By the time he was a teenager, Henry had moved with his family to the mid-western industrial city of Detroit. While Henry says his southern origins “pierce deep into one’s DNA,” he retains a soft spot for Detroit, especially as the city struggles to escape its troubled recent history. “I have strong ties to Detroit, and to the mid-west as a whole,” Henry says. “My wife is a Michigan native, and I made some of my closest and most enduring friendships there. Detroit is an extremely soulful place, and it is heartbreaking to see it languishing as it has been for so long now. But I believe in its powers of redemption.”
But it was the power of song to which Henry gravitated. “I was especially enamored of narrative songs, like the ones Jimmy Webb had written for Glen Campbell, or the ballads Johnny Cash so powerfully delivered in the mid-‘60s,” Henry says. “But it was probably Bob Dylan, in truth, who woke me up to the idea that, when I heard a song or a recording, real decisions were being made by someone with a vision; and that’s when I remember thinking I too wanted to write a song.”
A lack of classical musical training didn’t impede Henry’s development as a musician and a songwriter. “My first few songs were very derivative of melancholy folk ballads,” he says. “But once you do anything long enough, you stop sensing direct influence at play, and disappear along your own path.”
Henry sought inspiration from the great musicians and songwriters of his time; Dylan, Ray Charles, The Band’s Levon Helm and the enigmatic jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. While Henry’s reverence for those artists remains to this day, he’s careful to differentiate between an artist’s music, and the often flawed individual who exists behind the lauded musical product.
“Of course music has to speak for itself,” Henry says. “We can’t know everything and shouldn’t. I have always felt a personal devotion to the artists who have most inspired me; but the idea is not that they are unflawed humans, but that they offered what of themselves they could, despite the hardship that either life had imposed, or they had imposed upon their own.”
Henry’s interest in music was complemented by a wider interest in the arts. In the early 1970s Henry became aware of the African-American comedian Richard Pryor, whose witty and caustic observations exposed the latent racism that existed just behind the facade of self-righteous American cultural hegemony. In 2001 Henry recorded Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation, a track that took as its narrative voice the late American comic. A couple of years ago Henry and his brother co-authored a biography of Pryor, to critical acclaim.
Henry concedes writing about Pryor’s life provided him with a different perspective on the racially charged era of American sociology and politics during which he grew up. “It was just a visceral reminder of how little things have really changed, and about how important it is for all of us to own our fears and make peace with our mortality,” Henry says.
But it is within music that Henry continues to find both inspiration and peace. Henry has been quoted as saying his interest in the American songbook is analogous to his parents’ interest in the Bible. While modern American folk artists such as Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan have used song to critically explore the dominant American culture, as well as celebrating hitherto unheralded (and marginalized) aspects of the surrounding milieu, Henry’s views are more sanguine. “I don’t there is any obligation whatsoever [to be critical],” he says. “But I am interested and awake to the way our culture moves like weather through our lives: both influencing and reflecting it.”
Henry’s latest album, Invisible Man, continues the rich narrative tradition of his own songwriting. Henry has previously suggested that the album is about marriage, not as a noun but as a verb. “[The album] is about commitment and devotion, and all of its poetic invention and articulation,” Henry says. “I didn’t mean for that to be read quite so literally; but I do think it’s all in there nonetheless.”
While Henry acknowledges a thematic narrative in his music, he says it’s not a deliberate thing. “I don’t have pre-formed notions that I then try to fit into song form: I write to find out what I am writing about. It is discovery more than self-expression,” Henry says. “I frequently find after the fact that the songs on any given album share concerns and interests. But I recognize it all in hindsight, and I could be wrong in my interpretations. I am not necessarily the best judge of what’s going on.”
Musically, Invisible Man offers a contrast to Henry’s previous album, Reverie, with the latter once described by Henry as a “raucous and messy affair”. “With Invisible Hour I wanted no idea standing between the song and the listener,” Henry says. “I wanted all the intensity to come from the writing and the intentions of the performers. I wanted emotional clarity above all else.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
