Replay: Joe Henry shares Five Things He's Learned by Song
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
“I write to discover what I’m writing, as I learn by going where I have to go.”
“If a song—as a piece of writing, as a performance, or recording—if it makes you know you’re alive, then time is delicious. Not in spite of, but because, it is fleeting. And then it will be as perfect as anything can be perfect.”
“The characters in my songs believe things I cannot always believe—but I’ve put them into motion by a willingness to hear them out.”
“The tradition is a living thing—the water behind our wave—and always informing how even the most original work is expanded and received.”
“The mystery of our endurance in the face of the inevitable is the very thing that allows us to dare to love and dream forward. Its finality is what establishes value in our lives, a rule of mortality.”
– Joe Henry, Five Things I've Learned by Song
Joe Henry is a celebrated songwriter and artist whose 25 year career has left an indelible and unique on American popular music. Here’s the first five minutes of Joe’s 90-minute class in which he shares the ways he’s found that the process and progress of our lives – like Song – knows more than we do.
Five Things He’s Learned by Song offers a deep exploration of the creative process and its connection to life. Joe emphasizes the surrender into the creative process rather than striving for perfection. He delves into the collaborative nature of creativity, the tension that defines our existence, and the interconnectedness of various art forms and human experiences. Ultimately, the class aims to cultivate a sense of acceptance, wonder, and grace in both artistic endeavors and everyday living.
If you want to understand how one of our great musicians understands his creative process – and the essential interplay between art and the human experience – this class is for you.
As a songwriter and artist, Joe is celebrated for his exploration of the human experience. A hyper-literate storyteller, by turns dark, devastating, and hopeful, he draws an author's eye for the overlooked detail across a broad swath of American musical styles – rock, jazz and blues – rendering genre modifiers useless.
Joe has collaborated with many notable American artists on his own body of work, from T Bone Burnett, Daniel Lanois, and Van Dyke Parks on one side of the spectrum, to Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Brad Mehldau, and Bill Frisell on the other. A three-time-Grammy-winning producer, Joe has made records for Bonnie Raitt, Hugh Laurie, Lisa Hannigan, Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens and Solomon Burke among many others.
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