The return of Joe Henry: Madonna’s maverick in-law

Joe Henry married into pop royalty, but the relationship is immaterial, he tells Neil McCormick.
Joe Henry is one of those American mavericks who, like Tom Waits, seem to operate on a musical plane of their own.
Singer-songwriter Joe Henry

A wry, poetic storyteller, he spins narratives of wit and wisdom in an intimate, cracked voice, his characters inhabiting a melting-pot soundscape that is at once rootsy and contemporary, genuinely original yet oddly understated. His 10th album, Civilians, sets stories of personal, emotional and political conflict against a kind of retro sci-fi jazz-blues.

Along the way, Henry has become an in-demand producer, working with Elvis Costello, Ani DiFranco, Aimee Mann and a host of soulful veterans including Solomon Burke, Bettye LaVette, Allen Toussaint, Mavis Staples, Ann Peebles, Irma Thomas and Billy Preston.

“I enjoy working with artists who have a personal history that they can reference and they can depart from.”

In the mid-1980s, Henry married Melanie Ciccone, sister of Madonna, and the couple have two children. It’s odd to contemplate that this marginal musical maverick has a sister-in-law who is one of the planet’s biggest pop icons.

“I’ve known her since I was 15 and she was 17, longer than I’ve known my wife,” he reports. “We have had a great relationship, and part of that was because I never needed anything from her. I recognised that we were in two different occupations. Not to disparage one ounce of her musicality, I was always of the belief that her persona was her career.

“Whether she was making a movie or writing a song or punching a photographer, it was all pushing a persona forward, and that was the real body of work. I was never tempted to slip a song to her at thanksgiving.”

Then in 2000, Madonna reworked his twisted tango Stop into the hit Don’t Tell Me.

“People think what I do is idiosyncratic, so that was a really great vindication. The song has a very odd lyric but I was at a show once when she did a breakdown and it was just her and 20,000 people singing it, and I thought, ‘Am I allowed to rest my case at this point?’ What I do is not so limited to my interpretation of it.”
‘Civilians‘ by Joe Henry is out on Monday (Anti).

Source: Telegraph.co.uk
Thanks to Vincy