Joe Henry Goes South (By Southwest)
May 3, 1996 -- There are few people in the world with schedules as hectic as Madonna, who's now in London for the final month of "Evita" filming. So when her brother in law, singer/songwriter Joe Henry, came up with the idea for them to sing a duet for next month's all-star "Sweet Relief 2" benefit album for under-appreciated songwriter Vic Chesnutt, it took months for Madonna and Henry to be in the same place at the same time. But with her Sister's pasta as a lure, Madonna wound up in Henry's garage to record a Chesnutt-penned track called "Guilty By Association."
Joe Henry also says that song was irresistible because he sometimes sees his sister-in-law's celebrity as a bit of an albatross around his neck, career-wise. Legend has it Vic Chestnutt wrote "Guilty By Association" about his friendship with REM's Michael Stipe. Chesnutt, who became a paraplegic after a car crash, is currently on tour with Cowboy Junkies. Joe Henry is on tour too, supporting his seventh album, "Trampoline," I caught up with him recently in Austin, Texas while the city was being invaded by musicians much less famous than his sister-in-law for the South By Southwest music conference.
JOE HENRY: I don't like musicians as a rule, so to be in the same town with so many of them kind of makes me all squirrely.
TABITHA SOREN: Why don't you like musicians?
HENRY: Oh, they're an unreliable sort.
SOREN: Yourself included?
HENRY: Well I can hardly exclude myself from the gang, I suppose.
MTV: Joe Henry had been writing and recording albums that have tickled many a critic's fancy for years, placed not unfairly in a category where the words "country" and "folk" are often employed. For his new album, "Trampoline," Henry enlisted Page Hamilton of Helmet, a band not usually known for it's heartland sensibilities. So, how does this (Helmet's music) reconcile with this (Henry's music)?
PAGE HAMILTON, Helmet: Having me play the Joe Henry album is about as far musically as people would think. But really, we're very, very compatible. I mean, we both have the same passion for...
HENRY: He's an incredible rhythm player. Great textures and great sounds. And what he doesn't get to do at Helmet so much, is just, be a ferocious rhythm guitar player.
MTV: Much of Henry's appeal lies in his talents at writing lyrics, an uncanny ability to use very specific words to tell a very specific story. While "Trampoline" isn't exactly a wordless wall of sound, this time around, much of his energy went toward the music.
HENRY: The songs were starting to feel a little claustrophobic to me, in retrospect. Just how, kind of... how tight the narrative started to become, and how if you didn't catch all the words, you missed a lot of the story. And I just kind of... the more I worked, and the more I listened to other, different kinds of music, I realized that you don't have to be so specific to create a mood and to tell a story.
MTV: Henry happens to be the brother-in-law of mega-diva Madonna, and Sean Penn got his directorial debut on one of Joe's videos. But as it turns out, Joe's been brushing against either fame or infamy most of his life.
SOREN: Tell me about your connection with Jeffrey Dahmer.
HENRY: We went to elementary school together from fourth grade through seventh grade, played in the Junior High School band together.
SOREN: Did you always know that one day you'd be reading about Jeffrey Dahmer in the paper?
HENRY: No, he wasn't... he was kind of a funny kid, but, like a lot of kids at that age, you're funny.
SOREN: So, was he picked on as a child? Is it your classmates' fault that he turned out the way he did?
HENRY: No. I mean, jeez, we all got picked on, but we didn't all turn into cannibals.
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