 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
A Conversation with Joe Henry (continued)
JH: But it was incredibly exciting to be thinking, "I'm about to go into this room, with these unbelievable resources"--and there's not much you can imagine not being able to accomplish to your satisfaction.
PM: You bet.
JH: Also, though, I'm never one to have an idea beforehand, like "This is what I'm going after"--the way I think Prince works. He goes in and I think he's got an idea, "This is how this goes."
PM: Right. "Here's your part." [laughs]
JH: And either you can give it to him or you can't. And you're gone, or he plays it himself.
PM: [laughs]
JH: But I've always worked with the idea that you get people into a room--you'll be a good casting director, and then you find out what it sounds like. There was no strictly preconceived idea what this was going to sound like. But I really believed that if I got these people in a room, that the sensibility that had been the point of departure in writing this material was going to be inherently present, though as an ensemble we were going to go somewhere that was unique to these particular people, at this particular moment in time, playing together. And we jumped in with that idea, all of us knowing: A, there was going to be some orchestration added later; and B, that Ornette Coleman was going to be present on this particular song.
PM: Unbelievable.
JH: So everybody's recording imagining--not able to imagine exactly what he was going to do but imagining that his presence was going to take the floor at some point.
PM: Right.
JH: And other than that, there was absolutely no conversation about what it was going to sound like.
PM: Wow.
JH: I mean, I know everybody referred to my demos because I'd given them stuff where I was playing piano and there were string melodies and that kind of thing coming in. But I promise you there was very little conversation about what this was supposed to be.
PM: [laughs]
JH: All these people had played together at some point or another, though not all together. But Brian Blade had played with Brad Mehldau in Joshua Redman's band; Abe had played with Ribot; Ribot had played with Pilch. But these people had never all been together before.
PM: Beautiful.
JH: Also, Me'shell Ndegeocello came in--she kind of invited herself into it, much to my delight--to play bass on some stuff. But I basically said, "Here are the days we're working. Show up whenever you want and play whatever you want." And she was there for maybe two of the four days when we recorded everything.
PM: Cool.
JH: So we went in, without conversation about what the record would sound like, and we counted it off. And they just kind of became what they became. And one song influences what the next song sounds like, and that influences what the next song sounds like. And you start discovering what it is that you're doing, which is very much how I write. I don't ever sit down with an idea and say, "I need to put that into a song." The process of writing is the process of me finding out what I'm writing about.
PM: [laughs]
JH: And I realized that that was exactly the way we were recording, we're recording to find out what we sound like.
PM: Amazing.
JH: I knew it would be musical. These people are all wildly gifted and all have a real definite point of view. This is really my only restriction. I only want to work with people who really have a point of view. I don't want the guitar player to say, "What do you want me to do here?" "I want you to play here."
PM: [laughs]
JH: "That's what I want you to do. I want you to lay down the law."
PM: [laughs]
JH: I just truly believed that between all of us it would be musical, and it would be sound, it would be credible, and these guys wouldn't let it go somewhere else. We'd all know it if it went off the ramp, if it wasn't fully realized or uniquely realized unto itself.
So we just had at it, three songs a day, four songs a day, whatever. Live vocals, because I found myself for the first time just singing, leading. I mean, I've got Mark Ribot, I don't want to play guitar.
PM: [laughs]
JH: I'm not interested. And it wasn't going to be two guitars. I don't want to hear myself strumming through this.
PM: Right.
JH: I want to be a bandleader. All my phrasing dictates a certain amount of policy. So I just set up to be a singer, and that was my role in the recording.
PM: Were you off in a booth, or just in a room with sound baffles.
JH: There wasn't really room for me to be off in a booth. There were too many of us.
PM: Yeah, and then you can't see everybody right anyway.
JH: And I couldn't. I wound up in the machine room, which was the room between the control room and the lounge, where the actual two-inch tape machines live. There was no other place to put me where I could have any isolation at all if I needed to fix anything later--anything that could be fixed.
PM: Right.
JH: But I couldn't see anybody except the back of the engineer's head through the window in the control room.
PM: [laughs]
JH: It put me in a funny kind of abstract place, which I quite enjoyed. There's all this--through the headphones there's all this conversation and noise going on.
PM: Wild.
JH: And again, I don't want to bore you with too much information.
PM:
Believe me, it's the furthest thing from my mind.
continue
