At home, he and his girlfriend have some new additions to the family. We chatted with Henry via Zoom, following a long day at his day job at a construction site. In the background of his Zoom screen is a large, inflatable pool.
“A month ago, there was this dog [at the construction site]," Henry says. “Like 100 people, they're all trying to feed and water this dog, and the dog is having nothing to do with anybody. I say to one of my guys, ‘Challenge accepted,’ and I walk over there, the dog walks right up to me, bro. And we just connect.”
Henry decided to take in the Great Pyrenees and took her to the vet to get her shots, where she received a clean bill of health. Henry’s girlfriend’s intuition picked up that there would soon be puppies coming their way.
“My girl came over a week after the vet, and she's like, ‘Are you sure this dog is not pregnant?’” Henry says. “And I'm like, ‘Well, I took it to the vet, I'm pretty sure they would have said this dog’s pregnant.’ But no, she was right. She's always right.”
One Friday evening, the dog gave birth to nine puppies in their living room. Over the past few weeks, Henry has been balancing taking care of the puppies with working, while performing shows in support of his new EP, The Garden.
Composed of six tracks, The Garden is five years in the making. Henry wrote three songs before the COVID-19 pandemic, but was not able to record. Once the pandemic dwindled, he wrote three more tracks and laid them down in the studio.
Songs such as the breezy, guitar-driven “The Garden” recall the stylings of The Beach Boys, and Henry’s gravelly vocals add a punk-rock element. These are the types of sounds Henry grew up on.
But lately, Henry has found himself listening to Native American flute music.
“I can't stand music with lyrics,” Henry says, “even though I make music with lyrics. I don't sit there and force a song. I let a song come to me, and then I just let it flow. And then I sit down and I write the lyrics. And that's probably the longest part because they’ve got to mean something. I don’t just say words, to fill space. I’m real critical on the words that I put in my music.”
Between planting the initial seeds of The Garden and reaping the six fruits of his labor, Henry says he was struggling with depression. During the early days of the pandemic, he had moved to Denver for work. Not many live music venues were holding concerts or shows, and he started to feel like he'd lost a sense of identity.
“I was just working at 6:30 in the morning 'til 2:30 in the afternoon,” Henry says. “And I'm not doing my art because there are no venues open to play. And I've never been one of those people to be like, ‘Let me Facebook Live myself on acoustic guitar and fucking play to the computer.’ To me, the show is about the audience and you creating a connection. And that's the beauty of a show.
"So what the fuck is the point of playing on the fucking computer? To me, I never understood. So I didn't have an outlet. And it started driving me literally crazy. I use that word literally. Like, I felt fucking insane.”
Upon his return to Dallas, Henry sought to make those musical connections through live shows again. But with The Garden he wanted the delivery of his live performances to exist within the studio tracks.
No Place Like Home
Henry The Archer recorded The Garden at Valve Studios, where artists such as The Polyphonic Spree, Andre 3000 and Ryan Tedder have cut tracks and albums. Valve is one of the few studios with a Neve 8128 In-Line Console, which allowed Henry to optimize the recordings on an intimate level.“My drummer [Kevin Geist] works in aerospace, and he has this special soldering technique,” Henry says. “And Casey [Di Iorio] the owner of Valve Studios, was looking for someone to solder [the Neve console] and fix some stuff and just do some work around the studio. And Casey synched up with Kevin, and from what I heard, Casey responded, like, ‘Oh, I heard of Henry The Archer, you guys should come in here and lay down some music sometime.”
Having typically recorded in Henry’s home studio, Geist persuaded Henry to take their music over to Valve as a way to capture the feeling of live performances in the professional mixes.
“We've got good songs, but there's a disconnect somewhere along the chain between what we're putting together and how it's being presented to this community, and I think that's where Casey comes in,” says Henry. “We play a concert – — and I'm not sucking my own balls right now, I'm just saying — when people come and hear us live, they're like, ‘Holy shit, you guys are fucking awesome.’ And then they get the record. And they're like, ‘Yeah, that's good.’ There's a difference, and so Casey has brought to the table that feeling that you get when you hear us live, and it's the way that he recorded us.
"And also, I've always saturated my [music] with a lot of reverb, and a lot gets lost in there. And I learned that recently, in the last two years of recording, people connect more with less reverb. It was a big challenge, and there was some friction between me and Casey, because I'm like, ‘I need more reverb on the vocal.’ And he's like, ‘We need people to connect to your voice.’ And I didn't understand it for the longest time. But when the product was finished, I was like, ‘Oh, I see what you're saying now, because you pick up on all the nuances, and all the breaths.'”
Being away from Dallas and eventually returning was a strong reminder of the importance of artistic community. “What I’m looking for ain’t here,” Henry repeats on The Garden standout track, “People Make a Place,” inspired by his time in Denver.
To say coming back to Dallas has been healing for Henry would be an understatement. His evaluation of Denver’s music scene is that the landscape was primarily dominated by electronic dance music, with full bands and instrument-driven shows automatically defaulting to the famous Red Rocks Pavilion.
But Dallas, Henry says, has something for lovers of all music. And now that he’s back, he’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
“What I love about the Dallas music scene is that it still has this vibe that's open to organic instrumentation and live music,” says Henry. “But you've got these venues where you walk inside, and people are playing horns. You've got venues for fucking everything in Dallas, bro. Anything from hip-hop to punk rock to indie rock. Everybody has a place in Dallas and everybody is welcome in Dallas. And even if you're not going to see a show, chances are you're gonna walk by a show and walk in the door."
