Joe Henry Delivers Stunning, Stark, Poetic ‘The Gospel According to Water’ (ALBUM REVIEW)

Joe Henry’s stunning, dark, poetic The Gospel According to Water, as many may know, was written and recorded in the wake of an alarming cancer diagnosis. It’s an album that lends itself to multiple interpretations and its bleak, stark sound point to melancholy, spirituality and mortality. However, Joe Henry doesn’t see it that way and doesn’t want you to either. In the liner notes, the songwriter and multiple award-winning producer emphasize twice that “where a song comes from is not what a song is.” These 13 raw poems, that came in a burst of inspiration following his bad news are, according to Henry, not autobiographical, but hopeful songs, slivers of light peeking through the gloom.

Quoting directly from his liner notes, this passage sheds some additional perspective –“…I feel now that with every note sounding by my body there is a rattle and spark beyond my own original determination: it is the sound of love /creation itself –however you name that ocean behind our wave—alive in sympathetic response as I strike madly against pots and pans…bringing up the rear of a backstreet Easter parade, as I rise, fall, again stand to try rising.”

It’s an intimate recording with Henry sometimes alone on acoustic/electric guitar and at others supported by Levon Henry (tenor sax and Bb flat clarinet, John Smith (acoustic guitar) and Patrick Warren (piano and additional keys). Note the absence of drums and bass. The Birds of Chicago (JT Nero and Allison Russell) contribute harmonies on “In Time for Tomorrow” and “The Fact of Love.” Henry commented in a recent interview with Billboard on the instrumentation – “You can add more elements, but the acoustic guitar and singing made the album intimate and enormous. In the studio, you don’t make drama by adding more instruments. The voice in a room becomes intense and huge. It’s haunting music for me. And I respond to any music that conjures ghosts in the air.” The project had Henry working very closely with S. Husky Huskolds, who engineered, mixed, and mastered.

The opening “Famine Walk” was written before his prostate cancer diagnosis, based on his time on the West Coast of Ireland. The famine houses still stand with enormous trees growing through them, serving as a metaphor for “dealing with the present moment confronting you about being consumed back into the earth.” The title track introduces the concept of water which is present in many on the songs as either a river, ocean, waves, rowing, or winter rain. Henry, as he stated in the second paragraph herein, talks about water being the force behind the waves we see. Everything in life is in motion.

There are images of love and spirituality in many of the song titles – “The Fact of Love,” “Gates of Prayer Cemetery #2,” and a refrain of “pray for me” in the closing “Choir Boy.” Henry feels that most of these references are deeply romantic. Quoting from the Billboard interview again, Henry offers, “I think the spirituality has been very palpable in my last few albums. I used to get squeamish about talking about spirituality and our mortal lives because I way too caught up in how that would strike people. But the characters in these songs are desperate to understand beyond themselves and to see the divine in each other, and how to allow ourselves to live robustly knowing that we won’t always be here.”

When you listen to the album, you’ll be able to clearly understand each word, given the spare accompaniment but reading the lyrics as you listen adds to the experience. For one example, here is the refrain to “Orson Welles” – “Come the turn of story, come the moving floor –/If you supply the terms of my surrender/then I’ll provide the war.” In the tune “Bloom,” which is a little more buoyant than many of the others, here is the closing verse – “in the light remaining after/all the heart can bear/of circus wheels that loop their empty /letter in the air–/we spy the hand of god alive/and holding out the mirror,/our every single face within/to carry on from here.”

Chances are you won’t fall in love with this album immediately but images will liner in your head and you’ll be drawn back to it repeatedly and appreciate it more with each listen.

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