Concert Review – Joe Henry

Attending a Joe Henry show is like walking down a series of dark alleys late at night. Each song seems to promise you a safe passage to a more comfortable place but each time you are drawn down that path you find yourself feeling a little more uneasy and a little further from home.

Henry is a seductive songwriter – he’s a beat poet somehow trapped in the guise of a singer-songwriter. He’s a cross between Tom Waits and Paul Kelly with a little bit of Grant Lee Phillips thrown in.

Perhaps it is because he has two first names and both  are of the everyman variety but Henry has a unassuming persona, a quiet demeanour and a workmanlike approach to his performance and yet beneath this almost humble façade lies a performer that is capable of slicing you to the core with the subtlety of a paper cut.

It partly comes down to simply the tone of his voice. He is just a wonderful singer whose voice draws you into the songs and then breaks your heart in the next breath.

Rarely have I observed a Melbourne pub audience as attentive and as silent during the songs as this one. Perhaps once before  – in the eighties at the Prince Patrick when Jeff Buckley made his Melbourne debut, but that was different. That was a younger crowd that was simply awestruck – tonight it was a collection of devotees who were more deeply respectful than anything else.

Last time Joe Henry played in Melbourne it was at the still lamented Continental Café – a room where respectful audiences where the norm not the exception. I was reminded tonight by someone with a better memory than I of a consensus that was reached that Henry was going to be a big star.

That didn’t really happen but as it turns out Joe Henry has become something better than that. His work continues to improve and expand and it was telling that some of the highlights from tonights show where from his most recent album Civilians.

Amongst these were the shows closer Civil War and You Cant Fail Me Now but to me the pinnacle of the evening came with the Our Song – a song that deserves a much better, more distinctive and more evocative title. Once you know the song the title makes sense but the songs content deserves to be heard far and wide and this sometimes means wrapping it in the most attention grabbing gift wrap. This song is the American companion to Kelly’s Bradman.

Special mention must be made of upright bass player David Piltch whose contributions were both utterly tasteful and virtuosic. In a beautifully mixed crystalline sound the subtlety of his contributions was immeasurable.

A Mose Allison and a Loudon Wainright III co-write were included as well as a song written by Henry with his sister-in-law Madonna Ciccone about which he quipped “I recorded it as a tango, she recorded it as a hit”.

Henry chooses not to explain too much about this songs which is fine with me but he offers some wry remarks to the audience. When someone mentions the new president he comments “It’s not like one man can change the world….but then you look at the last eights years and think ‘damn’!” or something closer to that.

Let’s hope that we see Joe Henry return to Australia sometime in the current presidential term. He too may not change the world but his songs and performances certainly cast an ever lengthening shadow.

Joe Henry for Sydney Festival and beyond

Joe Henry, highly esteemed songwriter, producer and teller of tales is visiting Australia in early 2009 as part of the Sydney Festival, where he will perform three concerts, plus two shows in Victoria.. Joe will be joined at each show by the accomplished double bassist David Piltch.

Described by the San Francisco Weekly as a “literate purveyor of a kind of folk-imbued, smokily jazzified, contemporary “adult music” that in a far better world would reside at the top of the pop charts,” Joe Henry is something of a legend among music fanatics.

In a career spanning more than 20 years, Henry has left a unique imprint on American popular music.  As a songwriter and artist, by turns dark, devastating, and hopeful, he draws an author’s eye for the overlooked detail across a broad swath of American musical styles – rock, jazz and blues – rendering genre modifiers useless.

On his own albums, Henry has collaborated with many remarkable American artists, including Don Cherry, T Bone Burnett, Victoria Williams, The Jayhawks’ Gary Louris and Marc Perlman, guitarists Page Hamilton, Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot, Daniel Lanois, Jakob Dylan, and even Ornette Coleman in a rare appearance for the jazz icon.

Allmusic’s Thom Jurek, recently wrote that Henry “has moved into a space that only he and Tom Waits inhabit in that they are songwriters who have created deep archetypal characters that are composites—metaphorical, allegorical, and ‘real’—of the world around them and have created new sonic universes for them to both explore and express themselves in.”

Henry’s most recent album is 2007’s Civilians, his tenth record, which landed on many year-end “best of” lists and has been hailed as one of the artists finest works. Billboard magazine for example said, “Henry’s superb Civilians succeeds not only as a melodic collection of poignant short stories, but also as a potent picture book of America gone wrong.”

But Joe Henry is a man with many talents. As an album producer, Henry’s influence has shaped the sound of iconoclastic artists including Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint, Ani DiFranco, Bettye LaVette, and Aimee Mann. In 2003, he earned a Grammy Award for his production role on Solomon Burke’s astonishing comeback record Don’t Give Up On Me, and recently worked alongside his hero and good friend Loudon Wainwright III to create the score for the hit film Knocked Up, material which later became Wainwright’s full-length Strange Weirdos.

And what might you need to know about the incomparable David Piltch? As a renowned double bassist, Piltch is the tasteful player of choice and general musical collaborator for the likes of k.d. lang and Holly Cole among others. In the studio, he has consistently brought his deft touch to recordings by artists such as Madeleine Peyroux and Loudon Wainwright III. There are few who can walk the line between jazz, Americana, art pop and friendly experimentalism quite like David Piltch.

Friday Jan 23 – Corner Hotel – Melbourne

Saturday Jan 24 – Meenlyan Town Hall

Tuesday Jan 27 – The Famous Spiegeltent (Sydney Festival)

Wednesday Jan 28 – The Famous Spiegeltent (Sydney Festival)

Thursday Jan 29 – The Famous Spiegeltent (Sydney Festival)