Can you hear him now?
Joe Henry has been quietly making underappreciated masterpieces for years
By MARTY HUGHLEY
More than 15 years into his recording career, Joe Henry is well aware of the ironies that abound in it, such as a pair of observations he brought back from a recent press tour of Europe. Though he had gone to promote his new album, "Tiny Voices," he found there was much interest in his 2001 release, "Scar," of which he noted "one, the French regard it as a masterpiece and, two, it's not available there -- although many journalists wrote about it anyway."
Such is Joe Henry's world. He makes great records and hardly anyone hears them. The choruses of praise from critics and cognoscenti, like the music itself, gets lost amid the blizzard of corporate entertainment product and hype.
The odd overseas fate of "Scar" Henry chalks up to the perils of dealing with Disney, which owns Mammoth Records. "There's nothing I can do about the fact that they don't care about me, they don't care about this kind of record and they especially don't care about Europe," he says in a phone interview, sounding matter-of-fact. Even in the United States, "Scar" sold only in the neighborhood of 20,000 copies, despite landing on many critics' album-of-the-year lists (including top honors in The Oregonian).
Perhaps "Tiny Voices" will fare better, now that Henry has signed instead with the independent label Anti-, cozy home to such figures as Tom Waits and Daniel Lanois, and the company for which Henry produced Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Solomon Burke's latest album, "Don't Give Up on Me."
But Henry doesn't seem terribly concerned with his sales. You might wonder how he can afford to keep making such artistically ambitious albums, enlisting top musicians including jazzmen Don Byron and Ron Miles (on "Tiny Voices"), Brad Mehldau and even the legendary Ornette Coleman (on "Scar").
He explains that he simply works backward from whatever amount of money he can get as an advance from the label, factors in the musicians and studios he wants to use, then figures out how many days of work that allows him. The money he made for writing the lyrics to "Don't Tell Me," the hit by his sister-in-law Madonna, he insists, is for straightening his children's teeth, not for inflating his ego.
Henry continues to follow his restlessly creative and literate singer-songwriter muse. A decade ago he was working with the Jayhawks and cutting seminal alt-country classics including "Short Man's Room." By the late 1990s he was using drum loops and samples on the distinctive "Fuse."
"Scar" was elegant and dusky, full of jazz embellishments and a finely orchestrated tension. "Tiny Voices" borrows its predecessor's crepuscular palette but roughs up the edges.
This time Henry presented the musicians with skeletal versions of the songs. "The idea was just to say, 'Here's the shape of the song, here's the melody and the lyric.' So the moment of discovery is the moment you're recording. There's a level of energy and excitement that can't be replicated. Often there's a thing that happens about the second or third take of a song -- where you're getting the hang of it but everybody's still digging and scratching -- that I find highly musical. By the fourth or fifth take, people usually start pulling back and things become more mannered."
For Henry's tour-opening show at Dante's, the singer-guitarist will be accompanied only by drummer Jay Bellerose and bassist Jennifer Condos. "I can't possibly tour with a band of eight," he says, "and since I can't, I'm inclined to go the other way."
What the stripped-down approach should highlight is that Henry is a writers' writer. His elegiac blues "Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation" from "Scar" so moved its subject that he asked Henry to write a movie about the comedian's life (a project in limbo). And the evocative vignettes of "Tiny Voices" reconfirm how artfully he can convey complex ideas, from emotional truths to penetrating social observations.
You might say these songs are more Joe Henry masterpieces.
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