Joe Henry

Joe Henry
Background information
Birth name	Joseph Lee Henry
Origin	United States
Genres	Alt-Americana/Jazz
Occupations	Singer-songwriter, musician, record producer
Instruments	Vocals, guitar
Years active	1986–present
Labels	Profile, Mammoth, ANTI-

Joe Henry (born December 2, 1960) is an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and Grammy award winning producer. He has released 12 studio albums and produced multiple recordings for other artists.^[1]

Early life

Henry was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, grew up in the Detroit, Michigan area, and graduated from the University of Michigan.

Career

1985 to 2005

Henry moved to Brooklyn, NY in 1985 and began performing in local music venues. He released his first album "Talk of Heaven" in 1986. The album earned him a recording contract with A&M, which subsequently released the albums Murder of Crows in 1989 and Shuffletown in 1990.^[2] Shuffletown, produced by T-Bone Burnett, represented a shift in musical direction towards the "alt country" genre.^{[citation needed]} Henry’s next two recordings, Short Man's Room (1992) and Kindness of the World (1993), utilized members of the country-rock band the Jayhawks. The song "King's Highway" was later recorded by Joan Baez.^{[citation needed]} For his 1996 album Trampoline, Henry incorporated guitarist Page Hamilton of Helmet and a reviewer at Trouserpress called the album "idiosyncratic broadmindedness." ^[3]

1999's Fuse was recorded with producers Daniel Lanois and T-Bone Burnett. The album was called an "atmospheric marvel" by one reviewer^[4] and Ann Powers of the New York Times wrote: Henry has "found the sound that completes his verbal approach."^[5]

Scar, released in 2001, featured jazz musicians Marc Ribot, Brian Blade, Brad Mehldau and saxophonist Ornette Coleman on "Richard Pryor Addresses A Tearful Nation." According to Allmusic's Thom Jurek, the album is a "triumph not only for Henry—who has set a new watermark for himself—but for American popular music, which so desperately needed something else to make it sing again."

2003's self-produced Tiny Voices album was Henry's first recording on Epitaph's Anti label. Jurek described this album as "the sound of....electric guitars in an abandoned yet fully furnished Tiki bar in Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles."

Henry's wife talked him into letting her send Madonna a demo of his song "Stop," which was reworked and recorded as "Don't Tell Me" (from Madonna's 2000 album Music). Henry's own tango-tinged version of the song appeared on Scar and was featured in an episode of "The Sopranos." Henry and his sister-in-law recorded a duet, "Guilty By Association," on the charity album Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation, and collaborated on the songs "Jump" on Confessions on a Dance Floor, "Devil Wouldn't Recognize You" on Hard Candy, and "Falling Free" on MDNA.

In the early 2000s, Henry was an inaugural member of the Independent Music Awards' judging panel to support independent artists.^[6]

2006 to present

After producing the Grammy-award-winning album Don't Give Up on Me by Solomon Burke,^[7] Henry produced additional records and in 2006 opened up a home studio where he often collaborates with recording engineer Ryan Freeland and Los Angeles-based musicians such as Jay Bellerose, Greg Leisz, David Piltch, Patrick Warren and Keefus Ciancia.^[8] In September 2006, Henry and Loudon Wainwright III began composing the music for the Judd Apatow movie Knocked Up in Henry's home studio. Some instrumentals were used as background score for the film while other songs appeared on Wainwright's 2007 Strange Weirdos which Henry produced.

In 2007, Henry released Civilians, which was described as "a rich, acoustic affair that returns us to Henry's rootsier sounds".^[9] The final track on the album, "God Only Knows," was used in a "TCM Remembers 2008" TV commercial. Bonnie Raitt's 2012 album Slipstream, which Henry produced, contained versions of two songs from Civilians.

In 2009, Henry released his ninth solo record, Blood From Stars which incorporates orchestral blues with guitarist Marc Ribot, pianist Jason Moran and his son on saxophone. The album focuses on facets of blues with a sprinkling of jazz, rock and pop and traces the rugged history of American storytelling.”^[10]

In May 2011, Henry released the album Reverie with simple acoustic instrumention on guitar, upright bass, piano and drums.^[11] "When you listen to Reverie, especially on headphones, you can hear traffic in the background or a neighbor calling her dog. It's not always a pristine recording environment. Henry not only left the windows open at his basement studio, but also put microphones on them."^[12] "But there was this singer-songwriter environment, this post-Dylan fallout, of people who think that pages of your diary set to music are songs, and that the more 'honest' songs are, the better they are. And that's the greatest misconception of American popular music: that if you're being honest, you're being entertaining."^[13]

Reception

Henry has been described as "a modest-selling 'critic’s darling' with a reputation for pushing the envelope"^[14] and who writes "songs [that] don’t fit into an easily defined box"^[15] and instead draws influence from folk, blues, jazz, rock and country.

Personal life

Since 1987 Henry has been married to Madonna's sister Melanie Ciccone and they have two children.^[16] Henry and his brother David Henry are working on a biography of Richard Pryor. ^{[citation needed]}

Discography

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Joe Henry.

• official website
• Review of Civilians album at Variety
• Joe Henry on the Internet Movie Database
• Interview at Exlaim
• Interview with HitQuarters