Joe Henry - Disc of the day

Joe Henry
Civilians

(Anti, 2007)

He’s Madonna’s brother-in-law and he keeps getting better and better…

“Where’s my sock? / Where’s my other shoe? / I didn’t know what time it was when I came to…” murmurs Joe Henry on Parker’s Mood, the second track on Civilians. You’re immediately hooked; wondering what’s gone on before and what’s going to happen next. It’s a trick Joe Henry pulls time and again here. This was the Carolina-born, California-dwelling songwriter’s ninth full-length album, in a career that’s included collaborations with Elvis Costello and Solomon Burke. Henry found his current métier on 1996’s Trampoline album. Since then, he’s been writing eloquent, literate songs about oddball characters, driven with adventurous, sometimes outré instrumentation. Civilians features pump organ, mandolin, Van Dyke Parks playing occasional piano and some fabulous soft, shuffling drums. These songs come at you with all the grace of a New Orleans funeral procession, or the smoky, conspiratorial feel of an after-hours jazz blow. The mournful Our Song excels, Henry eavesdropping on an imagined conversation, with baseball legend Willie Mays bemoaning the plight of modern America, a country “that started badly and ended wrong”. In the UK, where Mays and, indeed, baseball might be regarded as marginal interests (rounders, anyone?), you’d expect him to be on shaky ground. Not so. Like his sock-less, partially shod anti-hero, Joe Henry always makes you care.

Mark Blake

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 16/03/2008

Further Listening

Bob Dylan – Time Out Of Mind (Columbia, 1997)

Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint – The River In Reverse (Verve Forecast, 2006)

Loudon Wainwright III – Strange Weirdos (Concord, 2007)

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