Some Notes on Mr. Joe Henry From Michigan
Joe Henry is Madonna’s brother-in-law, but he isn’t what you’d call famous. Although he was raised in Michigan, Joe Henry is not a Michigan songwriter in any quintessential sense. His lyrics don’t conform to the binaries of rust and leisure. His career resists such regional trappings. His “Great Lake,” on the T-Bone Burnett/Joe Henry produced Fuse is an elliptical meditation on the inherent boredom in beauty and divagation and a far cry from Bob Seger’s “Fire Lake,” which celebrates the idea of up-north as that putative region where work and mores are suspended. While Seger is known as an insider, a DIY Motor City original, Henry’s ethos is more ethereal; it exists in erasing his personality from the song, and, as a result, his songs and records present us with occasions we must attend in his proxy. While he is somewhere else, he’s painted his absence vividly. If his songs exist, as they must, it’s in the vicariousness of our experiences of them.
Henry’s first few records were squarely in the Americana tradition. In the early 90s he even used the Jayhawks as a backing band on a couple albums. On Short Man’s Room and Kindness of the World, Henry’s characters enact their plights with an ironic grin, while the Jayhawks’ fiddle and telecaster twang make the strange stories sound familiar. While many songwriters strike out for the ostensive truth, Henry avoids the faux-demotic trappings of telling it like it is. Authenticity and veracity miss the point. Joe Henry narrates with assured oblivion in mind, and this requires ironic distance from the self and the worlds that self might dream. The narrator of the song “Short Man’s Room,” an Overhill Cherokee man wandering from small town to small town while staying in countless inhospitable rooms, has no Ithaca to return to. Shuffling resignation constitutes a kind of protest; the past that’s been erased—mythical, historical, and geographical—gets re-inscribed in the perduring hyper-present. But to paraphrase Henry, you’re only as good as your knees, and Henry seems to vacate a genre as soon as he makes it beautiful for fear it might lapse into prettiness. The Americana song is a short man’s room, an inadequate container for the ideas he must enact.
It’s the late 90s. T-Bone Burnett gets ahold of him and together they produce Henry’s most critically-acclaimed record, Fuse. The band for this record includes Daniel Lanois on bass and Chris Whitley on electric guitar. Though produced by Henry and Burnett, the record has the feel of one of Lanois’ soundscapes. “Great Lake” and “Beautiful Hat” are real standouts here. With “Great Lake” my mind goes to Norton Shores on Lake Michigan in the dead of winter. The ruined stairs hanging from the bluff over the flooded beach are gone to volcanoes in the blue ice now. Joe Henry isn’t here, but I listen to the song as lake effect snow pours over us, occasionally pouring Bandol red wine from the decanter next to me. Burnett has him sounding like the Tragically Hip with the electric bass groove, the taut snare and plashing high hat 4/4 beat, those drums mic’d with an old RCA ribbon mic, ribbon mic on the hat and cymbals, SM 57 directional mic on the snare that makes the kit sound like breakwater on marram grass. Henry’s enigmatic lyrics, his lament that the lake’s too big for him, upend any romanticism one like me might hold for the region. It’s a symbolist’s lake, not a romantic’s. The song’s narrator slumbers through the breakers’ cinematics. The enigmatic Terri comes in from the cold and takes her coat off. Henry distrusts her laughter. He figures he’s been taken (why do I assume this narrator’s him? It runs against my thesis). If Joe Henry is to behold wonder, it’s in the built world of the song and not the world of nature.
Henry’s late career songs are more stripped down, but even more mystifying. We know who Orson Welles is, but we are unfamiliar with that stage door that allows us to levitate above the theater and Gary Street when soliloquy devolves into monologue. We don’t know what love is but we know several facts of love that emerge when Allison Russell sings with him on “The Fact of Love.” Henry isn’t telling stories anymore, at least not in the way Townes Van Zandt or Joni Mitchell or Guy Clark might tell a story. He’s soliloquizing on oblique, gnostic concepts. If he has desacralized the gospel and turned it into water, if our very blood tastes like honey now, if a droning progression on an open-tuned acoustic guitar becomes an open field where Henry’s symbolist poetics can work on us, then this strange music must be sacramental.
It’s late in his career when I’m introduced to Henry’s music by my friend, the Detroit record producer Bunky Hunt of Whistle Pig Records. Bunky first became interested in Joe Henry through the Daniel Lanois connection. Joe Henry, in addition to being a great songwriter, is also a well-respected record producer, and Henry and Lanois co-produced the 2002 Grammy-winning Solomon Burke record, Don’t Give Up On Me. When Joe Henry was returning to Michigan to play The Ark in 2019, Bunky talked me into tagging along. Henry had just gotten through a bout with cancer, and he was touring in support of The Gospel According to Water. It was a lovely concert, and one got the sense it was a bit of a homecoming with family and friends in the audience. Too often song lyrics get conflated with poetry, but I remember being struck by the poetry of what Joe Henry did. Henry quoted Rilke alongside an insight of his own about how cheap it is to put to melody what couldn’t stand on its own knees.
Henry told a story that night about LA in the 1980s that I’ll always remember. Sean Penn, his brother-in-law at the time, called him and told him to be ready in front of his apartment building in five minutes; they were going to dinner. Penn picked him up in a rusted-out Tacoma pick-up truck and took him to some casual Italian restaurant where they drank red table wine and dined with the writer Charles Bukowski. Henry is clear in this rendition that he doesn’t care for Bukowski’s writing all that much (he has decidedly better taste than that), but he was touched by something Bukowski said to him at that dinner. As Penn and others are trying to one-up each other with ridiculous bombastic stories to impress Bukowski, Bukowski draws Henry aside and says, “Hey, do you write any love songs?” Yes, Henry tells him, he does write some love songs. “So do I,” says Bukowski, “all my poems are love songs.” You can hear a pin drop in The Ark as Joe Henry transitions from this anecdote into “The Fact of Love.”
On the way home from the concert, we hit the neighborhood bar near my house for a few drinks. “His songs aren’t just these three-minute Rustbelt diamonds,” Bunky says as we sit down at a table in the corner. “His songwriting shows you a new level of possibilities.” We order another round and Bunky loads the jukebox with Henry songs from the app on his phone. The last tune that plays before we pay our tab to leave is, “In Time For Tomorrow (Funeral For Sorrow).” Out of the blue, I hear a vaguely familiar voice say, “That’s my cousin John. He’s the tall guy by the jukebox with the baseball cap on.” It’s my cousin Matt O’Neill whom I haven’t seen in years, not since before he left for Afghanistan. Hearing oneself described by an external voice that doesn’t know you’re listening has a haunting effect. Hearing one’s self described by an external voice that doesn’t know you can hear it is what it feels like to be lost in a Joe Henry song. I say goodbye to Bunky and tell him I’ll hoof it home from here. I turn to acknowledge my cousin. I know I’m not quite done with this place.
Multi-talented Cal Freeman took both photos provided in the article. These photos are taken at Norton Shores, Michigan.
