Speaker 1: Pushkin. Just a quick note here. You can listen to
Speaker 1: all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist,
Speaker 1: which you can find a link to in the show
Speaker 1: notes for licensing reasons, each time a song is referenced
Speaker 1: in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect all right.
Speaker 1: Enjoy the episode. Joe Henry is likely one of the
Speaker 1: best living singer songwriters that you've never heard of. But
Speaker 1: even if you don't recognize his name, you've probably heard
Speaker 1: his work. He's been at it for thirty four years,
Speaker 1: having released fifteen solo albums on three Grammys, and produced
Speaker 1: music for the likes of Elvis Costello, made his staples
Speaker 1: Bonnie Rait and his sister in law Madonna. Yeah that Madonna.
Speaker 1: During her cowgirl phase in the early two thousands, she
Speaker 1: turned Joe's song Stop into her hit Don't Tell Me.
Speaker 1: Joe Henry's latest studio album, his fifteenth, The Gospel according
Speaker 1: to Water, was released in November, almost exactly a year
Speaker 1: after he was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer. In
Speaker 1: this interview with Bruce Headlam, Joe talks about the artist
Speaker 1: who gave him strength after his diagnosis, and also about
Speaker 1: working with Elvis Costello. In the late great New Orleans
Speaker 1: legend Alan Tucson, just weeks after Katrina. This is broken
Speaker 1: record liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Richmonds.
Speaker 1: Here's Bruce Headlam and Joe Henry from Pasadena, California. Joe
Speaker 1: starts things off by playing something from his new album,
Speaker 1: a song called the Fact of Love. Thank you for coming,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me. And that was a song
Speaker 1: from your new album, which we want to talk about.
Speaker 1: But by way of introduction, longtime singer writer, probably one
Speaker 1: of the best songwriters of the last one thousand years
Speaker 1: or so, So tell me about that song first, the
Speaker 1: Fact of Love. It's called it was the last thing
Speaker 1: I wrote before recording the new album. When I recorded
Speaker 1: this new record, I did not know I was making
Speaker 1: a record. I needed to record some demos. I had
Speaker 1: this rush of new songs. I'd never had a batch
Speaker 1: of songs appear so quickly, to the point where I'd
Speaker 1: not even made iPhone demos, you know, to keep track
Speaker 1: of the basic architecture. And I can't read or write music.
Speaker 1: So when I learned something it's no I wish I had.
Speaker 1: I wish I had How do you write the lyrics down?
Speaker 1: And then I just think that if I go back
Speaker 1: to them, the music will be embedded, and mostly it is.
Speaker 1: Once in a while something slips away, which is why
Speaker 1: I try to get into the habit of making a
Speaker 1: really just rough phone recording of something when it's brand new.
Speaker 1: But these songs came in such a flurry that I
Speaker 1: would have a new song and think, oh, I should
Speaker 1: just quickly sketch this out, and then another song would
Speaker 1: begin to appear, and I think, oh, I better pay
Speaker 1: attention to this one, and then I just do both
Speaker 1: of them. Well, pretty soon I had ten or eleven
Speaker 1: songs that had no reference at all other than lyrics
Speaker 1: written on a page, and I thought, I really need
Speaker 1: to document this in some way so I don't forget them,
Speaker 1: and also so that I can stand back and evaluate
Speaker 1: them in some way, which you can't just do as
Speaker 1: readily when you're performing them to hear them. So I
Speaker 1: went to an old friend's studio downtown and just blew
Speaker 1: through everything with a few friends. Didn't even listen to
Speaker 1: playbacks of much of it, just trying to get them down.
Speaker 1: And I got home with them and realized that something
Speaker 1: more had happened. But also say that the songs came
Speaker 1: in such a rush, Bruce that at one point I
Speaker 1: just wanted them to stop, which is not a common
Speaker 1: thing for a songwriter to think aspiring songwriters, Oh, they
Speaker 1: just showed upday, somebody just on the front law. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they grow up like dandelions overnight, you'd be amazed. But
Speaker 1: I really needed to get them in hand. I really
Speaker 1: wanted to play through them enough to get fluid with them.
Speaker 1: And it's a really different engagement for me to be
Speaker 1: practicing finished songs than writing songs. Maybe two days before
Speaker 1: these sessions that we're supposed to be demos, my wife
Speaker 1: was finishing a piece of sculpture. She's a visual artist,
Speaker 1: and I said, I was walking past and I said,
Speaker 1: there's a piece of unearthed stone that looked like a
Speaker 1: torso and she was painting on top of it. And
Speaker 1: I said, what do you call that? And she said, UM,
Speaker 1: it's called the fact of Love. And I remember just going, fuck,
Speaker 1: I hear it sounds spring loaded. I know that if
Speaker 1: I pay attention to this for a moment, that there's
Speaker 1: a song there and there, and very quickly, And once
Speaker 1: I finished that one, I kind of thought, Okay, that's
Speaker 1: that feels like a pretty complete bracket when I think
Speaker 1: about what the earliest of these songs is, and I
Speaker 1: really realized that that needed to happen, and then I
Speaker 1: could step away from that part of the process. Was
Speaker 1: your wife happy you took the title for I think
Speaker 1: she was. I didn't change the name of it to
Speaker 1: my pending divorced I think she was really pleased. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, I find a lot of songwriting begins that way.
Speaker 1: For me, A phrase, an image, a word that I
Speaker 1: don't know how it was to describe it, except that
Speaker 1: it is spring loaded. And I have this sensation that,
Speaker 1: very much like opening a bottle of champagne, you sort
Speaker 1: of get one time for the cork to really pop,
Speaker 1: and if you're not prepared to deal with with that,
Speaker 1: you don't. You don't engage that because it'll go flat.
Speaker 1: Did that that opening phrase and some of the guitar work,
Speaker 1: did that come with the initial song or those things
Speaker 1: you put on later? Or was at on a separate
Speaker 1: track somewhere? How did that Does it come together? As
Speaker 1: it happens differently all the time, Bruce, But in the
Speaker 1: case of that song, I'd heard that title late in
Speaker 1: the evening. The next morning, I was up very early
Speaker 1: it was still dark, and I picked up a notebook
Speaker 1: and I just remember kind of writing essentially those three
Speaker 1: verses in chorus. Just wrote it down like I was
Speaker 1: taking dictation. A lot of the records sort of appeared
Speaker 1: this way, and for whatever reason, and this is not
Speaker 1: common necessarily, I walked through the room. I have a
Speaker 1: lot of guitars laying around, and picked one up, put
Speaker 1: the capo on the fourth fret as if I knew
Speaker 1: that that's where it lived melodically as a key. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that. I had no reason to think it
Speaker 1: was in F sharp. I just put the capo there
Speaker 1: for some unknown reason, and just put the guitar my
Speaker 1: lapp and played that opening motif. I didn't think about it.
Speaker 1: I just reached and it was sort of there. I'm
Speaker 1: making this aw sound very mystical because it is. I'm
Speaker 1: not being evasive. It's just the way that it happens.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a there's an inherent quality to music,
Speaker 1: as there is to living, that is inherently mysterious. And
Speaker 1: I do think, and I've said it in other moments,
Speaker 1: our job is never to dispel mystery. Our job is
Speaker 1: to abide mystery and stand with it, be an alliance
Speaker 1: with it, because there's a big part about living that's
Speaker 1: just inherently mysterious, always has been, always shall be. And
Speaker 1: the sooner we make peace with the fact that there
Speaker 1: is something else at play that we do not control,
Speaker 1: I think the more we can sort of be in
Speaker 1: collaboration with whatever life is asking. You know, I think
Speaker 1: back to Joseph Campbell when he said, you have to
Speaker 1: let go of the life you imagine so you can
Speaker 1: have the one that's actually waiting for you. And there's
Speaker 1: a certain kind of surrender that I think is essential
Speaker 1: to almost all productive living, but creative life in particular.
Speaker 1: You know, you just sort of have to surrender into process.
Speaker 1: And I don't mean surrender as in resignation. I mean
Speaker 1: surrender as in radical acceptance. Speaking of resignation radical acceptance,
Speaker 1: you had a tough year and a half. Do you
Speaker 1: want to explain a little bit of that? Sure? A
Speaker 1: year ago Thanksgiving? So you know, what is that fourteen
Speaker 1: months ago something like that, I got a diagnosis of
Speaker 1: stage four prostate cancer. And when I got that phone call,
Speaker 1: and it really was like a movie, you know, picking
Speaker 1: up the phone very innocently one day, you know, I
Speaker 1: felt like Bob Newhart, Hello, and there it was. You know,
Speaker 1: It's like somebody opened a door onto a cyclone and
Speaker 1: my family and I all stepped into it. I was
Speaker 1: not prepared, even though I'd been in some i'd head
Speaker 1: back pain for well over a year. I had been
Speaker 1: misdiagnosed three times. And I also, you know, I'm a
Speaker 1: touring musician in my late fifties, and I was in
Speaker 1: a really serious car crash when I was a teen.
Speaker 1: So back pain is something I've just sort of learned
Speaker 1: to live with. It's not intense, but it's present. It
Speaker 1: has been enough often enough that it was easy for
Speaker 1: me to think, I've just come off the biggest touring
Speaker 1: cycle of my entire working life. And I don't know
Speaker 1: any musician in their late fifties to tours who doesn't
Speaker 1: have back issues. It was easy to just sort of
Speaker 1: accept that it was no significant thing until it was.
Speaker 1: And next thing I know, there's somebody. I'm sitting in
Speaker 1: front of a doctor who very irresponse, irresponsibly I've I've
Speaker 1: learned he had very little to go on, just sort
Speaker 1: of blurted out to my wife and I that he
Speaker 1: thought I had like three to seven months to live,
Speaker 1: you know, And I lived with that as a new truth,
Speaker 1: you know, for a full week until I met my
Speaker 1: oncologist that I worked with at UCLA, who assured me
Speaker 1: that's not, in fact what I was forced to accept,
Speaker 1: you know. He said, I look at you know, I
Speaker 1: look at your whole life, not just this diagnosis. And
Speaker 1: you know, I think of this as as chronic disease management.
Speaker 1: It's not a terminal diagnosis. We help a lot of
Speaker 1: people like you. But I really did live through, you know,
Speaker 1: a week of real terror. The terror didn't end there.
Speaker 1: It changed shape, became a little bit more stealth, but
Speaker 1: I still had a you know, a pretty rough go
Speaker 1: and even though I responded to treatment almost immediately, I
Speaker 1: mean almost immediately, I was out of pain physically, but
Speaker 1: the psychic specter of that shadow is something real, and
Speaker 1: it changed me, you know. I mean it's kind of
Speaker 1: supposed to. What did it do to your songwriting? During
Speaker 1: that time, I was writing with a new urgency. I've
Speaker 1: always written a lot. I try to be writing all
Speaker 1: the time. Does mean that I always finish a lot
Speaker 1: of things. But at the time when I was first
Speaker 1: diagnosed and my wife Melanie was encouraging me to maybe
Speaker 1: seek out a support group. There's a lot of good
Speaker 1: ones around. They help a lot of people. And I said, look,
Speaker 1: I don't know that I won't get there eventually, but
Speaker 1: that's not how I process things. I don't see that
Speaker 1: as my path right now. I'm going to have to
Speaker 1: write my way through this, because writing is how I
Speaker 1: sort of process anything of significance in my life. And
Speaker 1: I realized that the way that fear and sadness had
Speaker 1: put a cap on my imagination, every time I could
Speaker 1: get something going, whether it was a palm or a song,
Speaker 1: that my imagination re engaged, I could see beyond what
Speaker 1: felt like an immediate and restricting way of thinking, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, sort of psychically, the doors and
Speaker 1: windows were open again, and I could see beyond, you know,
Speaker 1: just the immediate fear of a moment. And so I
Speaker 1: just kept writing. And I know in retrospect that I
Speaker 1: was writing to live, because that's that reconnected me to
Speaker 1: myself in a way that my diagnosis when it first happened,
Speaker 1: cut me off from who I believed myself truly to be.
Speaker 1: Did it were your days? Though? That that fear just
Speaker 1: closed all that down sure, Oh absolutely. I still have
Speaker 1: days like that where I'm not fit company for anybody.
Speaker 1: There's less of that because I'm in remission. Now. I
Speaker 1: feel better than I have felt in a couple of years. Actually,
Speaker 1: last year I felt like I at the beginning of
Speaker 1: the year, I was in a trench, And this year
Speaker 1: kind of feels like it has begun, like I've I've
Speaker 1: been shot out of a cannon. You know, when you
Speaker 1: were in that trench, what music did you listen to?
Speaker 1: A lot of Lewis Armstrong, a lot of Charlie Parker,
Speaker 1: a lot of Robert Johnson. Those were, Um, I've always
Speaker 1: been really important musicians for me, But for for I
Speaker 1: started to say, for whatever reason is if I don't know? Um, well,
Speaker 1: what's the reason that? Because those artists in particular, I
Speaker 1: feel that their humanity is so rawly and viscerally available.
Speaker 1: You know, I hear music that was recorded last month
Speaker 1: and it already sounds like, you know, an artifact, like
Speaker 1: one of those mosquitoes they bring out of the Pyramids,
Speaker 1: trapped an amber. You know, I can see it, but
Speaker 1: it's not alive. For me and time I've listened to
Speaker 1: Robert Johnson and I've been listening to him since I
Speaker 1: was fifteen. He sounds like a living person jumping out
Speaker 1: of a speaker. Charlie Parker does that to me too.
Speaker 1: I can't. It's not background. To me. It is like
Speaker 1: somebody walking into a room, and I am endlessly affirmed
Speaker 1: by the spirit of that music. Not to mention the
Speaker 1: fact that, certainly, in the case of Bird, he was
Speaker 1: in other respects not the most functional adult in the room.
Speaker 1: You know, he was a disturbed and troubled man. Yet
Speaker 1: not in spite of but I think because of he
Speaker 1: puts so much raw beauty into the world, and it
Speaker 1: makes me think a lot about the African American experience
Speaker 1: in particular, where I look back at some of my
Speaker 1: greatest greatest heroes, you know, Lewis Armstrong, Duke Ellington in particular,
Speaker 1: and think about the brutality that experienced and yet their
Speaker 1: response to it was incredible beauty. We'll be right back
Speaker 1: after this break. We're back with more of Bruce's conversation
Speaker 1: with Joe Henry. You know, you describe yourself primarily as
Speaker 1: a sort of a storyteller, and you you reject the
Speaker 1: kind of confessional model of songwriting. I think you've literally said,
Speaker 1: and I have the quote here the greatest misconception of
Speaker 1: American popular music that if you're being honest, you're being entertaining,
Speaker 1: and you tend to tell stories even in your own work,
Speaker 1: even the first and second person, but they're they're obviously
Speaker 1: about characters. Yeah, did that change a little with this album?
Speaker 1: Are there are there elements of this album you feel
Speaker 1: came directly out of your recent experience? Well, there's always
Speaker 1: elements I can recognize after the fact. I don't often
Speaker 1: and don't to be aware of that when I'm writing. Sure,
Speaker 1: I mean, there are things that now look back and
Speaker 1: going to go, well, that's that's really obvious to me,
Speaker 1: why in that moment that's what would appear. But look
Speaker 1: for starters, Bruce. I think that that all artistry, regardless
Speaker 1: of the medium, is storytelling, from the most abstract painting
Speaker 1: to film to you know, I think it's all storytelling.
Speaker 1: It's not all linear narrative, and yet they all seem
Speaker 1: to provoke or want to provoke some sense of narrative
Speaker 1: that we reach for. And I think musically is especially
Speaker 1: potent because it, you know, it's not nailed to the floor,
Speaker 1: you know ingmar Bergmann said, that all art aspires to
Speaker 1: work the way that music works, you know, because it's
Speaker 1: it's there's no defense against it. It appears like weather,
Speaker 1: and it changes the day. And I think, certainly the
Speaker 1: songs that have been most important to me my whole
Speaker 1: listening life, our songs that are specific enough to engage
Speaker 1: me and make me think of that something real is transpiring.
Speaker 1: But they're not so overt as to nail everything to
Speaker 1: the floor. There's not just one way to enter and
Speaker 1: accept this story. I know that as a writer, I'm
Speaker 1: fairly impressionistic. I do think I come out of a
Speaker 1: very particular folk tradition. And when I say folk, I'm
Speaker 1: saying that very broadly. And you know, I mean what
Speaker 1: he got through as a folk singer. So is Joe Strummer,
Speaker 1: you know. So was Bob Marley, you know, so is
Speaker 1: Lewis Armstrong. You know. But it's funny that in only
Speaker 1: just a few years ago I had a brand new
Speaker 1: record out. I'm trying to think which one it was.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was Reverie. Anyway, I had performed the whole
Speaker 1: of it the night before in Los Angeles, and my
Speaker 1: son was in town from Brooklyn. He plays with me frequently,
Speaker 1: and I was sitting out on the front yard under
Speaker 1: a big pine tree the next morning with my wife, Melanie,
Speaker 1: and my son lev On and my wife. You know,
Speaker 1: we've been together. We've been married almost thirty three years.
Speaker 1: We've been together longer than that. And I met her
Speaker 1: when I was sixteen and she was fifteen. She said,
Speaker 1: it finally dawned on me. I don't know why it
Speaker 1: took me so long that you were a Southern writer.
Speaker 1: You know. I mean, I'm from North Carolina. Originally, I
Speaker 1: didn't really come of age there, but it is part
Speaker 1: of my DNA. Both my parents are natives in North Carolina.
Speaker 1: And she said, all the you know, your door, wealthy
Speaker 1: Flannery O'Connor all makes sense to me now in a
Speaker 1: way that it didn't before. I don't know what it
Speaker 1: was about that batch of songs, that performance that allowed
Speaker 1: her to hear me as coming out of a tradition
Speaker 1: of Southern writers. Were your parents Southerners? They are still are,
Speaker 1: They're still with us, and they still they moved back
Speaker 1: to North Carolina, you know, we moved around a lot
Speaker 1: when I was young. My father was an executive engineer
Speaker 1: for Chevrolet, and not true anymore. But back in the day,
Speaker 1: if you were a lifer in that racket, you know,
Speaker 1: all roads led to Detroit. So we moved to Detroit
Speaker 1: area just as I was beginning high school the summer
Speaker 1: before my tenth grade year, so that would have been
Speaker 1: summer of seventy five, and my wife, Melanie, her family
Speaker 1: lived there and we went to the same high school.
Speaker 1: I met her there. I was friends with two of
Speaker 1: her older sisters before I met her. But I feel
Speaker 1: like I came of age, you know, among the Great Lakes.
Speaker 1: But I do know that in my core, I am
Speaker 1: a Southerner, even though I spent a lot of my
Speaker 1: early life trying to distance myself from that legacy, because
Speaker 1: what I thought about the South as a young person
Speaker 1: was not something I was proud of. Your parents were
Speaker 1: also devout where they they are. My parents are Southern Methodists.
Speaker 1: Oh was out right, So I was, you know, I
Speaker 1: went to church as a young person, just like I
Speaker 1: went to school, which means if I wasn't sick, that's
Speaker 1: where I went until I was, you know, fifteen, and
Speaker 1: my older brother David was seventeen. We were very close
Speaker 1: and at that point of our lives, we were staying
Speaker 1: up you know, terribly late of a Saturday night listening
Speaker 1: to music and such. And it was one Sunday. My
Speaker 1: mother came and tried to rouse this out, and we
Speaker 1: were not sprightly, and she said, well, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to force you to go, and I said you're not.
Speaker 1: She said, you're fifteen. You have to make your own
Speaker 1: decisions about this, and then I didn't. I didn't return.
Speaker 1: I want you to play another song, but first I
Speaker 1: do have a bone to pick with you at which
Speaker 1: is I think maybe the first song I ever heard
Speaker 1: of yours was the Ohio Plane Crash. And I mean
Speaker 1: that song I just thought was incredible. It captured experience
Speaker 1: so beautifully because when I was a kid, I saw
Speaker 1: a plane crash on an air show on Lake Ontario.
Speaker 1: And then I found out years later you made the
Speaker 1: whole thing up I did. Isn't it better that I
Speaker 1: did it? Maybe? Well you either either that or I
Speaker 1: now can only remember that experience yea through your song.
Speaker 1: But your song is about a kid, right because they're
Speaker 1: la dangling. You know what that song was about? For me?
Speaker 1: If I throw my mind back, there was the idea
Speaker 1: and it's in some ways it's it hinges on a
Speaker 1: concept that I learned from again I'm talking about I'll
Speaker 1: talk a lot about short story writers. They've been as
Speaker 1: impactful to me as songwriters. Um, it's something I learned
Speaker 1: from both Raymond Carver and Alice Monroe. And I just
Speaker 1: talk endlessly about Alice Monroe. I love her. But this
Speaker 1: concept of telling a dramatic story and decidedly undramatic language,
Speaker 1: and the idea of the Ohio Airshow plane crash was
Speaker 1: that with this tragedy as a backdrop, there is an
Speaker 1: estranged couple sort of you know, living within each other's proximity,
Speaker 1: not necessarily comfortably in in a shared moment. And so
Speaker 1: I thought the idea of staging this kind of bland
Speaker 1: disconnect between two lovers while as a backdrop this plane crashes.
Speaker 1: You know, the plane crash is not the story. The
Speaker 1: couple's estrangement is the story. The character speaking has is
Speaker 1: a strange from his lover, and he's at this gathering,
Speaker 1: this you know, holiday, this air show and sees his
Speaker 1: ex in the in the crowd, and he's and he's
Speaker 1: sort of reflecting on you know, not you know, that
Speaker 1: odd magnetic poll or maybe the opposite side of a magnet.
Speaker 1: That is that you still feel that that there's energy happening,
Speaker 1: but it's repelling. It's repellent. It's not you know, connecting.
Speaker 1: Could you play another song for us? And then, well,
Speaker 1: I can. I played you the last song that I
Speaker 1: wrote for the new record. I'm going to play you
Speaker 1: the earliest of them, all right. My wife and I
Speaker 1: were last fall for two months on the west coast
Speaker 1: of Ireland. I was invited to do a writing residency
Speaker 1: at a small art college. I was starting to have
Speaker 1: real pain episodes then. I don't mean to lean too
Speaker 1: heavily into that. It just was a It was a
Speaker 1: specter of what was happening, even though I didn't I
Speaker 1: didn't know what weight to give it. But I only
Speaker 1: bring it up now because I hear this song now
Speaker 1: completely sharing the same language of the songs that followed
Speaker 1: after I knew what was going on, and I just
Speaker 1: think I feel like, in some way, you know, my
Speaker 1: body knew the songs, knew something before I consciously knew something.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean? You should have gone to
Speaker 1: the doctor and said, listen to this. Yeah, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is called mule. Based on our conversation. I don't want
Speaker 1: you to overinterpret your own work. But I would like
Speaker 1: to know where the line silence deepest sound came from. Well,
Speaker 1: in this little village where we were on the west
Speaker 1: coast of Ireland called bally Vaughan, it just became really
Speaker 1: evident to me two things while I was there. The
Speaker 1: silence that I heard there was unlike how I thought
Speaker 1: to characterize silence. You know, it is not just the
Speaker 1: void of sound. Silence itself has a character. And I
Speaker 1: was really aware that the silence I was hearing was
Speaker 1: not fragile. It couldn't be just defeated by a random sound,
Speaker 1: a random sound, a cow, a truck, a train. You know,
Speaker 1: nothing ended the silence. It just punctuated it. It let
Speaker 1: me know something about its character, its depth. But I
Speaker 1: realized that there was a silence there that was part
Speaker 1: of the landscape, part of the culture. It also makes
Speaker 1: me think of your own recording style. You've produced a
Speaker 1: lot of records. You can't you record very quickly. You
Speaker 1: tend to do it with people sitting in a room
Speaker 1: playing this the sound bleeds. Why do you like that sound?
Speaker 1: Because it's human? You know, if people were sitting in
Speaker 1: this room playing music together, there's a you know, the
Speaker 1: sort of a vendette diagram where things overlap, and if
Speaker 1: you're sitting here, you read it very naturally that, you know,
Speaker 1: the harmonic overtones of an instrument bleed into those of another.
Speaker 1: But when people in so called modern recording world, you know,
Speaker 1: this idea of isolating everything, and then when you're mixing
Speaker 1: trying to use reverbs and delays and such to recreate
Speaker 1: an atmosphere that was very naturally and more compellingly actually
Speaker 1: in the room if you knew how to take that picture.
Speaker 1: I just find that endlessly and chanting. I don't know why.
Speaker 1: I know that on the records that I've made and
Speaker 1: a lot of older records that I love. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of what the drums sound like is how
Speaker 1: they're hitting the piano mic across the room, and that
Speaker 1: describes space. You know, you hear people playing a room together,
Speaker 1: you hear the size of the room. You know, the
Speaker 1: difference between them playing in a like a gymnasium sized
Speaker 1: studio and in a living room. You know, when sound
Speaker 1: finds limits of walls and ceiling, you know, you it's
Speaker 1: describing space. I'd like to be able to picture where
Speaker 1: people are. Place matters and I can vividly imagine where
Speaker 1: this is taking place. You know, those records where some
Speaker 1: of the energy is understood because of the limitation of
Speaker 1: the room, how instruments are colliding. I think about a
Speaker 1: record called Money Jungle that Duke Ellington made in the
Speaker 1: early seventies with Max Roach and Charles Mingus, and it's
Speaker 1: an intense record. You know, these upstarts of Mingus and
Speaker 1: Max Roach, you know playing, you know with this grand gentleman.
Speaker 1: He was the wildest of them. Duke was the most
Speaker 1: adventurous of all of them. But you can really hear
Speaker 1: their sound hit each other and hit the walls. You
Speaker 1: can feel natural compression of the space. And I like
Speaker 1: being able to picture them on top of each other
Speaker 1: up close, which they had to have been for that
Speaker 1: sound to be created. Before we started, I mentioned to
Speaker 1: you that one of my favorite pieces that you produced
Speaker 1: was Ann Peebles covering Bob Dylan's Tonight I'll be staying
Speaker 1: here with you from a great, great record you made.
Speaker 1: Thank you. You're great players, and your Billy Preston and
Speaker 1: Alan Toussant and all kinds of people. You said, she
Speaker 1: she wasn't she didn't hear that song, How did you
Speaker 1: how did you make that song hers? Or how did
Speaker 1: how did you help her make that song? Hers? I well,
Speaker 1: as I recall, I sent it to her and she
Speaker 1: was a bit unmoved. Not that she didn't like the song,
Speaker 1: she just didn't necessarily hear it in the context of
Speaker 1: the project as I had pitched it. And I just said,
Speaker 1: I think you're maybe stumbling on the production or Bob's voice,
Speaker 1: like you think, oh, that's a country song, but you know,
Speaker 1: country music, soul music structurally shares so many of the
Speaker 1: same so much of the same vocabulary, And all I
Speaker 1: had to do really was to ask and to think
Speaker 1: of it as a soul song. I said, just try
Speaker 1: singing through it, you know, at the piano or something.
Speaker 1: Just try singing through the song and maybe not worry about,
Speaker 1: you know, the reference recording. And then I think she
Speaker 1: heard it immediately because she sent me a demo of
Speaker 1: just heard a piano player playing through it and it
Speaker 1: was completely gorgeous. Right. I want to just mention two
Speaker 1: producers you've worked with, not even as producers, just just
Speaker 1: to know what you learn from him. The first is
Speaker 1: Alan to Song. What was it like working with him?
Speaker 1: Did he give you You were producing him at that point. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he produced so many Yeah, great great songs. What was
Speaker 1: that like? Oh man, how do I talk about that?
Speaker 1: Alan changed my life? You know, and when he passed,
Speaker 1: my wife saying, well, you'll never have another friendship like
Speaker 1: that one, because he was a you know, he was
Speaker 1: what my southern people referred to as a touched individual.
Speaker 1: You know, he was always an only part way of
Speaker 1: this world. He was always partly of another. He was
Speaker 1: a bit of a supernatural character. And I just seemed
Speaker 1: to when I met him. I just seemed to understand
Speaker 1: that we were maybe a very unlikely duo in some ways.
Speaker 1: But we worked together on many projects over ten years.
Speaker 1: You know, we traveled together. I took him to Germany
Speaker 1: to a festival I was creating, had him play, you know,
Speaker 1: with Michelle and Dago Cello at that festival. And you know,
Speaker 1: when I was producing Aaron Neville, Alan was the piano player.
Speaker 1: We went to a lot together. Even though truth be told,
Speaker 1: that I'm not I don't offer this up with any
Speaker 1: disrespect to Alan's son and daughter, who would you know,
Speaker 1: were his managers, But they and Alan's business partner didn't
Speaker 1: think that what I was asking Alan to do when
Speaker 1: I was producing the Bright Mississippi and American tunes. You
Speaker 1: know that those were not good ideas. They really thought
Speaker 1: he should walk the other way. And I don't know why,
Speaker 1: even with his own choir, they're singing in his ear
Speaker 1: saying at I don't know why you're doing this. This
Speaker 1: is not what you should be doing right now. And
Speaker 1: then he would say, yeah, but I'm gonna go with
Speaker 1: him anyway. I don't really understand that. We seem to
Speaker 1: have an unspoken understanding of each other. And I thought
Speaker 1: he was a miraculous man and many any ways. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that inspired me about him was
Speaker 1: as deep as he'd been in it. You know, he
Speaker 1: was already in the rock and roll Hall of Fame
Speaker 1: by the time I met him. Not that that means
Speaker 1: anything in particular other than he was a made man.
Speaker 1: You know, he was already on the mountain that he
Speaker 1: was so willing to be outside of his comfort zone.
Speaker 1: And he was significantly outside of his comfort zone. He
Speaker 1: was very uncomfortable coming into those pair of records. He
Speaker 1: had allowed me, he had invited me to create a
Speaker 1: concept for him and I in the case of Bright Mississippi.
Speaker 1: I picked all the music, I populated the room. I
Speaker 1: gave him these songs to learn as an assignment, you know,
Speaker 1: And I'm still I still marvel at the fact that
Speaker 1: he was willing to go there. You mentioned the little
Speaker 1: piano break he plays behind Anne in It's not I'd
Speaker 1: be staying here with you, And that was something I
Speaker 1: learned from him right away. It was the first thing
Speaker 1: I asked of him on that first day. We had
Speaker 1: cut the tune, and then I had this idea that
Speaker 1: I wanted him to play a piano break after the
Speaker 1: bridge and okay. He sits at the piano and he
Speaker 1: plays through, and I go on the talk back nervously
Speaker 1: and say, would you like to hear that back? And
Speaker 1: he said, I know what happened? What did you think
Speaker 1: of it? And I said, well, I guess you know
Speaker 1: what I think I need to hear it back. He said, okay,
Speaker 1: I'll wait, and I listened back and I said, I
Speaker 1: like it a good bit. Okay, then, but that thing
Speaker 1: of not really owning what I needed, and you know,
Speaker 1: under the guise of oh, you probably want to hear
Speaker 1: that back, and then I'll base my response on how
Speaker 1: I think you feel about what you just did, and
Speaker 1: he was he wouldn't have it. He was sort of
Speaker 1: respectfully insisting that I occupied that chair, and he did
Speaker 1: a few things like that, like the day Mavis was
Speaker 1: there and that was a beautiful reunion between the two
Speaker 1: of them, and he didn't have to do this at all.
Speaker 1: But at one point, maybe Us speaks to him across
Speaker 1: the control room and she was having such a great time.
Speaker 1: She said, Alan, this is so great being here with you.
Speaker 1: And when I make my next record, I'm gonna come
Speaker 1: straight down to New Orleans to you. He said, oh, maybe,
Speaker 1: as that's fine, but when you do, bring him with you,
Speaker 1: because he's the reason we're here. He's the reason this
Speaker 1: is happening. And I thought that was just the most
Speaker 1: generous thing. It was just overwhelming. Yeah, yeah, it just
Speaker 1: seems like and he had to be impeccibly dressed when
Speaker 1: he said he was always always. When we were making
Speaker 1: the The River and Reverse, you know, we jentaled most
Speaker 1: of the work in Los Angeles. But Alan's feeling was,
Speaker 1: if this record is gonna have my name on it,
Speaker 1: this is on maybe like ten weeks after Katrina happened,
Speaker 1: he said, that's the album he did, yeah, Elvis Costella, Yes,
Speaker 1: and Alan said, if this is any way that any
Speaker 1: of this project could be done in New Orleans, I
Speaker 1: want it to be. You know, I don't want to
Speaker 1: just talk about I hope music comes back. I want
Speaker 1: to be part of bringing it back. And at that
Speaker 1: point we weren't even Elvis through it to me and said,
Speaker 1: that's up to you. You're the producer, you know. And
Speaker 1: I said, look, I don't even know if that there's
Speaker 1: drinking water there. I mean there's a war zone. And
Speaker 1: I called at the time my younger brother, his brother
Speaker 1: in law at the time, was a doctor in New Orleans.
Speaker 1: So I got in touch with him and said, what's
Speaker 1: the scene down there? I mean, as their food, as
Speaker 1: their safe water. I don't you know the idea that
Speaker 1: we would come down there. I don't want to feel
Speaker 1: like a photo op, which you couldn't have because it
Speaker 1: was Alan's home. He had every reason and every right
Speaker 1: to go want to work there, but I wanted to
Speaker 1: be respectful of the moment at the same time, and
Speaker 1: this doctor that I called said, you know, look, if
Speaker 1: there's any way that you can come and work here,
Speaker 1: you should. People need to see something other than devastation
Speaker 1: happening here. So in the very end, we moved the
Speaker 1: entire camp, you know, for a couple of days down
Speaker 1: down to New Orleans, and that was just remarkable to
Speaker 1: be there with him. And I remember, I bring this
Speaker 1: up because you mentioned the way he was dressed. That
Speaker 1: when I was packing to go down in New Orleans
Speaker 1: late one night after a session, we're leaving the next morning,
Speaker 1: and I was packing the suit and my wife said,
Speaker 1: I don't think you know where you're going, you know,
Speaker 1: and you think you're gonna be wearing a suit. And
Speaker 1: I said, look, if you think Alan's going to step
Speaker 1: it down because of what we're walking into, I think
Speaker 1: you're crazy. And sure enough, when we got down there,
Speaker 1: he was even more regal, you know. He walked down
Speaker 1: there like a you know, like a like a prince
Speaker 1: from Africa. Yeah, I was. I was once on a
Speaker 1: plane with them, and I I never used to dress
Speaker 1: up for planes because I thought, now, you just want
Speaker 1: to be comfortable. I mean, I wasn't one of those
Speaker 1: guys that were like track suit yeah. Yeah, but but
Speaker 1: I was with a plane with him and he was
Speaker 1: he was in line ahead of me, standing Ramrod straight
Speaker 1: in this beautiful suit, and I said, yeah, I've got
Speaker 1: to dial it up. Yeah. Look at him, he looks
Speaker 1: comfortab I don't look comfortable. Yeah. I remember once we
Speaker 1: were in a session somewhere and somebody I don't know
Speaker 1: who would have said it like Alan, you want to
Speaker 1: take your jacket off, be more comfortable, and He's just
Speaker 1: wheeled around and said, what in the world makes you
Speaker 1: think I'm not comfortable? He was so rarely that pointed,
Speaker 1: but it was always wonderful moments when he would just
Speaker 1: be take you to task, like him saying to me,
Speaker 1: I know what happened. What did you think about what happened?
Speaker 1: Do you want to do another song? Sure, I will
Speaker 1: play this song called Orson Wells. We'll be right back
Speaker 1: with more from Joe Henry after the break, We're back
Speaker 1: with the rest of Bruce's conversation with Joe Henry. But
Speaker 1: first let's finish the song Orson Wells. Why is it
Speaker 1: called Orson Wells. I don't know, other than just that
Speaker 1: he was the messenger. He was the delivery system of
Speaker 1: this song. You know, I remember distinctly my wife and
Speaker 1: I were flying for the for like thirty six hours
Speaker 1: up to San Francisco to see a really dear friend
Speaker 1: in a play. And we got on the plane at Burbank,
Speaker 1: you know that flights about fifty minutes long. And I
Speaker 1: just do what I frequently do. I just opened a
Speaker 1: notebook and I just sort of watched my handwrite Orson
Speaker 1: Wells at the top of the page, and I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I knew I wasn't running a song about
Speaker 1: Orson Wells. But for whatever reason, he was an evocative specter,
Speaker 1: and I knew that if I just if I listened,
Speaker 1: he was going to tell me what this song was
Speaker 1: that that was there to be written. Are there really
Speaker 1: great songs? Like is there a great Beatles song that
Speaker 1: has no effect on you? And you just think, yeah,
Speaker 1: whatever reason, doesn't a lot of them? Actually? Well, look,
Speaker 1: I like the Beatles, is fine, I really do. I
Speaker 1: like John in particular. I like Georgia. But I the
Speaker 1: Beatles didn't do to me in real time what they
Speaker 1: did to most of my peers. You know who did
Speaker 1: that for you? Bob? And I mean that's probably a
Speaker 1: pretty obvious in a way because his records are so
Speaker 1: especially his records are the middle sixties, but not only
Speaker 1: desire to which I think is incredibly underrated. There's a
Speaker 1: rawness to it. You can't miss, you can't miss the
Speaker 1: immediacy of it. You know. I hear the Beatles, and
Speaker 1: they're beautiful records. I mean, I'm not saying they're not
Speaker 1: beautiful records, but you know, I hear them, I hear
Speaker 1: the work, and I'm not as seduced by that as
Speaker 1: I am when I know that I'm witnessing, you know,
Speaker 1: like you're driving late at night and there's all of
Speaker 1: a sudden you you've ever had this experience. I had
Speaker 1: it once, driving late at night on a freeway somewhere
Speaker 1: in West Virginia and they're out in the middle of
Speaker 1: a field as a house completely on fire. You know, No,
Speaker 1: Joni Mitchell wrote a good song of it. Yes, Um,
Speaker 1: it's just the witnessing something that's is immediate and it's urgent.
Speaker 1: What's happening? You know. I listened to just like Tom
Speaker 1: Thumb's Blues or listened to you know, sooner or later
Speaker 1: one of us must know or something like. I can't
Speaker 1: miss that. This was like people just fucking hanging on,
Speaker 1: Like I mean, it's a runaway train in a way,
Speaker 1: and I'm endlessly engaged by that kind of real time
Speaker 1: urgency in a way that I'm not so much when
Speaker 1: I hear careful construction, you know, like when I was,
Speaker 1: you know, really young. I mean Bob happened to me
Speaker 1: when I was about eleven, and other music I was
Speaker 1: hearing at the same time that, like the you know Beatles,
Speaker 1: as an example, I was not, you know, held in
Speaker 1: thrall in the same way to to the labor. I
Speaker 1: heard of that being constructed as I was in witnessing
Speaker 1: a house burning off in a field on the side
Speaker 1: of a road. You know what I mean. Does that
Speaker 1: make sense? I'm not trying. You're often compared with Robbie
Speaker 1: robertson m I didn't know that. Who is I think
Speaker 1: that very seriously and I appreciate it. You know. I'm
Speaker 1: a man who named his son Levin. So I would
Speaker 1: have traded and and people think this is a little
Speaker 1: bit of sacrilege, you know, I would have traded the
Speaker 1: entirety of the Beatles catalog to have made music from
Speaker 1: Big Pink, you know. But that's music that is both
Speaker 1: feel spontaneous, but also it's highly polished. Sure, and I
Speaker 1: don't mind if it's constructed. I just don't want to be.
Speaker 1: I just don't want to know that it is. I
Speaker 1: don't I don't want to be telegraphed the meticulousness of
Speaker 1: the of the hand at work. I don't want to.
Speaker 1: I don't want to see the hand at work. I
Speaker 1: want the mystery to take over and take me over. Look,
Speaker 1: I'm a Sinatra freak, and those are meticulous records. You know.
Speaker 1: He did like thirty three takes in a row. I've
Speaker 1: got you under my skin. He knew that that was
Speaker 1: a something to be seized. And nonetheless, when I hear it,
Speaker 1: I hear a moment, I hear like you know, the
Speaker 1: house burning, I hear it happening. Sure I know now
Speaker 1: as an more educated person, how that went down. Like
Speaker 1: I said, I just you can still hear it. I
Speaker 1: want to. You know, it's all theater, Bruce. You know
Speaker 1: it's all phony. You know in that regard, you know
Speaker 1: the idea of even people who have this idea of purity.
Speaker 1: It's like, I record live in a room because I hey,
Speaker 1: it's an incredibly financially responsible way to work frequently, and
Speaker 1: it's the most direct line if you want the sound
Speaker 1: if you are playing in a room together then you
Speaker 1: get people in a room together and they play that's
Speaker 1: what you care about. You know. Now you're in the
Speaker 1: middle of this incredible career. You've done all this brilliant music,
Speaker 1: you've you've recordered, all these brilliant people. You're still described
Speaker 1: as you know, the critics darling and all that stuff.
Speaker 1: But you've had You've had the experience with your sister
Speaker 1: in law, who's Madonna. We haven't mentioned that, but she
Speaker 1: took one of your songs and made a big points
Speaker 1: for being this far into an interview without bringing by
Speaker 1: the lay. Well, I bring it up because I actually
Speaker 1: loved that album Hers and I thought before I knew
Speaker 1: it was yours, I thought it was. I think there
Speaker 1: are a lot of good songs on that album, by
Speaker 1: the way. But yeah, you know, critics, Grill Marcus could
Speaker 1: be very hard on people for not seizing the biggest
Speaker 1: possible stage. You know, he said that about Randy Newman.
Speaker 1: You know, you've got to go out and prove it.
Speaker 1: The proving ground is sixty thousand people in the stadium
Speaker 1: who all sang along. Well, you've had that experience. What's
Speaker 1: that like, Well, it's freakish because I haven't had that
Speaker 1: experience much. You know, well, I'm saying you had it
Speaker 1: with that song. I did. And I was at a
Speaker 1: an arena once in Orange County when she was doing
Speaker 1: that tour, which was running from nine to eleven. Um.
Speaker 1: I only bring that up because it just the air
Speaker 1: was electrified, you know, the country was in a very
Speaker 1: particular state of mind, and people gathered together and I
Speaker 1: had you know, I had pitched to her kind of
Speaker 1: something that she's doing now she's doing the theater tour.
Speaker 1: You know, I had said, look, why don't you just
Speaker 1: like park the whole cirque to soul a thing? Like
Speaker 1: she needs career advice from me? What your career look
Speaker 1: like mine looks? You know, you walked the streets effortlessly
Speaker 1: as if she wanted to. Um. But anyway, I had
Speaker 1: pitched this idea to her to like, you know, you
Speaker 1: don't need Cirque to sola happening on stage. You don't
Speaker 1: need all that. You know, you went a new concept.
Speaker 1: Think about what Marvin Gay would be doing if he's
Speaker 1: alive right now. Put together the most funky, badass like
Speaker 1: five piece band and co present yourself as a musician.
Speaker 1: What about that as an idea? You know, and she said, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know how that would play an arenas. That said,
Speaker 1: well that's the I have my idea. Get out of
Speaker 1: the arenas. You know, go check into the nicest hotel
Speaker 1: in every city and do ten nights somewhere you know
Speaker 1: it gets comfortable, and then explore it all. To say
Speaker 1: that that night, the first time that I've ever seen
Speaker 1: her performance were the mask you know, the grid of
Speaker 1: the night, which was incredibly intricate with stay, you know, elaborate,
Speaker 1: you know, choreography whatever. But at a moment when she
Speaker 1: did that song Don't tell me, she came out with
Speaker 1: she had an acoustic guitar, she sat on a stool,
Speaker 1: she had another guitar player on an acoustic guitar, and
Speaker 1: she had a beatbox. And we were in the like
Speaker 1: the second row. And you know, before that she'd just
Speaker 1: been in character, you know, Madonna, in corporate logo Madonna,
Speaker 1: you know even that's her real name. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a d M. Yeah, and you know it's all out here.
Speaker 1: But when she sat down to do that song, she
Speaker 1: looks straight at me and she said, this is for you,
Speaker 1: and did it like too, because guitars and a beat
Speaker 1: and at one point, the music all stops and twenty
Speaker 1: thousand people are all singing it. And that was a
Speaker 1: really unique moment, not only because it's really affirming just
Speaker 1: as a songwriter who operates decidedly out of the mainstream
Speaker 1: to have a moment like that, but it also reminded
Speaker 1: me that, you know, I've been told my whole career
Speaker 1: that my songs are obtuse, that they're too difficult, that
Speaker 1: they're not coverable. There you know, and I realized that
Speaker 1: it wasn't really about that as much as it was
Speaker 1: about the delivery system, because that's got some really cryptic,
Speaker 1: you know lines in it too, But there were twenty
Speaker 1: thousand people singing them, you know, wrapped in a different package.
Speaker 1: It went down really differently. You know, I'm not saying
Speaker 1: you're going to be your sister in law, But is
Speaker 1: it a feeling that, yeah, that's that's where the music
Speaker 1: belongs now? No, No, I don't feel that way. Might
Speaker 1: it belongs in for some people? It's not not been
Speaker 1: my path, you know. Um, you know who Bob Neworth is, well,
Speaker 1: he was he was Bob Dylan's like a sidekick and
Speaker 1: the Don't Look Back film, and he's a songwriter and
Speaker 1: a painter and a beautiful man. And when we met
Speaker 1: many years ago, he pulled me aside one night, like
Speaker 1: a Dutch uncle and said, you know what your problem is.
Speaker 1: I said no, but I think you're about to tell me.
Speaker 1: And he said, you you haven't created a persona, said
Speaker 1: everybody that you admire, whether it's Bob, or it's Tom
Speaker 1: Waits or I don't forget who else he listed, you know,
Speaker 1: they've gotta they've gotta they've created a public persona that's
Speaker 1: really persuasive and and you need to do that or
Speaker 1: you're not gonna get over. And I realized that I
Speaker 1: couldn't and I wouldn't. That's just not where I come from.
Speaker 1: I think I made a decision really early on, whether
Speaker 1: I was conscious of it or not, is that to like, Look,
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to create a mean Tom created this
Speaker 1: beautifully persuasive character that walks out ahead of his songs,
Speaker 1: and before he sings a word, you already have a
Speaker 1: sense of their language in their context because he has
Speaker 1: this character that you recognize and it's consistent. But I
Speaker 1: realized that that what I was going to try to
Speaker 1: do is write songs that were seductive enough that I
Speaker 1: could just disappear into them. You know, I know want
Speaker 1: the songs to be fodder for my character. I wanted
Speaker 1: to feed myself like a bunk of wood, into the
Speaker 1: fire of the songs and go up in sparks. You know.
Speaker 1: I wasn't trying to create a character that I had
Speaker 1: to like, Oh geez, what happens if I go out
Speaker 1: to get a paper and I'm not dressed like like
Speaker 1: my character? You know, if you become you know, that's
Speaker 1: a disaster. Okay, well listen. Thank you so much, Bruce,
Speaker 1: Thank you, thank you. It was really it was a pleasure,
Speaker 1: and I appreciate you doing the you know, doing the homework.
Speaker 1: Thanks to Joe Henry for playing songs off the new album,
Speaker 1: The Gospel according to Water and for talking to Bruce
Speaker 1: about the inspiration behind his work. If you're sure, to
Speaker 1: check out his new album plus a playlist of our
Speaker 1: favorite Joe Henry songs plus a playlist of his own
Speaker 1: at broken record podcast dot com. Broken Record is produced
Speaker 1: with help from Jason Gambrel, Neil LaBelle Lea Rose, Matt Laboza,
Speaker 1: and Martin Gonzalez for Pushkin Industries. Our theme musics by
Speaker 1: Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond. Thanks for listening.