Mike Reid & Joe Henry Interview - Life And Time Album

Mike Reid and Joe Henry have long been known for being Grammy Award-winning artists & songwriters who have both had storied careers. Reid has written several classic hit songs including “I Can’t Make You Love Me” for Bonnie Raitt and “Stranger in My House” for Ronnie Milsap. Henry has recorded & released 16 solo albums and he recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Americana Music Association. In addition, Henry has won three Grammy Awards for his work as a producer.

Now in 2025, Reid and Henry have teamed up for their first album together, called Life and Time (on the Work Song Inc label via Thirty Tigers). It’s a special collaboration that features Reid as lead vocalist & pianist, with 12 songs written together by Reid & Henry. It was produced by Henry.

Life and Time is a deep, heartfelt collection of songs that reflect the personal experiences and insights of these two artists who have both spent over 40 years of making music. Consisting mostly of thoughtful, expressive ballads, the album’s production showcases Reid’s soulful, deep vocals, his intimate piano playing, and Henry’s acoustic guitar playing. The songs have poetic lyrics and the focus is on the storytelling.

Highlights on the album include the title track “Life and Time,” “The Bridge” (which features harmony vocals by Bonnie Raitt, “Sleeper Car,” “Weather Rose” and “Stray Bird.”

Reid & Henry first met at a songwriting camp in Nashville, and they realized that they shared many interests including a love of poetry. Soon after they began writing together, and eventually they decided to release a joint album of their songs.

Life and Time was released in early September, and the duo has already played shows in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. They will resume touring in early 2026, playing west coast dates.

We are pleased to do this new Q&A interview with Mike Reid & Joe Henry. But before we get started, here’s a brief rundown of their individual careers as artists, songwriters and producers.

Reid, 76, is a former NFL football player who became a talented hit songwriter. His best known song is the classic ballad “I Can’t Make You Love Me” for Bonnie Raitt, and he won the Grammy Award for Best Country Song for writing the hit “Stranger in My House” for Ronnie Milsap. Impressively, he has written 12 country hits for artists such as The Judds, Wynonna, Tim McGraw, Alabama and Collin Raye. On top of this, he had a #1 country hit as an artist, with his song “Walk on Faith.”

Here’s the video of Mike Reid & Joe Henry’s song “Life and Time.”

Henry, 64, is an accomplished singer/songwriter whose music uniquely combines folk, blues, jazz and rock. He has released many acclaimed albums including Scar (2001), Tiny Voices (2003), Civilians (2007) and Blood from Stars (2009). Notably, he is also known as an excellent record producer. He has won three Grammy Awards for producing Solomon Burke (Best Contemporary Blues Album), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (Best Traditional Blues Album) and Carolina Chocolate Drops (Best Traditional Folk Album).

Here’s our interview with Mike Reid and Joe Henry. They discuss their collaboration for their new Life and Time album, and they also discuss some highlights from their individual careers.

DK: I like your new album, Life and Time. How did the two of you meet, and when did you decide to create this new album?

Joe Henry: In August 2022, Mike and I were both teachers in residence at a songwriting camp at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, hosted by my dear friend Rodney Crowell. On the first night of the camp, Mike and I happened to walk across the campus to the dining hall at the same moment. We got in line for food, and then we sat down and started having a conversation. I realized that we had in common a love for the same poets, and we quickly fell into a deep conversation that made us both feel like we’d known each other for a long time.

DK: When did you write and record the songs for Life and Time?

Henry: We broke camp there at the end of August, and then I reached out to Mike in October. I recall that I was visiting my dad in North Carolina, and I heard the beginning of a song take shape in my mind. I stopped and sent a text to Mike, and asked if he would like to write something together. As it turns out, I sent him a complete lyric, and about 24 hours later he had finished the song and recorded a beautiful version with vocal & piano. And I was so struck by the fact that with no conversation between us, no back and forth, I sent him the completed words and he sent back a completed recording. I’ve never known a collaboration like that, and then we repeated that and we continued. It worked so well and we just stayed with it.

Here’s the lyric video of Mike Reid & Joe Henry’s song,
“Weather Rose.”

Mike Reid: I love Joe’s work, and when we met we talked about our favorite poets and we hit it off. When he sent me the lyric, we didn’t think in terms of making a record. Joe was saying, “Do you want to try writing together?” At the time. I had mostly gone back to writing by myself. Then I said to Joe, and I suppose I meant this to be funny—”I don’t know what I’m doing when I’m writing, and I’m very slow. But if you want to push off the dock into the fog, then I’m your guy.” And Joe was fine with that.

Joe’s a great producer. I feel that everything he added on our record, it gives the listener an opportunity to be more intimate with this singer and the songs as opposed to putting noise on a record. As you know, it’s a very intimate record, and Joe’s words are to be savored. They’re not of a time and place…they’re of a universal human condition, of people caught in circumstances. They’re trying very hard to figure things out, and sometimes there are solutions and sometimes not. So the record evolved and it was like, “Let’s see where this goes.”

DK: I noticed that Mike is singing all the lead vocals on the album. Early on, did you decide to put the emphasis on Mike as the main singer?

Henry: Because I’ve continued to make more records of my own over the years than Mike has, I first imagined that I would take them on as my repertoire for my next album, because I was so in love with the songs. But when I started doing some demos of them myself, and then in Nashville I spent a full day in the studio with Mike where he played through them and I sang 11 or 12 of the songs to see…how do these live in my voice? Ultimately, I didn’t feel like I was the right actor for that movie. I heard Mike’s versions, and I realized that I wanted to make the record around Mike.

DK: I like your title song, “Life and Time.” Can you tell the story behind writing that song?

Reid: When Joe sends me a lyric, I love the poetic aspect of his words. I would take them out of my house and into the woods, walk around and speak them out loud. When I read Joe’s words for “Life and Time,” what came to mind is a movie I love called McCabe & Mrs. Miller, with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. From his lyrics, I got the atmospheric feeling of that movie. I loved the sound of the lyrics.

Henry: I can recall those words coming quickly, and I imagined them like a Jimmy Webb song where there’s a character being sketched, and there’s enough detail for a listener to hopefully create their own movie behind their eyes when they hear it. But nothing so specific that it limits people to only one way of hearing the song. I always think a song is most successful when it leaves room for a listener to be a participant, not just a static receiver for it.

Here’s the audio of Mike Reid & Joe Henry’s song, “The Bridge.”

DK: Besides the title song, what are your favorite songs on the new album?

Henry: From the moment I heard the demo of “Sleeper Car” come back from Mike, I have been wholly enamored of this song, that opens the record. I’m also particularly fond of “Stray Bird” and “Whoever We Are.” I find this coming off Mike’s tongue and through his hands to be particular sorts of meditations that hover off the ground for me. They’re hymn-like in a certain way. I’m not saying that with any denominational affiliation. I just mean they feel active and vivid, like living things to me.

Reid: The last song on the record, “So We May,” has a very personal meaning to me. And it’s hard to pick favorites, but I also like “The Bridge” which Bonnie Raitt sings on, and “Stray Bird.”

DK: In addition to your new album, I want to ask you about your own individual careers. Mike, you are known for being a successful NFL football player who became a respected singer/songwriter? How did you make that transition?

Reid: There’s a lot of things we could say, but I suspect that underneath it’s that I live in terror of having to get a real job (laughs).

There are two things—my abilities, nature—the divine played a trick on me. They gave me my abilities and talents, whatever they have been in the world. I’ve been in the athletic world that I came from. I was raised in Pennsylvania, a railroading town, and high school football in western Pennsylvania was a big deal. I loved that game and it got me a scholarship to college at Penn State, and I turned out to be a first-round draft pick in the NFL.

Also when I was a kid, I started piano lessons. My dad and uncle dragged an old upright piano up from my grandmother’s house, and I would bang on that keyboard. Then I would listen to hymns in church, and that reflects a lot in the writing I do now. I discovered those hymns, and when I was 13, I rode my bike across town to a dear friend, Dave Berry, and he played me a recording of Van Cliburn & Fritz Reiner…Beethoven’s piano concerto. And I’ve always said that [this concerto] and the birth of my children are the only two things that have ever changed me, and I felt it change instantly in that moment.

Here’s the audio of Mike Reid & Joe Henry’s song, “Sleeper Car.”

I always tell young writers, when they want to know, that discipline and commitment are not enough. They’re wonderful., but only after you ask yourself and be as honest with yourself as you can be. Are you sufficiently compelled and against all odds for me, of any possibility of what one might call success with music or being considered a writer? I was sufficiently compelled. I don’t have big talents in music, but my gift in music was a relentless curiosity and the desire to lean into that which I didn’t understand.

DK: Mike, you’re known for co-writing the classic hit “I Can’t Make You Love Me” for Bonnie Raitt. Can you talk about writing that song with Allen Shamblin, and how you placed it with Bonnie Raitt?

Reid: Before her album Nick of Time, Bonnie already had a beautiful career, but Nick of Time became a breakout. On that album, I also had a song called “Too Soon to Tell,” so I had a way to get to her once I finally had the demo of “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”

About the writing of “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” I’d watched an interview with William Godman, the great screenwriter, and he said in this interview that he had asked in a conversation with Stephen Sondheim, the great theater composer. He asked, “Steve, do you know what you’re doing when you write?” And Sondheim didn’t hesitate at all. He said, “Oh, absolutely not. If I did, I would have never written a bad song.” If I knew where these things come from, I would have written 20 more “I Can’t Make You Love Me’s.” You begin to sense something, and Allen and I had two lines—”I can’t make you love me if you don’t,” and “You can’t make your heart feel something that it won’t.” At the time Ricky Skaggs was having big hits, so we wrote it for a couple of months as an uptempo bluegrass song. Then one day I had dropped my kids off to school; I came home and tape recorded everything, and that whole first verse fell out. And I didn’t associate it at all with those two lines. I always tell young writers, John Prine had these little couplets written down on pieces of paper all over his house. He said that he had these things written down, and you never know when something is going to fire.

In my case, Dale, it’s when I am sufficiently out of the damn way so I can hear what something is. You know, the great poet W.H. Auden said to a group of people, “How many here write because they have something to say?” And a numner of people raised their hands, and he wished them luck. Then he said, “However, if you are someone who is likely to simply hang around words, listening for what they might have to say, then I suspect you might be a poet.” And I suppose I’m in the latter. You know, I’ve never in the course of my writing life had anything to say. But I love hanging around words, and that’s really as fine a point as I can put on “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” Where that music comes from, who knows where it comes from.

Here’s the audio of Mike Reid & Joe Henry’s song, “Stray Bird.”

DK: Joe, you were recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Americana Music Association. How does it feel to receive this special honor?

Henry: It was both touching and terrifying. It was really nice to be acknowledged by your peers, and I won’t pretend like it wasn’t important for me. But I think for anybody, getting an honor that is awarded for a lifetime’s work, you’ve got to be really careful moving forward that you don’t think of yourself as having being put in the trophy case (laughs). Like people have decided for you that it’s been summarized and completed. I resist any temptation to think of myself as being in the museum.

Reid: I have to add one thing to this. Joe made a transcendent acceptance speech…it was beautiful. At the very beginning of his speech, he said when he got the news that he would receive this award, the first thing he thought of was, “Oh no, they think I’m gonna die” (laughs). So Joe, I don’t think you should leave that out of the telling of this story (laughs).

Henry: Well it was an authentic confession. That really is what I thought. I was sitting on a bus coming back to Maine, after having produced a record in New York City. And I got a text from someone high up in the Americana Music Association, with whom I’m close, asking me would I happen to be in Nashville when the awards were happening. I said, “Yes, I was planning to come in the next day. What’s shaking?” She said, “Well what’s shaking is we want to give you this award.”

DK: Joe, I looked at your discography and it says you’ve released 16 albums as an artist. So for fans who’d like to hear more of your music as a solo artist, which of your albums would you recommend that they check out first?

Henry: That’s an interesting question—there are two answers to that. For the people who like me, they tend to like my albums called Civilians (from 2007), and Scar (2001). Those seem to be particularly resonate with people who are inclined to walk in my direction. Myself personally, I’m certainly proud of things on both of those two records. But Tiny Voices (2003) was the closest thing I’ve ever done to really achieving what I first imagined. I’m particularly proud of that batch of songs. I also quite like Blood from Stars (2009). There’s an electricity to that record and a sprawl to it, and very little space between songs that kind of add up to a movie, as I hoped it would.