Catching Up With... Joe Henry

Writer: Josh Jackson, photo by Melanie Nissen
Feature, Published online on 07 May 2008 Page 1 of 2 Next >

Singer/songwriter Joe Henry has spent the last dozen years charting one of those careers that has quietly put him on the path towards legendary status. Aside from releasing 11 eclectic and adventurous records of his own (including last year’s Civilians), he has a knack for getting involved in a host of interesting collaborations, from Aimee Mann and Ani DiFranco to Solomon Burke and now Allen Toussaint.

Paste: Of the many, many things you have going on right now, one is a project with Allen Toussaint—why don’t you start off with that?
Henry: I’m just finishing that one, actually. I’m going to be in New York in a week and a half to mix it. I made a beautiful record, if you don’t mind me saying so, with Allen in New York over four days in March that has him featured as a piano interpreter—which has never happened before. I sourced it from jazz that either originated in New Orleans or is associated with New Orleans in the ’20s and the ’30s. Even though the source music is old, he’s approaching it in a very unique way, and with the assistance of some of the boldest jazz musicians out there currently.

Paste: You got your start in the rock world. But when you recently played the Lincoln Center, you had folks like Brad Mehldau and Don Byron playing with you. Are you feeling much more comfortable now playing jazz?
Henry: You know, I’ve never called myself a rock musician any more than I would ever call myself a jazz musician. I’m not being coy; I did come up listening to rock music and basing my songwriting from the guitar for the most part, as many people from my generation did, but I was always listening to everything. I was certainly informed by folk music at the same time, or maybe even before, I started listening to anything called rock music. Soul music as well, and I didn’t see a distinction between those things; I didn’t know that there was one necessarily. I listened to Johnny Cash; the first album I bought was Johnny Cash’s San Quentin. It still has one of the nastiest electric guitar sounds, courtesy of Luther Perkins, that you’ve ever heard on a record. That sounded like rock ’n’ roll to me, and so did Ray Charles for that matter.

Paste: You can probably make a better argument than most anybody for not really clinging to any of those distinctions, but how would you describe your approach to music?
Henry: Well, in a very real way, Josh, I don’t. First, I felt like I certainly have been treated as if that’s a stubborn stance to take. I don’t do it to be stubborn. I have to say that when I began I saw very little distinction in different genres of music and then I started to work myself and I was always told that I had to find a way to name what it is that I do in particular so they would know what section to put it in in the record store, and then the more that I worked I realized that no, I think I was right the first time. I don’t think it’s beneficial to me or anybody else at a certain point to get hung up on distinctions of music genre. I do understand—you know I walk into a record store, too, when there used to be record stores, and go to the jazz section, go to the vocal section or go to the folk section or go to the rock section. I do know what that means. But in terms of you and I talking about the conceit of creating music, for instance, I don’t think it’s helpful and I think it’s less and less valid to talk about things in those distinct categories. Because anybody, certainly my age, has been exposed to all kinds of music and it all becomes a part of your language. When I was really young and hearing Ray Charles and Johnny Cash and Jimmie Rogers and Roger Miller and Louis Armstrong and Jim Nabors all at the same time, I didn’t understand that there was a difference between them. I really didn’t. I knew that I responded to some things more than other things. But there was nobody there; my parents weren’t people of leisure, and they didn’t sit around playing records. They weren’t there to tell me that Glenn Campbell was different than Ray Charles. So I really did just start ingesting things and making distinctions based on what was meaningful and what wasn’t, usually based on songs and somebody’s voice. So I think that somebody who has come up roughly in my same time frame, especially once the CD boom happened and all kind of music that had been unavailable for years got reissued, it was impossible not to be influenced by all of it. I listened to a radio station out of Detroit when I was in high school, and a woman named Judy Adams on the public station there used to have an afternoon program and she would play, in a row, Leadbelly and Coltrane and Edith Piaf and a whole side of The Basement Tapes before she would come on and announce what we had just heard. And I took it all in in equal measure. You asked me if I feel more comfortable in the jazz world than the rock world. I feel most comfortable with liberated musicians who approach a song like a song.

Paste: Well, that attitude has got to make it easier to jump from working with Rosanne Cash to working with Allen Toussaint.
Henry: Sure, in the same day, you know? I had a journalist ask me recently if I was the only person, if I imagined that I was the only person, who’d worked with both Ornette Coleman and Madonna, and I said, “Well, if you add Ramblin’ Jack Elliot to that and make a trifecta out of it, I certainly am the only person who’s worked with all three.” But it makes perfect sense to me that I would work with all three, and that I hope to continue to in some way or another.

Paste: And you’ve managed to carve out a nice little career, balancing your own music and producing others, kind of along the lines of a T-Bone Burnett and Buddy Miller and not many others. What’s the trick in balancing it all out?
Henry: Well I think the trick, going back to the beginning of our conversation, is that I see less and less distinction; I don’t see them as different jobs anymore. I think there was a time before I was producing anyone else that I would have to really shift gears and change my thinking to accept the idea that I might produce someone else’s record, that I might be working from the control room and not from the other side of the glass. But the more opportunity I started to have, I started to see very little distinction in the way I approached the work. Whether it was my voice or my song coming out of the speaker, the goal was the same. Is it meaningful? Does it make me want to put it on again? Am I putting a light on the song? Am I putting a light on the artist? Whoever that is, if it’s Mavis Staples or Aimee Mann or Elvis or Billy Preston or myself, in particular, I find it all sort of the same job. And no one’s more surprised than me to realize that. You know, I certainly have to acknowledge T-Bone as a literal mentor in that way because he was the first person that employed me in any kind of production capacity as kind of “his associate.” He had just produced a record of mine in 1990 and I moved to Los Angeles and he asked me to come to work for him as his production assistant or production associate. And because he was the first person that did, and I understood that he was an artist first and he was working as a producer from the point of view of being an artist, that it became very natural for me to adopt the same posture. I still find it really hard, and I almost would never introduce myself to anybody as a record producer, but I say that I’m an artist who produces records. And I think that’s more to the point of my philosophical approach, and I bet if you asked Buddy Miller the same thing, he might respond in a similar way.

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Catching Up With... Joe Henry

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