20 To Watch

1999 for Austin City Search

Mammoth Records
"Fuse"
Release Date: March 9, 1999

www.mammoth.com

SXSW Venue: Liberty Lunch, Thursday, March 18, Midnight
After recording five alt-country albums (two of which featured The Jayhawks), Joe Henry found himself bored. So he electrified his muse, began experimenting in the studio, and hooked up with Page Hamilton, guitarist for Helmet. The result of this unholy team was the critically acclaimed "Trampoline," which easily won over an enthusiastic record industry crowd at Henry's '96 SXSW showcase at the Electric Lounge. Leaving the country crooner persona behind, Henry and Hamiliton brought hard-edged guitar and distortion to Henry's working man lyrics about pain and heartache.

Hoping for a repeat success this year, Henry's new Mammoth Records release "Fuse," is scheduled to hit stores March 9, 1999. Easily his most sophisticated, classy album to date, Henry has finally fused the lyricist in him with the musician. Joining him in this effort were T-Bone Burnett (who mixed the album), Randy Jacobs, Chris Whitley, Daniel Lanois, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Jakob Dylan, Dizzy Gillespie, among others (the only person absent is Henry's infamous sister-in-law, Madonna). Joe Henry will showcase material from his new album on Thursday, March 18, at Liberty Lunch. If you can't make the show, Henry will perform on the Rosie O'Donnell show on March 11 and on David Letterman on March 31.

CS: Why the half-man or half-monkey theme on the album? Feeling primal lately?
JH: (Laughing) That metamorphosis is only on the advance copy. On the actual album cover, the monkey is sitting on my shoulder and I'm not sure how it relates to anything, but in the past I've had a rule not to be on my album covers. I think a record should have its own identity and the front of a record should be treated like a movie poster. The most important thing is for that poster's image to suggest a mood or environment of that movie--same thing for a record. I've tried every way possible to operate differently on this record than I've ever done before. So I decided to put myself on the cover and not be so dodgey about it. The monkey has so many connotations to it...a monkey on your back or a dark angel hovering over you. I like things that don't always equate, things that are non-linear, things that work on an impressionistic level and you don't even know why. Besides, the monkey provides something else going on in the picture, as a foil perhaps, but at least it's not just me trying to look good.

CS: I see that T-Bone Burnett mixed this album for you. Have you worked with him before?
JH: I've known T-Bone for almost a decade. He produced a record of mine back in 1990 when I was living in New York and we became great pals. We've done a lot of things together since we moved to California. T-Bone has been playing my guardian angel in the most bizarre unexpected ways. He'll disappear for about six months at a time and then resurface at a time when I didn't even know I needed him.

CS: Was T-bone your guardian angel on this record? I thought the monkey was.
JH: (Laughing) Initially, I was working on this record alone in my garage, just running a song as far as I could go with it until I needed help. Then I'd set it aside and work on another one. I continued like that, in a vacuum, for some time. One evening, T-bone and his wife came over for dinner and we ended up out in the garage. We spent the next several hours mixing things and discussing elements of the songs that were working and not working. Later, as I got closer to completion of the album, T-bone offered to mix it. He really brought a fresh ear to the process, as he didn't have any emotional attachments to any of it. He really did a beautiful job.

CS: You mentioned earlier that you tried to make this album completely different and one thing I feel you succeeded with is the music. I think it makes much more of a statement than your previous albums and stands more spiritually on its own. Was this planned?
JH: I'm so glad you picked up on that. I really wanted to make music that was just as important to the whole and wasn't there to just prop up the lyrics. I've been more of a "word" guy in the past and I've been teaching myself a whole new way to write. Instead of beginning with the lyrics, I would start from a place of rhythm, like a drum loop. A couple of times I had a song completely recorded, without having any lyrics, vocals, or melody. I've been trying to figure out what sort of lyrics the mood of the music suggests, instead of writing the music to fit the mood of the lyrics. One such song is "Fat." I wanted it to feel like a Ray Charles type of song...like it was 1955, with that real driven, rough-around-the-edges feel. I took this piece of music and drove around with it in my car for days and days, just reciting gibberish, until I found one spot where I got a leg up and then wrote leading up to it and away from it.

CS: By way of closing our interview, what made you to decide to close your album with a 1939 cover tune?
JH: (Laughing) The song, "We'll Meet Again," is an old World War II song from the Hit Parade. I knew it from the movie "Dr. Strangelove," as it closes the film. One evening, the recording engineer and I were waiting for Jakob Dylan to arrive to put down some background vocals for the track "Skin and Teeth." He was late, as usual, and we began talking about movies and I started to play that song on an old entertainment organ. We began having fun with it and started recording it with different instruments, but quit when Jakob arrived. A couple of weeks later, I played it back just for fun, or so I thought. But when I heard it, it just made sense to end the record with it.

Photo by Melanie Nissen