Joe Henry
The Gospel According to Water
(earMUSIC)
In the liner notes to his latest album, The Gospel According to Water, poetic songwriter and prestigious producer Joe Henry emphasized twice that “where a song comes from is not what a song is.” He’s at once saying that these thirteen raw, sinewy, and intimate poems—written in rapid inspiration last year and recorded in spare, demo-like takes after Henry was diagnosed with prostate cancer in November of 2018—are not autobiographical, but are “songs about finding light” in the midst of overcast circumstances. “It’s like someone carrying a lantern through the dark woods,” the SoCal resident told me.
His fifteenth studio album, The Gospel According to Water (earMUSIC) marks a serendipitous milestone in Henry’s thriving three-decade career of eclectic music tastes, ranging from collaborations with avant-jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman to folk hero Ramblin’ Jack Elliot to roots band Carolina Chocolate Drops.
I talked with Joe after his cancer had gone into remission earlier this year and he was preparing to tour his new music—shows were canceled because of the pandemic. I started by asking about his spirituality. I noted that there was both a sense of romance and of spirituality in many of the songs like “Green of the Afternoon,” “The Fact of Love,” “Gates of Prayer Cemetery #2,’ and the “pray for me” refrain in “Choir Boy.”
“All the songs on the album are deeply romantic,” Joe said. “I don’t see them as dark at all. ‘The Fact of Love’ was the last song I wrote a day or so before the recording sessions. I think the spirituality has been very palpable in my last few albums. I used to get squeamish about talking about spirituality and our mortal lives because I was way too caught up with how that would strike people. But the characters in these songs are desperate to understand beyond themselves and to see the divine in each other, and how to allow ourselves to live robustly, knowing that we won’t always be here.”
When I asked him about the poetic quality of his songs, he said, “It’s a compliment, but poetry isn’t for everyone. People in contemporary America aren’t prone to reading and appreciating poetry. You can say “poetic,” but people seem to think that means pretty. But really, they have no idea about what you’re talking about. I take that part of my music seriously. I process anything significant in my life by writing. I write to learn, to understand, to discover. When the shoe dropped about the cancer, my beloved wife said that there are a lot of support groups. But that’s not how I processed what I was going through. I needed to write to get through the darkest days. I could have easily coiled up on the floor and accepted that the walls were closing in on me. But as soon as I began to write I found new access to my own imagination. I could imagine my way to the other side of the forest—and I did.”
The poetry came first, nearly one poem a day, but Henry said he was bereft of the music. Then one night he wrote a new poem and could hear the music in it. On another occasion, he was driving to meet a friend when he started singing out the song of a poem he had just written. “The melody offered itself almost fully formed,” Joe said. “I pulled over to the side of the road and sang it into my iPhone. I had remembered all the words from the night before, which was its own surprise. Then I went home, got my guitar out, and found it there.”
Having unlocked the melody key, he said the songs “came in a tumble, one after the other. I had never experienced this before. There came a point where I wished it could stop so that I could take stock of what I had. But the songs kept coming. I’ve trained myself for years to not just let the fish swim by the boat but at least make some kind of play for them. So I kept writing, and I realized they were a body of work. And I felt desperate to record it.”
I told Joe that the opening track, “Famine Walk,” sounded like a self-reflective flower emerging from the black earth.
“I wanted to expand my imagination as I went through my dire circumstances,” he replied. “But this is not autobiographical. Everything comes through the lens of my own experience. I rarely put my personal life into my songs. This is based on my time before my diagnosis on the West Coast of Ireland when I walked with locals on the Famine Walk, where victims of the Great Famine [1845-1849] cut roads through the mountains in exchange for a bowl of soup every day. The walks were quite high, where you can see the shoreline and the old abandoned famine houses that still stand, with enormous trees growing through the middle of them. That became an easy and apt metaphor of dealing with the present moment confronting you about being consumed back into the earth. What’s my role in the present? We’re only here for a brief time. There are a lot of journeys, some revelatory in the essential ways of being acutely aware. With the unexpected visitor nonetheless, I can’t dismiss the wild revelations.”
I also talked to the artist about how in almost all of the songs on the album, water appears as a recurring image— a sea, crashing waves, a river, rowing, winter rain.
“There’s an Eastern philosophy that says we all need to be like water,” Joe said. “Water is incredibly powerful yet unimaginably flexible. It penetrates everything. It moves through everything. For me it’s about recognizing water as the landscape that’s also moving through your body. In the title song, water is the force behind the waves we see. The wave is there to let you know about the power of water. Everything in life is in motion, in evolution constantly. That’s what makes life mysterious; nothing can be nailed to the floor. We can attempt to stay hunkered down, but we’ll be swept away.”
*This essay was based on an interview I wrote for Billboard on Joe’s new album.
New York writer Dan Ouellette is the Radix music editor and author of Ron Carter: Finding the Right Notes. He has written for Billboard, Downbeat, The New Yorker (Special Sections), JazzTimes and elsewhere. Currently he is working on his book, The Landfill Chronicles.