“Brings together a collection songs in the lineage of Cale and Drake and Cohen, which function as dispatches from his personal vantage point, or as the press release puts it ‘the specific weight of being somewhere for a long time without quite being from there’.” That’s how we described Apocrypha, the new full-length from Dublin-born, US-based songwriter henry o henry back in July, the album using the experience of being an immigrant in America for over thirty years to observe the country from the novel perspective of an adopted son. And it is not only the angle of henry o henry’s work that is different from the norm, his ‘training’ as a musician beginning and ending with a few chords on a childhood nylon-string before his brother gifted him a $6 guitar from a charity shop years later in 2019. The instrument, patched together by home repairs, was volatile and prone to distortion, though the majority of songs on Apocrypha were written on it. “I wrote them for myself,” henry o henry explains, “and was certain every song was the last one.”
It was only on the insistence of filmmaker Rick Alverson that henry o henry realised the songs might hang together as an album, and the recording process developed organically from there with a characteristically authentic spirit. Father and son duo Eamon O’Leary and Ned Steves play across much of the album, recording together for the first time and without rehearsal, favouring instinct over deliberation and furthering the sense of songs unfurling in real time. Emilie Rex of Lean Year and poet Callie Garnett also appear, while Alverson oversaw the sessions and guided these energies towards their final shape, and Erik Hall contributed overdubs and mixed the result to further its subtly striking power. A record able to live up to its title: ambiguous in nature and all the more alluring because of it, where the hard-won wisdoms of a life well lived are matched by the flickering sense of some unforeseen possibility.
After lead single ‘The Fool’, what we called “a song worn and wistful and weathered but with a glint in its eye, moving with a sincerity and easy grace that comes with experience,” henry o henry has now shared latest track, ‘Parade’, ahead of Apocrypha’s release next month via Western Vinyl. An example of the careful patience which marks so much of the album, the song is understated yet strangely hypnotic, as though its mellow rhythms slowly envelop the listener and hold them within their world. “It’s like lying completely still in the grass but there’s always a circus in town,” as o henry puts it, hinting at both the grounded nature of the sound and the eccentric shadows which play across it.
