Chris Henry

Making My Way to You

This is another Chris Henry solo project. Jason Carter plays fiddle and Smith Curry plays pedal steel and resonator guitar. Sarah Sellari sings with Chris on “Robot Dreams” and “As Long as You Have Love.” Everything else is all Chris. All original material. You want a review? OK here it is. This is a great album. Buy it (or take it or whatever one does to get music these days) and listen to it. You will love it. There. That’s done. Now what this album really needs is not a review but an analysis.

Chris Henry is a skilled and talented multi-instrumentalist, but also a productive and prolific songwriter. This work adds a new dimension to Chris Henry – that of stylist. I guess producer is more the accepted term of art, but that word is somehow insufficient. Chris does a number of things with this album that demonstrate his maturity and a grasp of music as a nourishing commodity that most folks in the music industry might wish for but never fully develop. Fundamentally, Chris Henry is a skillful architect. Form follows function in his music as much as it does in anything Louis Sullivan ever built.

Here are just a few examples of what I am talking about. Bluegrass players will remember the ’70s and ’80s when every now and then the music industry would stick a banjo track into some piece of pop or mainstream country music. Think “Misty” “Rockford Files” “Eastbound and Down.” No matter what they did it ended up sounding like a novelty piece. This is the architectural equivalent of attaching a pointed arch to a steel and glass skyscraper. It serves no real purpose and does not fool anybody. It is mere decoration and out of place at that. Chris has succeeded where New York, L.A. and Nashville failed, not by shoving a banjo track where it does not belong, but by allowing electric and pedal steel guitar to contribute to his music on terms that add to the function rather than simply the form. I suppose that Jim and Jesse, The Louvin Brothers and The Osborne Brothers also excelled at this. But Chris Henry does it in a way that links form and function, the result of which is great music, not mismatched instruments forcing songs into keys in which they wither. Listen closely to “I Keep Dreaming of You” “Gone” “On This Mountain” and “Tears in My Eyes” and you will hear bold columns supporting graceful archways that define the enclosed space, rather than features that are merely stuck onto buildings as decoration.

Closely related to this notion of musical architectural is musical onomatopoeia in which the melodic structure suggests the lyrical theme. This is a trait that we often see in classical music, and one that I suppose a lot of artists attempt. But Chris Henry carries it to an extent that excludes all other possibilities. “Medicine Man” “Spirit Traveler” and “Incarceration” are simply incapable of conveying any other feeling other than that which is told by its story, musically and lyrically. Now, I know Chris’s family, and have to think that this may be partially a matter of DNA. Listen to some of his Dad’s (Red Henry) mandolin compositions and you will understand.

Chris can also be as whimsical and witty as anybody. In this, he tends to put things where we would least expect to find them. “Robot Dreams”  gives us as accurate an assessment of the state of artificial intelligence today as you are likely to read in any serious scientific journal, served up in a traditional and lively bluegrass manner with Sarah Sellari singing along with Chris.

But to get past all the intellectual bullcrap that I have just shoveled all over the place, this album gives us some of the best traditional country songwriting I have heard in a long time. I won’t say the Chris is channeling anybody. If he is, we’ll let him tell us that. But he is writing songs and playing them the way we all love to hear them. There is some stuff here that is so traditional country, it is hard to believe that anybody born in the last half of the last century even has the ability to recognize it, much less write, perform and produce it. Chris’s music is bold and daring. But skillful and sensitive architect (producer) that he is we are not assaulted with features that serve no purpose. On the other hand it is by no means sparse. It is everything it needs to be, with no waste and no superfluous decoration. What you get with a Chris Henry project is that rare combination of amazing talent and unbound work ethic. And great music.

Chris Henry is talented in many ways. “Making My Way to You” puts it all on display. Get the album. I guarantee that it will move to the top of your playlist.  Buy it here: http://www.christopherhenry.net