Joe Henry
Among the many lasting images Stanley Kubrick left us is the ultimate shot in Dr. Strangelove, when Slim Pickens rides down to Russia astride the H-bomb. Kubrick created a perfect ironic moment: it’s absurd and pathetic, and yet Pickens as Major T.J. “King” Kong is ecstatic as he embraces not only his own death but the end of the world as we know it. In an apparent homage, Joe Henry–a singer-songwriter whose deadpan delivery of twisted tales bears some resemblance to Kubrick’s storytelling style–concludes his new album, Fuse, with a loving cover of “We’ll Meet Again,” the Vera Lynn chestnut that also closes the film. Like Kubrick’s cold-war masterpiece, Fuse is a bittersweet comedy of obsession that follows its cast to an inescapable fate, with the rich atmosphere and constant motion we expect to find in good films but rarely get from records.
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It’s not the first time Henry has incorporated his professed love of the movies into his music: his 1990 album, Shuffletown, closes with “Ben Turpin in the Army,” in which the hero likens himself to the cross-eyed comedian of silent films, and in “Third Reel,” from Kindness of the World (1993), he sings, “Well they’ve torn up the streets and / Burned off the fields / And turned all the dogs to the woods / They took up the cross / But they lost the third reel / And the picture was just getting good.” Other narratives on his early albums evoke film archetypes less directly: “King’s Highway,” from Short Man’s Room (1992), is as disturbing a monologue as any Norman Bates ever delivered. A hitchhiker dispassionately relates how he killed his ride, then robbed the corpse out of courtesy, so the dead man “wouldn’t have to feel so bad / To think I’d killed him just because / He was passing through this town / And only ’cause he looked about right / And he stopped when I flagged him down / On the King’s Highway tonight.”
As the next song, “Angels,” begins, with almost no pause, the voice from the album’s opening returns, as it will again and again throughout the album. It’s credited in the liner notes to a performance artist named George Seedorff, whom Henry’s brother recorded some 20 years ago at a reading. Henry rediscovered the tape in his brother’s attic, and on Fuse he uses Seedorff as a sort of found Greek chorus.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): uncredited photo.
