One way to understand the elusive nature of Joe Henry’s art is to consider his tapestry of connections to this fall’s Duke Performances roster. Though he’ll team up with Carolina Chocolate Drops on September 25 at Reynolds Industries Theater, he could have just as easily been paired with Loudon Wainwright III at Reynolds on the night before, having produced Wainwright’s 2007 album Strange Weirdos, which was an outgrowth of their work together on the soundtrack to Judd Apatow’s film Knocked Up. He’d also be right at home at Reynolds on November 7 with Allen Toussaint, whose 2006 collaboration with Elvis Costello, The River in Reverse, Henry produced.
That Toussaint, Wainwright, and the Chocolate Drops are a diverse range of acts with distinctly different styles and sensibilities testifies to Henry’s knack for assimilating many different musical languages into his own broad-ranging repertoire. He’s done plainspoken country-folk-rock: That was him with members of the Jayhawks on the early-nineties records Short Man’s Room and Kindness Of The World. He’s also worked with some of the world’s top jazz talents: You’ll find Ornette Coleman, Marc Ribot, Brian Blade and Brad Mehldau among his cast of cohorts on 2001′s Scar. Dig deep enough into his catalog, and you’ll even find Henry dueting with pop megastar Madonna (on a cover of the late Vic Chesnutt’s “Guilty By Association,” from the 1996 Sweet Relief benefit compilation, Gravity Of The Situation).
As his own music has evolved, the line between tradition and invention has become blurred for Henry, perhaps even vanished altogether. Whereas in his earlier years, he was more likely to work within the musical forms he had witnessed, he’s now reached a point where everything has been internalized, and what comes out is, to reshuffle a famous quote from Duke Performances speaker Greil Marcus (February 2011), the sound of a new, weird America. I reached Henry via e-mail to find out how his work as a producer for artists ranging from the soul great Solomon Burke to the pop star Aimee Mann to the blues singer Bettye LaVette has affected his own approach to songwriting.
“I have always tried to write songs and record music irrespective of genre constraints,” Henry replied. “And working with artists such as the ones you name (and to those, I might add Salif Keita, Mose Allison, Harry Belafonte, Baaba Maal, Jimmy Scott, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott…) has made me additionally conscious of the fact that what I am truly trying to put my finger to has everything to do with our shared language, and nothing to do with my particular accent, so to speak. When I work in service to other artists, I am offered an aerial view of the waterway—when, working for years only on my own, was like trying to imagine the shape of a great lake while chin-deep in the middle of one. I see things more clearly for not having my persona entangled in a project—even if what I more clearly see is the smoke and unfailing mystery of the process.”
“How has that affected my songwriting? It has liberated me from ever thinking that a song must stand for something more or other than itself…from believing that what a song does is advertise my artistry, when in fact, what the best ones do is affirm our collective humanity. I don’t mean that to sound self-aggrandizing, because in truth, when that really happens, I disappear, and only the song remains.”
Check back later today to listen to Joe Henry’s song “The Man I Keep Hid,” from his 2009 album, Blood From Stars.
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