John Henry

John Henry – Out At Sea – 2020
By Steve Leftridge
John Henry is a rock-and-roll lifer. As a mainstay of the St. Louis music scene, Henry is the talent booker for Off Broadway, one of St. Louis’s top music venues, and he founded and manages the annual Open Highway Music Festival, which recently celebrated its 10th year as one of the city’s marquee live-music events. Music fans in the Midwest know him best as the hard-touring, guitar-slinging singer-songwriter, first as the frontman for John Henry and the Engine and now leading his stellar new band of St. Louis all-stars. All along, John has toured or shared the stage with Jason Isbell, Dwight Yoakam, Nathaniel Rateliff, and countless others, earning critical raves for his songwriting, record-making, and galvanizing live performances.
John Henry has a voice like St. Louis itself--tough, stormy, and spirited. As a result, Henry is one of St. Louis’s best-loved troubadours, whose heartland rock smolders and smokes with small-town dramas shot in cinematic widescreen. With his evocative storytelling, melodic craftsmanship, and sandstorm vocals, Henry has consistently captivated his spirited fanbase with his rousing live shows, full of musical vignettes and emotional travelogues, prompting his audiences to open up their hearts and tonsils to sing along to Henry’s songs.

As the former leader of John Henry & the Engine, the singer-songwriter first hit the scene with stories of the scrappers and wounded hearts looking for a place to stand amid the darkness on the edge of town. On 2008’s Under the Yellow Moon, Henry established his sensual sonic identity, mapping the American musical landscape as a relentless seeker of styles and stories, truths and injustices, grace and peace in the form of street-tough hymns filled with searching poetry and wreathed in shadowed, ambient atmospherics.

Under the Yellow Moon proved that Henry was a passionate alchemist of classic rock history, combining the romantic sweep of Bruce Springsteen with the scruffy melodicism of The Replacements, along with a healthy dose of Muscle Shoals swing and Stax punch. Never to pinned in, however, Henry’s 2009 single “I Don’t Want to Know” and the 2011 EP Sad Face of Yours added fiddles and Telecasters to a fresh twangcraft that also fit Henry into the great St. Louis alt-country tradition alongside Uncle Tupelo.

2011’s Spinning Wheel was another breakthrough, replicating the locked-in wallop of Henry’s live shows—the driving rhythms, the comet-hot vocals, the towering tunes. With his first solo album, 2026’s beautifully resonant Dark City Dark Country, Henry reached another artistic peak, securing coveted main stage spots at the LouFest and Roots N Blues festivals.

Dark City Dark Country is a collection of sharply observed, diary-spilling songs about the highs and lows of living, resilience, commitment, and finding blessings in bittersweet losses. Channeling Delta bluesmen and urban-inferno rock troubadours, Henry floats his prairie-chapel vocals over known-in-the-bones storytelling about lost souls looking for answers. On songs like “Country of the Broken Hearted” and the mesmerizing title track, Henry combines autumnal elegance with fist-in-the-air resilience and a poet’s gifts for fresh imagery.

In 2018, Henry unleashed “American Pain,” a searing portrait of a national scene in which the walls are breaking down, a song shot through with a desperation matched only by the almighty rocking of Henry’s voice and guitar. The latest single, “Work,” hits even harder. Now with an expanded band, including a horn section and keyboardist Jake Elking, “Work” is both a lament for the current moment’s economic anguish and a strident personal call to action, all set to a sledgehammer groove and Henry’s turbo-charged vocals.
Now married with two kids (and a third on the way), Henry’s commitment to life as a working musician has drawn on the deeper inspiration of the grace and beauty of his children and the compassion he feels for his community. Those influences have helped Henry craft the new Out at Sea, recorded with a first-rate band composed of the Bottle Rockets’ John Horton (lead guitar), El Monstero’s Jack Elking (keys), Tony Barbata (drums), Bryan Hoskins (guitar), and Kevin Bachmann (bass). “Ultimately, I am trying to be the best and most honest version of myself,” Henry says of the new record. “Lyrically I wanted to say exactly what I was feeling in the most efficient way possible while tackling heavy topics set to melodies that weren’t afraid to be pretty.” The result is the most personal and passionate music of Henry’s career, one that speaks to the harsh realities of the current national scene but that also reflects the renegade musical spirit of a great American roots rocker.