The Musical Box

joe henry. photo by lauren dukoff.

Confessing that he normally doesn’t perform in an unaccompanied setting, producer/song stylist Joe Henry vowed last night at the 930 Art Center in Louisville to play assorted songs of love, sex and death  “almost all in minor key.” But even with only two well worn Gibson acoustic guitars, an upright piano and nine strategically placed lamps as onstage allies, the evocative nature of Henry’s music was in no way shortchanged.

Sure, half the beauty of his recordings are the sonic fortresses - the ambient arrangements, the trip-hop grooves - that surround the atmospheric nature of the songs. But the combination of the pin-drop-quiet the 930 audience afforded the concert and the intimate clarity that resulted brought two often overlooked attributes of Henry’s music to the surface.

The first, of course, were the lyrics. Sometimes disparaging, often mysterious and, in more than a few instances, strangely sunny - they were all pushed to the forefront instead of serving as another element of the ambience. In this instance, no song sounded more involving or human than the title tune to what remains Henry’s finest album, 2001’s Scar. Served as a show-closing encore, the confessional grace in this hesitant but hopeful love song simply glowed with only a lone acoustic guitar melody as a backdrop.

The performance’s other great rediscovery was Henry’s singing. Instead of the purposely corrosive vocals that surface on his recordings, a crisp, patiently paced folk/pop voice liberated self-described “opaque” songs like Channel (one of five tunes pulled from the new Blood From Stars album). “Every fuzzy word I send returns a finer blade,” Henry sang before quoting the title to one of Van Morrison’s most mercurial songs You Don’t Pull No Punches But You Don’t Push the River.

Insightful as the performance was, it didn’t diffuse the wonder of Henry’s finest works, from the revolution-from-a-child’s-eye slant of This Afternoon to the romantic inscrutability of Progress of Love. Nor did it make apologies for past successes that slipped away. Henry summed up the differences between his Scar song Stop and the version that sister-in-law Madonna took to the Top 5 (as the re-titled Don’t Tell Me) with little regret.

“I recorded my version as a tango. She recorded her version as a hit.” With that, Henry let loose with the tango version in all its solo, unplugged glory.