The Atmosphere’s Just Right

The message is ominous: “You stagedive, you go home.”

Joe Henry, still hours away from show time, studies the sign that hangs beside the stage at the Troubadour. He seems pleased that it’s there, with its suggestion of danger and excitement.

Leaning against the bar in his dark suit and tie, Henry calmly sips a Coke. “Just once I would like to have to tell the crowd to calm down,” he says with a grin. “But it hasn’t come up.”

Not that it should. There is a dark undercurrent to the music of Joe Henry, an edge that reveals itself gradually within smoldering waves of sound: guitar, organ, muffled beats, samples and loops. His new “Fuse” album is loaded with tales from the shadowy margins of the human psyche, where even the motives of angels are in question. But loud it is not.

So even before this afternoon’s sound check begins, a stagehand is peeling down the sign, a remnant from a hard-rock show the previous night. Henry is expecting good behavior from the locals. He’s called Los Angeles home for the last nine years, and tonight he will be dedicating songs to friends, playing to a crowd destined to include members of R.E.M. and basking in the acclaim that has finally come his way.

He’s been making records for more than a decade now, but it’s only been since the recording of 1996’s soulful and atmospheric “Trampoline” that Henry, 38, has felt fully realized as an artist.

Most of his career was spent as a kind of super-literate singer-songwriter, a sometime collaborator with alternative country heroes the Jayhawks, crafting smart, elegant folk-rock. Now Henry prefers to express subtle shifts of mood via overlapping layers of folk, funk, jazz, hip-hop and ambient murk.

Lyrics now emerge late in the recording process and feed off the complex emotions within the music. “It’s allowed me to use a lot fewer words and be a little more impressionistic because the song already has a character before I put words on top of it,” he says. “There’s already a mood that’s there.”

Only minutes ago, Henry arrived from the Atwater home he shares with his wife and two children. It was there, in his garage studio, that the recording of “Fuse” began last year with a single obsession: to secure hip-hop master Dr. Dre to produce. His intention was to make a record that was stripped-down and yet deeply rhythmic. When his overtures to Dre were met with silence, Henry began slowly building his own loops and samples, creating the sort of fiery funk-flavored groove found within the song “Fat.”

Across the brooding rhythms of that track, Henry sings: “I gambled I would lose / I guess I win.” Elsewhere he warns, “Here comes the night, there go your knees / Reaching for the floor.”

“I think all my songs are funny,” Henry says. “I’m always dismayed when other people don’t think so. People describe what I do as dark or something.”

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Henry first became interested in music as a child growing up near Detroit. “I was 11 years old and I consciously remember hearing a Bob Dylan song, and being absolutely destroyed by it,” he says. “It was ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile.’ My older brother had it. And I still remember where I was standing when I heard it, and I looked at everything different.”

By age 15 he was dissecting the blues of Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins, decoding the songs of Tom Waits and Charlie Mingus, spending his free hours alone in the dark with a pair of headphones.

Dylan’s influence on Henry was profound by the time he relocated to New York in the mid-’80s to begin his own recording career. He was ultimately signed to A&M; Records, but his main champion at the label left the company the day his first album was released. And when he later began work on his “Murder of Crows” album, he saw his plans for a raw update on Dylan’s “Basement Tapes” usurped by a producer who was aiming for a bigger ‘80s rock sound.

“I’ve had really grim, terrible periods,” Henry says. The worst moments came in 1993, after he had been dropped from the A&M; roster and found himself facing ambivalent crowds as the opening act on a solo tour by Glenn Frey of the Eagles.

He considered a career change, but he focused again on music, beginning a kinship with the Jayhawks that resulted in a pair of fine country-flavored rock albums. The release of “Trampoline” on Mammoth Records dramatically severed his ties with that sound. Some of his old fans were puzzled, and a few were even offended, but it wasn’t exactly Dylan-goes-electric.

“People don’t care about music in those terms anymore,” Henry says with a shrug. “Now, if people go into a club and hear something they don’t like, they could just take it down the street. People, as a rule, are not invested in music like maybe they were 30 years ago, for better or worse.”

Henry is content enough to have freedom to explore his present sound. The critical accolades that followed have also contributed to a new degree of fame for the musician. Since the March release of “Fuse,” also on Mammoth, Henry has been playing to improbable millions of television viewers as a guest of David Letterman and Rosie O’Donnell. And just days before the Troubadour show he faced Pamela Anderson Lee on “Politically Incorrect” as panelists argued the merits of feeding dogs steamed vegetables.

“It was a fairly surreal moment,” he observes.

Celebrity is not entirely foreign to his experience. He is, as it happens, a superstar in Holland. More important, he attended high school with Madonna and eventually married her sister, Melanie Ciccone. (The two singers have only collaborated once, recording Vic Chesnutt’s “Guilty by Association” for the 1996 “Sweet Relief II” benefit album.)

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On stage later that night, Henry gives a little hop as his band--a tight, sophisticated unit that’s made Henry’s music its own--glides into the song “Trampoline,” and he leans back on his heels, knees buckling at the crash of each chord. By morning, the group will be disbanded, scattered to assorted previous engagements, leaving Henry to begin two days of rehearsals with a new lineup in time for a coming tour (he returns to the Troubadour on July 14).

This is just as Henry likes it.

“I find it really exciting to start over,” he says. “I’m completely delighted for songs to become something else altogether. I don’t care if it’s completely different as long as it’s really good.”*

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JOE HENRY, Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Date: July 14. Price: $12. Phone: (310) 276-6168.