Singer-songwriter Joe
Henry — the literate purveyor of a kind of country-tinged, folk-imbued, smokily
jazzified, contemporary “adult music” that in a far better world would be
slapped heartily on the back and reside comfortably at the top of the pop
charts — has been making solo albums since the mid-’80s or thereabouts. But
you might know Henry better by his funkily imaginative production jobs for
the likes of Aimee Mann, Elvis Costello, Bettye LaVette and Mary Gauthier,
not to mention that ace 2003 Grammy Award–winning Solomon Burke disc, Don’t
Give Up on Me. Henry also composed and produced the soundtrack to the Judd
Apatow comedy Knocked Up, in collaboration with his hero, Loudon Wainwright
III.
Henry has a new solo
disc out on Anti- called Civilians. His first in four years, it’s an often extraordinarily poignant
set of ruminations on the shaky state of our state and the enduring value
of true love in times of trouble. The album’s mostly somber themes are
given rich and satisfying fields of play with the aid of guests including
guitarist Bill Frisell and pianist-synergist Van Dyke Parks.
On Civilians, Henry weaves the personal and the political with
such deft and dark-witted lyrical prowess that the painterly arrangement
and mix of the music might go unnoticed. Yet that sound is an integral part
of the album’s thematic thrust. It’s a warm, thick, usually close sound,
with spare acoustic bass and brushed drums, rolling piano chords and
crystalline guitars. And when Henry sings, he whines high and trilly like
Dave Edmunds, through old ribbon mikes and just a touch of slap back. It’s
a semicontemporary sound, coming off like a layering of times and places,
people and things.
This supremely crafted
music is made for listening to, no doubt about it. And to do that kind of
thing right, a musician needs to take his time. For Henry, that was
crucial. He finds, too, that his diverse experiences as a producer
invariably add a lot to his palette when it comes time to record his own
material.
“I’ve been very
surprised to find out that in producing other projects, the satisfaction is
not really any different from making my own records,” he says. “I wouldn’t
have imagined such a thing before I was doing a lot of producing. I would
have been agonizing to find myself putting my own ‘artistic vision’ on
hold. But everything I do that facilitates something meaningful coming out
of a pair of speakers is really gratifying.”
With the exception of
one track, Civilians took just
three days last January to record in Henry’s basement studio in South
Pasadena. By the time he was ready to record, the pervasive lyrical themes
and emotional angles had surfaced and made themselves clear to Henry. That
the album feels in sum so solidly conceived, and weighty, like an epic
Western, is probably due to the organic way Henry allowed those themes to
emerge, and the subject matter that lay just beneath the surface of his
consciousness when he originally sketched out their design. His approach to
composing and arranging songs, then sequencing them in a meaningful way, is
a lesson plan in the modern art of composition.
I'm always writing,
and songs kind of go on a pile,” he says, “and at a certain point, songs
start grouping together and implying a body. When I see that happening,
it’s intriguing to me, then I kind of take direction from that, and start
writing accordingly. Then a couple of songs that seem significant to the
business at hand appear, and they shed a new light on what you already
have. You just start sculpting it, and it starts to take its own shape.
It’s like writing a book, or making a movie: It’s easy to see which scenes
are lacking, and where the story needs to be fleshed out.”
Hearkening back to the
stately marches and gentle waltzes of very old American musical forms,
“Civil War” was the first song Henry wrote for Civilians. Its subject matter, rustic rhythmic cadence and
panoramic instrumental cascade served as both lyrical and sonic stencil for
many of the songs that followed, which Henry characterizes as “emotionally
political and religiously emotional.”
“By the time I recorded
it,” he says, “I understood that it was distinctly a template. I didn’t
make a decision to write in an oblique poetic way about politics, but when
I saw that that was happening and surfacing in the writing, I did make the
decision to let it happen.”
On Civilians, the emotional and sensual effect of Henry’s
careful juggling of time and place — what we commonly refer to as atmosphere — is at times so strong as to make you feel a bit
woozy. It’s an album whose almost opulently burnished resonance invites one
in as if to submerge. Befitting its ostensible theme of how hard it can be
to justify one’s patriotism — but how pretty damn hard it is to let it go
too — Henry likes to single out the kind of Americans with whom he feels
proud to align himself, and uses their stories to dig a bit deeper than the
merely political.
With reference to the
legend of the madly obsessive Charlie Parker, the gentle shamble and
surprising chords of “Parker’s Mood” bring home, says Henry, “the idea that
sometimes some thing that obsesses you, energizes and compels you, can also
be the thing that destroys you.”
The album’s centerpiece
is “Our Song,” in which Henry imagines seeing Willie Mays
in a Home Depot
in Arizona,
shopping with his wife and puzzling out what’s become of his semibeloved USA:
“This was my country,” says Willie Mays, and “it’s my right if the worst of
it may still make me a better man.”
Up to and including a
brief respite for a jaunt through the Hoagy
Carmichael–ish “I Will Write My Book,” Civilians is built to best experience it as one would a
really good movie, where you’d buy your popcorn, settle into your seat and
declare yourself in for the duration. That’s the ideal scenario, anyway;
taken separately, the songs are also remarkably self-contained and durable.
However, says Henry, “Civilians contains a bigger story, far beyond the
individual stories it contains.”
