Live at the Belly Up: Eric Henderson and The Believers (Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Friday night, November 25, my husband Charles and I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode featuring a musician named Eric Hutchinson who led a band called The Believers. Eric Henderson was born September 8, 1980 in Takoma Park, Maryland and he’s tall, baby-faced and for his Live at the Belly Up appearance wore a red outfit that made him look sexy in a nerdish way. Henderson shot this show in 2018, though the copyright date on it was a year later, and when he made it he was just coming off a four-year hiatus in his career during which he had decided that whatever he wanted to do with the rest of his life, playing music was not it. Fortunately he came back, organized a new band called The Believers, and made an album in 2018 called Modern Happiness which was, he said, the first time in his life where he’d made the music he wanted to make instead of what he thought would sell. In the interstitial interviews Henderson talked about how much he likes to write songs that are cross-purposes with each other, often setting lyrics about doleful subjects to bright, upbeat, happy melodies. He mentioned onie woman who came up to him after a gig and said, “I’ve been doing housework to one of your songs for four years now and I just realized that the lyrics are about suicide.” Henderson said Stevie Wonder was his main inspiration even though he sounds very little like him; he said what he likes best about Wonder is his ability to slip political and social messages into his songs but avoid the anger that usually traps most protest singers. Instead, Henderson likes the way Wonder presents his messages in terms of peace, love and bringing people together instead of setting them apart. He also mentioned Randy Newman as his model for a song called “New Religion,” which he wrote in the persona of God lamenting the injustices and idiocies people perpetrate in the Deity’s name – though “Dear Me” is considerably less angry than Newman’s own (marvelous) song on the same topic, “God’s Song (That’s Why i Love Mankind).”

The songs Henderson played on this occasion were “A Little More,” “Miracle Woman,” “New Religion,” “I’ll Always Be the One Who Makes You Cry,” “Happy Like a Chicken With Its Head Cut Off” (itself a pretty good index of Henderson’s loopy sensibility), “Hands” (written as a tribute to his father, who got a late-onset form of muscular dystrophy that first hit him at age 35 and cost him the ability to clench his fists; as the disease has progressed Henderson, Sr. has largely lost the ability to walk, but it’s typical of Henderson, Jr.’s outlook on life that he chose to focus the song on what the old man still can do instead of what he can’t), “Take It Easy on Me,” “For the First Time,” “Watching You Watch Him” (which, according to Henderson’s Wikipedia page, came about when he watched his wife Jill watching the famously hunky tennis star Roger Federer on TV), “Dear Me” (an engaging song – I notice I’m using the word “engaging” quite a lot to describe Henderson’s music – about what advice the 39-year-old Henderson would give his 18-year-old self), “Rock and Roll” (which isn’t the usual raveup you get from a song with that title) and “Tell the World.” I’ve taken to count the number of songs an act performs in the one-hour Live at the Belly Up time slot as an indication of whether they’re a band with tightly knit songs or a more free-flowing jam band The more songs they can get into the hour, the more carefully crafted they are, and Henderson’s 13 puts him towards the “carefully crafted” and “tightly knit” side of things.