Joe Henry sought out Bonnie Raitt for album project

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NEW YORK - OCTOBER 29: (FILE PHOTO) Bonnie Raitt attends the 25th Anniversary Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Concert at Madison Square Garden on October 29, 2009 in New York City. Raitt will release her first album in seven years on April 10, 2012. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images) R:\Merlin\Getty_Photos\92531208.jpg

Updated: January 25, 2012 5:50PM

The empathetic and understated production style of Joe Henry goes against his aggressive nature of tracking down artists.

Henry recently finished producing “Slipstream,” the first studio record Bonnie Raitt has made in seven years.

“I try to be proactive in my life as a producer,” Henry said. “The ones that have been most meaningful are not things I got called to do but things I asked to do. With Bonnie, we had met once years ago, not that she would remember. I didn’t know what she was doing. I wrote to her manager.”

Raitt knew of Henry. They talked on the phone for three hours.

“She had retreated for a few years after the deaths in quick succession of her parents and her brother,” Henry said. “We hatched this plan where she would come to my house, we’d put a small band together and record for a few days. I promised her she had no obligation to do anything with it.”

They brought jazz-country guitarist Bill Frisell into the mix and recorded seven of Henry’s compositions and three Bob Dylan songs. Raitt also has recorded material with her touring band. “She rejoined her musical life,” Henry said.

Henry also produced a 2009 duet of Harry Belafonte and Senegalese singer-guitarist Baaba Maal taking on Lead Belly’s “Sylvie.” In 1956 Belafonte and the Norman Lubof Choir had a crossover hit with the ballad “Sylvie.”

“I started working with Harry as he was finishing the documentary of his life that is out now,” Henry said. “I produced what I think will stand as his last studio performance as a singer. It was a mind-blowing moment for me, but Harry is not happy with where his voice is. It’s not the one he had, it’s not the one he wants. Even though we believed we were ramping up to make a full record, once the one song happened he decided he was through singing and he was going to focus his energies elsewhere.”

Henry spent two weeks traveling with Belafonte through Europe as the calypso singer-activist was researching a documentary he hopes to make on hip hop and violence. “I think he invited me because he likes to talk to me,” Henry said with a chuckle. “And I like the way he rolls. I didn’t know what my job was but to spend time with him was too much to pass up.”

Henry wound up writing a Belafonte Q&A for the 200th issue of the English music magazine MOJO, published in July 2010. The commemorative issue was curated by singer-songwriter Tom Waits. “Tom wanted the main feature to be on Harry,” Henry said. “He couldn’t get a hold of him. He asked me to introduce him to Harry. Then, like a natural-born editor, he said, ‘I have a brilliant idea. Why don’t you write the piece on Harry and I’ll edit it?”

It’s a compelling piece. Henry watched a rough cut of the HBO Belafonte documentary “Sing Your Song” with the singer in his New York apartment. Henry was born in 1960 in Atlanta, Ga., and when he saw the documentary footage of Rev. Martin Luther King’s 1968 funeral match in the streets of Atlanta he “faltered and wept,” as he wrote in the five-page essay.

Belafonte asked Henry, “Are you all right?”

Henry wrote, “By gently asking me if I was all right, Harry Belafonte told me that I was.”