Confessional Emotion From Joe Henry

Intimate confessions concerning love, desire and revolution dropped from Joe Henry’s lips during his performance at Largo Wednesday, the first night of a weekly residency. Yet they were not personal admissions of any sort.

Instead, the tunes played like movie shorts from inside the head of the veteran songwriter, whose critically acclaimed music has gradually morphed from hushed country-folk to the loop-laden electro-jazz cabaret of last year’s “Scar” album.

For 90 minutes, the singer-guitarist unreeled stark portraits of characters caught up in or reflecting on odd-to-desperate emotional situations. Along with material from “Scar” and “Fuse” (1999), he presented several new songs, including the viscerally romantic “Flesh and Blood,” written for pioneering soul singer Solomon Burke, whose forthcoming album Henry produced.

“Subtitles help,” said the Pasadena-based musician before explaining the plot of “This Afternoon,” a new number about a Cuban boy entertaining tourists on the cusp of Castro’s 1959 takeover.

Though his stellar band could not reproduce all the subtleties of the recordings, the players carefully crafted a sensual, generally languorous sound that ebbed and flowed from torchy soul to an almost Velvet Underground gurgle.

But the most distinctive instrument was Henry’s voice, a conversational velvet rasp he played the way a jazz musician uses his horn. Crisply clipping off phrases or forcefully spitting out words, he enunciated pain, hope and need with clarity. You didn’t need subtitles to understand the feelings.

Joe Henry at Largo, 432 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A. Wednesday and April 17, 9 p.m. $15. (323) 852-1073.