Tag: Joe Henry

Beloved GRAMMY award-winning singer songwriters Mike Reid and Joe Henry today confirm a new collaborative album, Life & Time, set for release September 5 on the Work Song Inc label via Thirty Tigers.

Life & Time sees the two hit songwriters turning a new page: Reid, whose beginnings as an NFL All Pro preceded a music career which has seen 12 #1’s and an induction to the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, and Henry, who has penned 16 critically acclaimed albums as a solo artist and has blazed a path as a GRAMMY-winning producer (Solomon Burke, Elvis Costello, Allen Toussaint, Julian Lage, Bonnie Raitt). Reid steps forward as the singer of the duo here, the weather in his burnt-umber voice telegraphing a depth of experience that allows the speakers of each song to coalesce.

The album’s twelve songs, rooted in piano ballads, feature upright bass, pastoral orchestral flourishes in the distance, pied pipes on the periphery, and twinkling pedal steel. They are moody and lush, rich in imagery, with prismatic chords that call forth their colours, yet not so dense as to weigh down the songs’ tuneful melodies.

Henry recalls his first meeting with Reid, sharing a table in the dining hall at Rodney Crowell’s Nashville songwriting camp. The pair exchanged shared influences, people that have contributed to their evolution as thinkers, readers and writers. Reconnecting months later, Henry recalls, “I just heard a couplet in my head and stopped what I was doing and reached out to Mike, reminded him who I was, and asked if he might want to try writing something together. And he uttered a phrase that we’ve repeated to each other since: “Let’s push off the dock and into the fog and we’ll see what we find.”’

Reid shares, “There’s something very mysterious that happens to me emotionally, whatever that is… physically… when I sing Joe’s words, I just… believe them, and more than my mind, my body believes them. I feel physically a belief in this stuff. More than my mind, my body knows… feels these words, and I like that because ultimately, when I do something that isn’t working, I feel it physically in my body.” He furthers, “I think, often, whether creating or not, or planting a rose or making a good lasagna, that part of you is always attempting to recognise itself. And the delight for me in this whole time with Joe is I got to recognise something in me that I only suspected was there. Granted, I did suspect it, but I got to recognise it before I moved on from here.”

Through dozens of songs written as a pair, with no agenda, Reid and Henry came to the realisation that there was an album made along the way. In the record-making process, the two held a strong collective faith in the specific atmosphere they had already crafted into the songwriting itself. From there, it was a matter of delicate restraint in expanding that atmosphere enough to fill a room without changing the scene.

In this cohesive blend, with Reid’s voice and Henry’s words, the pair are a bit like holding up a mirror to a mirror: it’s beside the point to parse each of their distinctive contributions, and much more interesting to simply feel what it’s like to stand between them, here, through Life & Time.

About Mike Reid

Mike Reid moved to Nashville, TN in 1980 marking a return to music after a sidebar career in the NFL — he played football at Penn State while getting his B.A. in Music, was selected in the first round of the 1970 NFL draft and went on to play defensive tackle for five seasons with the Cincinnati Bengals. Once in Nashville, however, he quickly made a name for himself as a hit-making songwriter. Reid penned twelve #1 singles in the 80s & 90s, including Alabama’s “Forever As Far As I’ll Go”, Ronnie Milsap’s “Stranger In My House” which won a Grammy in 1984 for Best Country Song, and Bonnie Raitt’s iconic “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” which Reid co-wrote with Alan Shamblin. He has also written songs for countless others, including Conway Twitty, The Judds, Tanya Tucker, and Willie Nelson, and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005.

About Joe Henry

Joe Henry is a singer-songwriter who became a record producer as a protege of T Bone Burnett, having gone on to win Grammys for Solomon Burke, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, and Bonnie Raitt. Notably, he produced the final albums of the late Allen Toussaint, who credited Henry for ushering him out of retirement at a time he thought he’d never leave New Orleans again. Henry’s contribution to American music remains somewhat enigmatic: Joe’s own records often feature adventurous contributions by instrumentalists, such as one of only two cameos Ornette Coleman ever made with a singer, yet a song of his like “Stop” Madonna’s hit single “Don’t Tell Me”. Recently, Nazraeli Press published Unspeakable: The Collected Lyrics of Joe Henry, 1985–2020, though Henry quickly rendered it incomplete by releasing his 16th studio album All The Eye Can See.

Artists’ website: https://www.joehenrylovesyoumadly.com/

‘Life And Time’ – official video: