Tunesmith waxes cinematic with Fuse
Like every ambitious star, Joe Henry really wants to direct. But not movies. One spin through Fuse--the latest Vista Vision-esque album from this astute folk-pop composer--and you'll get the picture.
From the opening muffled kick drum creep of "Monkey" through a beatbox-rhythmed "Fat" and a murky, threatening "Great Lake," to the funereal finale "Beautiful Hat" and its
carnival-hokey cover of '30s standard "We'll Meet Again," this surreal set flickers past in smoky Wilder-style reels. You don't listen to it so much as view it. One track, "Want Too Much," pastiches so many melancholy images and sounds (offhanded whistling, lone Porgy and Bess-inspired trumpet, flashes of subtle orchestration, chilled visceral whisperings) that it plays like a noir-ish short subject.
Which is exactly as it should be, says rabid film buff Henry over scrambled eggs at his favorite Hollywood greasy spoon. He uses terms like "mood," "environment" and "atmosphere" to describe his music, and says he intended "Want" to appear "disembodied, like a Bu–uel dream."
The rest of the self-produced Fuse (Mammoth), Henry believes, visually communicates regret. "Unspeakable regret," he says, "because there's so much of it that these characters have." And sure, he talks like Cecil B. De Mille. "That's because I like a record to feel the same way a movie works," he explains. "It's not just, 'Here's 11 songs I've strung together!' You want one song to fall into another the way one movie theme falls into another, so they all feel like parts of the same piece. And I'm always using film references when making a record, like 'Now I want this song to feel like The Last Detail.'" After a few minutes spent praising the work of Fellini, Kubrick and Bergman, he settles on one Herculean effort by Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo, a production that went into such obsessive overdrive it launched a shot-by-painful-shot documentary, Burden of Dreams. Henry's eyes get a faraway glimmer. "Fitzcarraldo," he sighs. "I love the way that works as a film, and I'd love to make a record that felt like that."
He may have. The process began with '96's minimalist Trampoline, wherein the Midwest-bred multi-instrumentalist radically reinvented himself five albums into his career ("I find my older records unlistenable," he scowls). He co-produced Trampoline with keyboardist Patrick McCarthy; this time, home-recording Henry (assisted in mixing by Rick Will, Daniel Lanois and T-Bone Burnett) was the only one calling 'Cut!' The project might've taken a year, but it was far from leisurely. He and wife (and Madonna sis) Melanie Ciccone had a new baby. "I was working in accelerated, small fragments of time. The baby'd go for a nap, and I had anywhere from a half hour to two hours to work, literally. But I found I could do an incredible amount of work in a very short period of time, just by knowing that was my parameter. I had to make choices and move."
Henry has one more scene to reveal: On Fuse's bonus CD-ROM "interview," he was too shy to go on camera. Instead, Billy Bob Thornton chatters away about the record, billed as "Joe Henry." And the real Henry can't stop cackling about this sight gag. "Like Robert Fripp once said," he concludes, "'As soon as you hear a musician talking about self-expression, you know it's gonna suck!' And I agree completely."
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