Joe Henry – New soul
ND: So what has been your approach to producing these artists?
JH: Well, first thing I say to them is that I’m not going to try to change your sensibility. I want to shine a light under it. But we’re not going to try to re-create anything you’ve done before. And, you know, you find that in life some people are fine with an idea in theory but not in practice. So I was anxious to see how people were going to react once we actually got into the studio.
ND: When writer Bill Friskics-Warren interviewed LaVette [ND #60], she told him, “[I]f Solomon had taken more interest in his record, it would have not come out the way that it did.”
JH: Oh, that’s absolutely right. And that’s not a knock against Solomon. It’s just a different working philosophy. I mean, Solomon came in embracing the idea that he had signed off on making a record that wasn’t his normal thing. He didn’t listen to a song before he’d showed up the first day, even though I asked him to. [Laughs] He adopted that posture of, you know, “Oh, I want every song to be a surprise.” And, truth be told, he didn’t listen to a playback. I don’t think he had any idea of what kind of a record we’d made when we made it. In fact, I’ll tell you right now that he didn’t.
ND: But he won a Grammy —
JH: He won a Grammy! He knew that —
ND: And so did you —
JH: No, I mean, he knew that we’d win. I’ll tell you, we were making a record that I was fairly certain he didn’t like — which is why I thought he was kind of protesting by never coming over to hear a playback. His headphones were basically just him and the drummer, you know, so he didn’t have any idea what the record sounded like. He was just kind of like, “I’ve agreed to do it, this is your thing, I’m here, what do you want me to do?” So I was on a tightrope. I didn’t know if I thought he bought it or not. Even though he sure sang like he bought it, I wasn’t sure if he knew what we had.
Yet, he already knew we were going to win a Grammy for it!
ND: He told you that?
JH: We were working the weekend the Grammys were on, that Sunday night, and I’d asked somebody to call me when T Bone Burnett was going to speak because I thought he might win Record of the Year [for producing O Brother, Where Art Thou?]. So I said, “Hey Solomon, I’m going to take a few minutes and go watch my friend on TV.” And I came back afterward, and he said, “Well, Dr. Henry,” which is what he called me, “next year that’ll be me and you.” And I thought to myself, “You don’t even like this record!” But a year later, there the two of us were, sitting in an Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan, having just won Grammys, and he said, “I told you we’d win this year.”
ND: But LaVette came in with definite ideas of how she wanted things to go?
JH: Oh, Betty came in with a definite point of view. For instance, she was very involved in picking the material. We sent her many, many songs, but she didn’t stand on ceremony. I wrote a song for her that I thought was pretty good, but she rejected it immediately. She said, “It sounds good on you; I wouldn’t do it.” She won’t sing anything that doesn’t sound like she could’ve written it, that isn’t authentic to her in the way it would be if she’d written it. So she came in absolutely having worked on all the material. She knew how she was going to sing and what her point of view was going to be for each song.
ND: When I listen to Burke and LaVette, as well as all of the singers on I Believe To My Soul, and especially Mavis Staples, it always puts me in mind of something James Baldwin wrote: “In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them.” That’s not the way Mavis sings.
JH: That’s completely true. I mean, the happiest thing that Mavis sings — and she is joyful to my ear in the way Louis Armstrong is joyful; I am just filled up when I hear her — there’s always an awareness of mortality and of the consequences of that awareness in anything she sings. And in the saddest blues she sings, there always such a light about it. Because she sees beyond it, she sees right through it to something else.
She is so completely who she is, too. There’s nothing guarded about Mavis’ person. When we were working at Capitol, when word got out that she was on the premises, everybody from the other studios and from upstairs in the company came down, and all of a sudden our control room and hallway was jammed with people just wanting to get a look at her, and to listen. And there’d been big people there all week, but when they heard Mavis was there, the place filled up. Jackson Browne came by, people just appeared out of nowhere….And when she would meet someone for the first time, and when she became aware that meeting Mavis Staples meant something to this person, she gave totally of herself. My brother David conducted video interviews [with each of the artists involved in I Believe To My Soul], and I think he basically asked Mavis one question and she talked for an hour. And it was all totally captivating.