Track 1: Famine Walk
@JoeHenryMusic's new album is out Nov 15, of songs mostly written after a life-changing health crisis earlier this year. These are simple, wise and sonically gorgeous songs, & he asked friends to each debut a track. The stunning opener, ‘Famine Walk.’
—Rosanne Cash
Track 2: The Gospel According To Water
“The Gospel AccordingTo Water” - Deep and beautifully moving. A masterful artist, we need Joe Henry’s voice. Listen carefully. Listen closely. There is a spirit here. Let it speak to you.
—Lucinda Williams
Track 3: Mule
Here is the voice of a friend and brother who had been away too long. I urge you to listen to this lovely performance and investigate “Joe Henry Loves You Madly”.
There is enough anger, enough misery in the world. Too many tears, fires and trampled flowers, so make room in your life for some beauty like this.
Your friend in music. Elvis Costello.
Track 4: Orson Welles
My good friend Joe Henry is releasing his new album - The Gospel According To Water - on November 15th. I heard him sing his new songs in a set at LA’s Largo a few months ago, and was astounded, moved, and inspired by these songs, many of lines of which have stayed with me and are now stuck in my head. Like these:
“You provide the terms of my surrender, I’ll provide the war”
Especially memorable was this song, Orson Welles, which I am including a link to here.
Not only a love song, but a song of resistance, of defiance, and ultimately, of survival and belief. Is the devide in the third verse a metaphor for our devided country? Or the cancer Joe has battled for the last year, and which is now in remission?
I hope you hear in this song some of what I hear.
—Jackson Browne
Track 5: Green of the Afternoon
Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, said that the wound is the place where the light enters you. Well the great singer/songwriter/mystic/minstrel/bard/muse/essayist/ima emaker/trubador/rhapsodist Joe Henry found the light when the wound entered him, and all the evidence is available on his incredible brand new album, The Gospel According to Water (due out Nov 15th).
In November 2018 I was in East Jerusalem, working on my novel Apeirogon. I woke up to an email from Joe -- who over the years has become a good friend -- telling me that he had been diagnosed with cancer. I was reeling, but I pulled myself together, walked out into the morning, sat under a tree, and wrote back straight away. My e-mail is a little personal but I quote it in full here:
"Joe, a chara. I wake up this morning in East Jerusalem to this news. Strong sunlight and birds. I have to tell you that after a moment of pure and unresolved grief, I began to think about you fighting this. The light grew. I hope that does not sound strange. I know you understand. The light grew. Yes the grief was so real that it knocked me backwards for a moment but almost immediately I was gently brought up from the unfathomable with the knowledge that it will hear the music and poetry you create and that you will not allow to inhabit you or indeed anyone else and that this too will make the world a better place to wait for the dark and overcome it. If someone is going to fight the real with the mystery (call it grace), it's you. The light grows. I am sad so very sad that this is the news today, but bolstered by the fact that it is you and it is Mel and it is possible to find meaning, language, hope, constancy, love. And somehow -- don't ask me why -- there is a deep beauty in all of this. It comes in the simple fact that you will not succumb. Not just for yourself but for all of us. Now get out there and banish this."
The thing is that Joe did more than go out and banish this: he found the place of the wound and went through, as Lorca would say, to the pulse on the opposite side. The album was recorded in two days. It arrived for him, yes, like a piece of light, and then it decided to stay.
I got a chance to get a sneak listen to his song "Green of the Afternoon.” I was taken by the immediate intimacy of the voice which swiftly says: The days crawl, the light falls swift and soon. It's a raw voice in your ear, saying, Come, listen, journey with me a while. You move like green upon this afternoon. What a line! To move like green upon the afternoon. There is something so Gerard Manley Hopkins about it, some Dylan Thomas-y. And then Joe takes us on this fabulous journey: What goes unspoken may not go unheard. At one point in the song he says, You take the p**ce of God away from me. The reason I put two asterisks there is that I cannot be sure whether he meant the word peace or piece. I assume it's peace, but I like it also as the word piece, as in piece of God. I don't really want to ask Joe about it because it's a beautiful lesson in the idea of the both, Whitmanesque in the way it embraces possibility.
For those of you who know Joe, this is another bouquet of flowers to the world. For those of you who don't know him, this is a basketful of seeds to plant and grow. This is his 15th album but he is also an incredible producer, having worked with, among others, Elvis Costello, Alain Toussaint, Loudon Wainright III, Billy Bragg, the Milk Carton Kids and one of my all-time favourites, Lisa Hannigan. He wrote a kick-ass book about Richard Pryor with his brother, David. He's a great bloke, down to earth, solid, loyal. He's married to the wonderful Mel. He's father of the incredibly talented Levon. And one of my great prides in life is that I got a chance to contribute, along with Lisa Hannigan, the title song on the Invisible Hour album.
Send the song along to friends if you can. Buy the album when it comes. Place it in a dark spot and watch the light go to work.
Finally, I'm reminded of the incredible Anne Carson who says: If all the lamps in this house/ were turned out/you could dress this wound /by what shines from it.
—Colum McCann
Track 6: In Time For Tomorrow
All hail--my friend Joe Henry's new album, The Gospel of Water, will be available Nov. 15th. He's asked some friends to each debut one song and I’ve chosen: In Time for Tomorrow (funeral for sorrow), which I truly love. It’s an extraordinary album, with songs in part inspired by his recent serious health crisis. I think you’ll be as moved as I am by the sheer beauty, wisdom and eloquence throughout.
—Bonnie Raitt
Track 7: The Fact of Love
Here’s a new song from @JoeHenryMusic that I’d like for you to listen to. Beautifully performed and recorded. Really interesting guitar playing and a smart and tender lyric. Joe’s new album is out on the 15th.
—Jason Isbell
Track 8: Book of Common Prayer
I love Joe Henry. Fi and I have loved hanging with him in Ireland and at our home in the US. This is an important record. Joe is an important writer and producer. "Book of Common Prayer"... a beautiful song and a timely song. Congrats on the new album, The Gospel According to Water.
— John Prine
Track 9: Bloom
I'm here to speak for the track Bloom - a perfectly Joe Henry song that at no point contains the word 'I'. It's a solitary journey, and others might retreat into themselves in the telling of it, but Joe holds out a hand with 'we'. Beautiful.
— Hugh Laurie
Track 10: Gates of Prayer Cemetery #2
I'm excited to premiere my pal Joe Henry's breathtakingly beautiful new song "Gates of Prayer Cemetery #2" from his forthcoming album "The Gospel According to Water." The album drops this Fri, Nov 15.
—Ben Harper
Track 11: Salt and Sugar
Give a listen to this brilliant track, "Salt and Sugar," from Joe Henry's album - The Gospel According To Water - out on 11/15. (Joe produced my last album.) His inimitable style/raw beautiful lyrics make this entire body of music a wonder to behold.
—Joan Baez
Track 12: General Tzu Names the Planets for His Children
I can't really express how much I love this new song by Joe Henry (who I'm grateful to call a friend). It brought calm and beauty to me in a difficult few months; here's an early release. The whole album (The Gospel According to Water) drops Friday...
— Krista Tippett
Track 13: Choir Boy
Tomorrow, my friend Joe Henry releases his new album, The Gospel According to Water. In “Choir Boy,” as in every track, there is gentleness and strength. His music is poetry.
—Gloria Steinem