New Times Los Angeles
April 11, 2002
I, Joe Henry
For the record, Joe Henry is not Richard Pryor.
By Dan Reines
For the record, Joe Henry has never been paralyzed in an automobile crash -- or, for that matter, any other kind of crash. He has also never monkey-sat for an absent lover or been bitten by an ornery parrot (that we know of). And in case you've heard his latest album and were, somehow, confused, it's worth making plain: Joe Henry is not Richard Pryor. Just, you know. For the record.If you weren't sure about all that, you can perhaps be forgiven your confusion (well, OK, not on the last point). Because Henry, easily one of the finest songsmiths you've (likely) never heard of -- or at least have probably never heard -- isn't your average singer-songwriter setting down his daily ruminations into a series of musical journal entries. Rather, he has the relatively curious habit of centering his bluesy, coolly hypnotic tracks almost exclusively on other people, often fictional other people, people like the laid-up crash victim from Trampoline's "Medicine," or the lovelorn monkey-watcher from Fuse's "Monkey," or the bird-chomped casualty from "Edgar Bergen," off last year's brilliant Scar. And while that in itself is not so unusual -- there are some writers left who don't treat their music as a confessional booth -- what's curious is the way he writes about those other people almost exclusively in the first person, as if his lyrics were confessionals. "As soon as you sing the word I, people
think you're talking about you, yourself," says Henry. "To almost a laughable degree. I've read things about myself from journalists supposing things about me as a person based on the songs I've written. It's been a long time now, but somebody wrote in an article
just kind of matter-of-factly that I was alcoholic and divorced," both of which were true of a Joe Henry character -- but not of Joe Henry.
Henry says first-person is "a great writer's gag," lending immediacy to a song's narration, but his songs are rarely autobiographical. "You can either look in or you can look out," he
says. "And I think of looking in as [mining] a very finite space, whereas looking out is infinite."
"It wasn't a conscious decision," Henry says. "The people I was listening to [when my tastes were formed], it never occurred to me that they were writing about their lives, or that they were supposed to be. I thought songwriters were like filmmakers, and I still do.
You know, "Hey, I made a Western, now I want to make a circus picture.'"
If that's his working model, then Scar would be Henry's Citizen Kane. No, not because it's the finest album ever made, though it is damn good -- quite possibly Henry's best, and most definitely one of the best releases of 2001. Rather, like Kane, Scar deals with strivers who fall short, people who chase dreams that, in the end, don't always live up to the advanced billing. Like lovers left vulnerable by damaged relationships, for example: "Should I love you more than I do?" asks the pained narrator in "Struck." "Or pray to love you less?"
On the surface, Henry's songs are as unassuming as his name, as straightforward as his clean, rounded good looks. But the lyrics have layers of meaning. Take Scar's heartbreaking opening track: "I look at you as the thing I wanted most," goes the lyric, "You look at me and it's like you've seen a ghost." As a song about love insufficiently requited, it's moving. Add the title -- "Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation" -- and suddenly Henry's inside the mind of a man who, as he puts it, "desired acceptance from a country that he had reason to loathe."
Of course, there is the occasional bit of himself in Henry's work. Scar's title track is a poignant love letter to Henry's wife (who, as it happens, is Madonna's sister): "I love you with all that I am," he sings, "And you love me with what you are/As pretty as a twisting
vine/A mark so fine/But still a scar."
Not that Henry set out to write "Scar" as a personal message. "When I was in it, [I realized] I was referring to something very specific in my own life," he says. "I was not speaking in a character."
He was speaking, for once, as Joe Henry.
"Well, yeah," he says mischievously, "though I don't refer to myself in the third person that way."
"But yeah, I was aware that this was myself, and that I was addressing my relationship with my wife. And once I realized what was happening, it was just a matter of, well, can I do it anyway? Can I make it work? Can a song be good enough even if you didn't know that I was writing about my own relationship? Would it still stand up?"
It's something that most writers never think twice about, and apparently "Scar" doesn't signal any kind of trend. Among the new songs Henry's airing out during a recent mini-residency at Largo is "This Afternoon," a song about a 15-year-old Cuban boy
entertaining an Australian businessman on the day the revolution began. Told in the first person, of course.
"Of course," says Henry. "How else would you go about it?"