some even rock -- a little. Many are dressed in horn arrangements and offbeat sounds that seem to enter in from the rafters. They drift in and out and are allowed to play a part in the songs. Who cannot relate to the swinging blues (à la "St. James Infirmary") led by piano, upright bass, acoustic guitar, and a minimal trap kit? The music seems to come from antiquity in "The Man I Keep Hid," but Henry's voice is right firmly in the historical present: his protagonist voices his desires and how they are thwarted -- usually by himself -- as horns, organs, piano, and rhythm section swell and offer the chaos just under the surface of the singer's voice. "Channel" follows it, a love song about disorder that is played as anything but. Henry's character asks simple questions that offer significant difficulties in his inner world, but he embraces them: "I want my story straight/But all the others bend/From wondrous to strange/To beauty at the end...." It's a haunting melody that would be -- if we had them anymore -- a parlor song. Both songs reflect something lost and hidden in the wires and satellites of modern life: that individuals -- no matter how lost, determined, angry, displaced, hopeful, or praying for redemption at any cost -- still have human voices that speak, at least on the inside, constantly. Musical traditions bend and blend into and through one another and are painted by the sounds Freeland allowed to enter from the ghosts in the walls, the ceilings, or up from the floorboards. "Death to the Storm" reveals this better than just about any track here, a simple blues with Ribot's electric guitar weaving through Henry's lines and phrases about characters -- including the protagonist, who could have come from Steinbeck, Dos Passos, or O'Connor. "Bellwether" -- another early 20th century jazz-blues -- is a modern tale of Sisyphus. He's climbing a hill, digging a well, changing his name, leaving his shame, etc., until the story gets better. Ultimately, Blood from Stars is the most sophisticated, redemptive, and romantic album Henry's cut; the love songs are simply raggedly breathtaking. It reflects an America that wasn't so much lost as consciously wiped away near the end of the 20th century. Its remnants still live, however, in the shadows of memory, and in the broken-hearted ghosts that continue to haunt its landscape and atmosphere, and sometimes even its people. Henry welcomes them, lending his voice to theirs in of all these songs. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Looking for the heart in the center of any Joe Henry recording since 2001's Scar is a labyrinthine exercise that ultimately leads to befuddlement, bemusement, and sometimes, outright frustration. Perhaps that is because it's on display at every moment. So big, so bruised, and papered with tattered words, phrases, and sad but true jokes that echo from a thousand haunted fire escapes and empty rooms where the walls are two-toned from furniture being moved out of them. It doesn't remotely resemble that red pillowed thing most musical romantics would consider when seeking something uniform and readily on display in a small, shiny, or even shattered case. Civilians has as many stories attached as any record Henry's written, but they're so finely crafted now that the singer almost disappears in their flickering appearances on the wall of the mind of the listener. It could be anyone in them, but you know them; that's what you do know. You have no real idea who the songwriter is, which means he's done his job perfectly. The first clues are on the cover and the inside sleeve, but that comes in a minute. First there's the practical stuff: the band on this date is essentially the same one that Henry and Loudon Wainwright used on Wainwright's Strange Weirdos album (that Henry collaborated on and acted and co-produced) that ended up, in its own skewed way, becoming the best soundtrack of 2007 for the film Knocked Up. The recruited are Bill Frisell, Patrick Warren, David Piltch, Greg Leisz and Jay Bellerose (other than Warren, the rest were a quartet who toured in support of Frisell's Good Dog, Happy Man album). Wainwright is here on backing vocals, and there are guests including Van Dyke Parks and Chris Hickey. The Section, a string quartet, appears on "Our Song." On the surface, this record is the other side of 2003's wonderfully surreal Tiny Voices, and a world away from 2001's hunted Scar where Ornette Coleman made his presence felt, known, and in his way informed with his spirit all the songs on the album, though he only really appeared on one. The fragmented, cibachrome soundscapes on Tiny Voices have been replaced by a band playing it (mostly) straight. They lay down Henry's tunes with the kind of subtlety, an underlying net that is required when walking this far out on the observational ledge, but since these are in the first person that's a sleight of hand dodge. The horns and other aspects of the Tiny Voices and Scar mosaics are completely absent, put in a closet for now in favor of something more seemingly organic. That said, those longing for a return to the more "rootsy" sounds of far earlier Henry records aren't getting that either. What this band plays can't be called rock or jazz or folk or pop or anything at all that falls inside the lines; it's music. And that's quite a thing. The mostly relaxed, snaky noise this group does make, accessible as it is, is every bit as lush and warm as its predecessors only in reverse. It's every bit the warm yet torn coat one needs to wear while standing alone in a cold wind without the sunshine for reassurance. And then there are the songs. They have many wise-acre wisdoms to impart, direct experiences from the front of walking the streets and alleys in the neighborhood that we all live in these days, known as Tension Heights. There is a repeat performance here of sorts, Henry recorded his own version of "You Can't Fail Me Now," the finest moment from Wainwright's Strange Weirdos. The difference is subtle but there: Henry's version feels more like a declaration; not of fear exactly, but hoping for an escape from the feeling, whereas Wainwright's was one of romantic surrender and desperate acceptance. Then there's "Parker's Mood," the most beautiful song on an album full of them. Named for one of Charles "Yardbird" Parker's most famous tunes (yeah, Henry's got cojones), it's either the story of a spirit falling out of a body or of leaving its legacy, there are clues here as to the evening of the saxophonist's demise as a result of hard, fast living, but there are also truths that what was left when he died was bigger than he ever imagined. Somehow in the last moment, perhaps we know that; perhaps not. The song is a mystery wrapped in acoustic guitars, standup bass, drums and that spectral Weissenborn guitar of Leisz's. The military dirge waltz that commences "Scare Me to Death," with Frisell's electric guitar, Leisz's mandolin and the snare, bass drum, and tambourine offers Henry just enough to sing a kind of blues that comes after waking one morning, looking across the kitchen table, and admitting every fault in the face of true intimacy. Frisell's uncanny ability to underline every line with exactly the right note brings the fear home. One wishes this stage of the game never arrived, but perhaps it was here all along. "Our Song" follows it. It's one of the greatest political songs written in the last 30 years and it doesn't feel like one. If one recognizes the people and places in the song, with Bellerose's rim shot snare softly keeping time with swirling, elegiac strings, a simply chorded piano, and that beautiful, big, woody double bass, all singing with one another behind Henry, who knows that Willie Mays was the 21st century's Walt Whitman -- or perhaps Edwin Denby -- was the embodiment of everything we once believed about this strange place we live in. According to Henry's protagonist who prophesies on the back side of the mountain: "Though it started badly and it's ending wrong/This was my country/This frightful and this angry land/But it's my right if the worst of it might/Still make me a better man..." The bottom line in these songs is simple: in dark times we still need to believe in something, even if it's in the goodness of our own last breath. God makes numerous appearances here, but mostly as one of the gang who is as guilty as all the rest but has more cards up his sleeve.Speaking of sleeves, the one on Civilians is quite something. It is illustrated with photographs by John Cohen, musicologist, historian, unheralded chronicler of the lost American soul, and banjo picker for the New Lost City Ramblers. There are two things that are very telling: the first is on the back cover: it's one of the artist Red Grooms hustling across Third Avenue in New York with a canvas -- blank on the side we can see -- in a wheelbarrow. Nearly smack dab in the middle of the booklet is another of the artist Bob Thompson teetering above his peers at Grooms' Delancey Street Museum (his studio), beholding a blazing light fixture. It most likely occurred at the staging of one of Grooms' great "happenings" (while Andy Warhol was still doing shop windows). These gatherings were great theater, and exhibits where art was alive and breathing, not observed. They were participatory events; acknowledgements of America's great tragic and comedic history inside a beat studio. Grooms loved vaudeville, the Keystone Cops, the circus a
What The Critics Say
Welcome to the humid, claustrophobic, darkness of Tiny Voices, songwriter Joe Henry's ninth album and his first for the venerable renegade venture Anti. Fresh off his production stint for Solomon Burke, Henry settled into an old Hollywood recording studio with a band that included Don Byron, Ron Miles, Dave Palmer, Patrick Warren, Chris Bruce, Jay Bellerose, and Jennifer Condos -- plus übermensch engineer S. "Husky" Hoskulds -- and came up with a song-suite more adventurous, weird, and perhaps even reckless, thank God, than anything he's ever dreamed of before. Cut mostly live from the floor, Tiny Voices is an aural montage seemingly shot in cibachrome with no discernible center except the rumpled, disillusioned but unbowed singer who imparts skewed observations, bold-faced lies, and sacred truths with stale, liquored breath, too much makeup, and wearing impeccable clothes. Remember Ornette Coleman, Marc Ribot, and Brad Mehldau hanging around on Scar? Right, but this is even more so. Tiny Voices is the sound of Hemingway contemplating the Cuban Revolution with William Gaddis, the sound of Buddy DeFranco and Jimmy Giuffre trying to talk to Miles Davis about electric guitars in an abandoned yet fully furnished Tiki bar in Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. All of this is the sound of these images as seen through the unflinching gaze of Robert Frank. But then, it is also the sound of the other side of the circus. In this torn big top that is teetering on the edge of economic oblivion, the band gets drunk after hours and gets its rocks off by skewering the performers in song for their very human weaknesses because they secretly feel compassion for them. Give a listen to "Sold," where grand and Fender Rhodes pianos are quietly taunting one another around clarinets and trumpets slipping along a quiet, unfamiliar stage and the singer cannot quite get his bearings but sings anyway, figuring he might understand his own language before the instruments run out of time and space. "Flag" and "Dirty Magazine" celebrate the underside of the underside, where everything is exactly the way it seems and that's the problem. Byron and Miles play it soft, sweet, faltering, and anything but straight. As Bruce and Henry unwind each other's strings and Jim Keltner lends a percussive hand for a two-drummer elegy on "Flag." It all swings, but it shimmers as more smoke pours up from the floorboards, too. Unearthly sounds come wafting in from the margins and the alleys; they unravel and just whisper themselves into extinction as Henry moves on, half a step at a time, iterating his tale of fragmented love. But this music on Tiny Voices is far from inaccessible. These are not art songs; they are pop songs hung out to dry and they become more themselves with every decaying moment. And yes, there is still great art in decay. With the ghosts of cinematic realism, the forgotten trampled immediacy of the Living Theater in its production of Jack Gelber's Connection, haunted jazzmen, hungry rockers, and burnt out sages visit empty Tin Pan Alley buildings in search of a song that was never written there. Henry and his band take American popular song by the lapels and prop it up even as it falls in "Loves You Madly" and allows it to list up one last drink to a yesterday that never really was in "Widows of the Revolution." What was ultimately left of the young Joe Henry yesterday at the bus stop has found its way into the darkness of today's nightmarishly lit nightclub with his black sense of humor intact and bleary, wizened eyes with a gaze just soft enough to see tenderness in brutality and humanity through the looking glass and bring it all to bear in a new genre of song: pop noir. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
For the last five years, Joe Henry has gradually taken his songwriting into hidden areas, exploring the different textures of shadow with occasional forays into the twilight of the human heart. Longing has been painted upon the smoky backdrop of every song he's written. His protagonists have been mixtures of Oliver Gant from Thomas Wolfe, the man whose passion was just beyond his reach, never quenching his thirst, to working cats that Raymond Carver has illustrated well -- men who've noticed the lack in their soul cavities when it comes to love, often realizing too late that it, and it alone, is the only thing humans have. And Henry, despite the increasing psychological and emotional depth of his lyrical character studies and an increasingly angular method of his storytelling, has always been able to put these varying literary tropes into love songs that register without a lot of fuss. They tell it, though it doesn't really matter exactly what, because the person who needs to hear them does. On Scar, his eighth album, Henry follows his other obsession down the rabbit hole: the myriad ways in which sound and texture can become musical instruments themselves in order to paint a song properly. Scar, his highly textured sonic meditation on love and its twisted redemptive power, features a list of highly visible musicians that help make this the album Henry's been trying to make his entire adult life. Producing and contributing to four soundtracks hasn't hurt Henry a bit in his quest to make his music finish the story his lyrics sketch out. With the help of producer Craig Street, Henry moves the bell further down the wire of soulful yet accessible pop music. The opener, "Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation," slips its smoky way into being with a whining guitar by Marc Ribot, a vibraphone by Brian Blade, and Henry's cigarette-stained vocal: "Sometimes I think I've almost fooled myself/Spreading out my wings above us like a tree/Laughing now out loud/Almost like I was free/I look at you as the thing I wanted most/You look at me and it's like you see a ghost/I wear the face all of this has cost/Everything you tried to keep away from me/Everything I took from you and lost." It's a blues tune, where steel guitar is trumped by Ornette Coleman's alto blowing his deepest soul-blues. He thins the lyric yet digs its knife in deeper. By the tune's nadir, the protagonist has shrunk to the vanishing point and disappears in a wisp of smoke. From here the disc moves into a broken, slippery Cuban mambo driven by Brad Mehldau and Blade. Ribot chimes the lyric through and the love song asserts itself in earnest: "Don't tell me to stop/Tell the rain not to drop/Tell the wind not to blow 'cause you say so/ Tell me love isn't true/It's just something we do/Tell me everything I'm not/But don't tell me to stop." Ribot rings through the rhythm section, filling it with droning melodic lines that knot themselves around Henry's vocal. The string sounds give the impression of a son band from time immemorial winding their way into the mix. Despite Ribot's seductive riffing and Blade's New Orleans' double-time rhythm, "Mean Flower" is a ballad coming from the center of a heart so broken, all it shines is prismatic light. Its protagonist has literally nothing left to lose by his proclamation; he's been through the purification process and speaks only to make sure the beloved who's ripped from him his essence knows that he knows the truth. He is not judgmental in his brokenness, but is illuminated in the purity of his burning, bleeding heart. (If Leonard Cohen's notion that "There is a crack in everything/That's where the light gets in" is true, Henry's singer is all light.) The final track, the album's namesake, is an opus at 14:21. Lyrically it's as direct as anything Henry's ever written, but it's an entire film score rolled into one love song. It's poetry too genuine, so metaphorical and rich in imagery, that it would be a disservice to quote from it. It is the most beautiful of the many beautiful songs Henry has written. Texturally, everything but a clarinet line paints the landscape as an early New Orleans Sunday, and the acoustic guitars are buried in a slow, rhythmic mix. Here Henry takes his cinematic vision and lets it illustrate brokenness and determination, celebrating them both as being as good as it gets, and that's plenty fine. The fact that after the songs fades it becomes a backdrop for Coleman to blow is just fine; he lays out the soul and blues in his horn in the void. Scar, with its rich poetic tapestries and complex musical and atmospheric architectures, is Henry's highest achievement thus far. He has moved into a space that only he and Tom Waits inhabit in that they are songwriters who have created deep archetypal characters that are composites -- metaphorical, allegorical, and "real" -- of the world around them and have created new sonic universes for them to both explore and express themselves in. Scar is a triumph not only for Henry -- who has set a new watermark for himself -- but for American popular music, which so desperately needed something else to make it sing again. ~ Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Given Joe Henry's chameleonic career, it should come as no surprise that upon finally hearing his long-unavailable debut album Talk of Heaven (finally reissued in 1999 on Astor Place), it sounds quite unlike any other record in the singer/songwriter's catalog -- with its melancholy folk-rock approach (closest in spirit to his 1989 major label bow Murder of Crows), the disc almost collapses under the weight of its massive debt to Bob Dylan. Where by later efforts like Kindness of the World and Trampoline Henry's learned to channel his influences into something unique and organic, here he self-consciously apes his idols, suppressing his own natural instincts in the process -- in hindsight, one can certainly hear the emergence of a talent to watch, but judged solely on its own terms Talk of Heaven leaves a lot to be desired. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Henry has often made stylistic departures, so Fuse shouldn't be all that shocking. Yet, "Fat" sounds freaky till the beats soak in; the faux soul of "Want Too Much" is cloying. But ultimately, the new groove-a-delic Henry knows how to work the sound as he mixes and matches old and new, as on the Dylan-y bits with a "millennial" backing track (Daniel Lanois and T-Bone Burnett step in to mix); the subtle, catchy chorus in the opener "Monkey"; the laid-back and fuzzy "Angels"; and the fantastically evocative and poetic mysticism in the title song. There's upbeat melodicism in (I love you with my) "Skin and Teeth." But why that George Benson-like guitar solo during "Curt Flood"? ~ Denise Sullivan, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
On Trampoline, Joe Henry moves away from the country-rock that earned his reputation in the early '90s. Though there are still some remnants of his Gram Parsons and Neil Young influences, Henry attempts a more atmospheric, rock-based sound on Trampoline, which explains his choice of Helmet guitarist Page Hamilton as musical collaborator. The shift in sound is effective, but it does sound as if the singer/songwriter is still trying to become comfortable with his new direction. It doesn't help that the album is slightly uneven, as Henry tries to write more literate lyrics, making his songs almost into short stories. When his ambitions do work, Trampoline is a stark, affecting listen, and even when they don't, the album is admirable. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
'Kindness of the World'
Release Date 1/1/1993
Tracks 12
Label Mammoth
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
On this album of more strong songs, some have definite country leanings. Henry covers Tom T. Hall's "I Flew Over Our House Last Night," and he wrote "She Always Goes" with George Strait in mind. ~ Brian Mansfield, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
A stunning collection of beautiful country- and folk-inflected songs that shift and sway with spare acoustic arrangements. While the songs are not autobiographical per se, the lyrics are a central focus, bringing a rich assortment of complex characters to life with abstract but vividly rendered details. The band includes Gary Louris and Marc Perlman from the Jayhawks. ~ Kurt Wolff, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Major label release, a name producer, noted session men, this album couldn't lose, right? Well, not quite. Although time has caught up with Murder of Crows, sometimes Joe Henry gets lost amidst all the busy work and fancy arranging of his songs. True, there are some great songs here, notably "Six Feet in the Country," "Here and Gone" and "Step Across the Mountain" which will remind one a lot of Counting Crows. Here is a glimpse at a young songwriter being pushed too quickly to come up with the goods. Sometimes, the waiting is the hardest part... ~ James Chrispell, All Music Guide
