Getting real PERSONAL

After years of writing tunes about imaginary people and events, Harry Connick Jr has taken his wife’s advice and penned some songs about his own life

When you’re writing about love, there are so many shades

Harry Connick Jr has tried on a good many identities since he started playing music in public at the age of five. That’s one of the reasons that his latest album, Every Man Should Know, is so special to him.

His musical expression has run the gamut from the classical studies of his youth to the jazz and big-band sounds that made him a top-seller, and he’s subsequently explored blues, R&B, funk, Latin, gospel and other styles. As an actor he’s been on the big screen as tailgunner Clay Busby in Memphis Belle (1990), as serial killer Daryll Lee Cullum in Copycat (1995), as hotshot fighter pilot Jimmy Wilder in Independence Day (1996), as a small-town charmer in Hope Floats (1998) and as the compassionate Dr Clay Haskett in Dolphin Tale (2011), and on the small screen as cheating boyfriend Leo Markus on Will & Grace (2002-06) and as idealistic prosecutor David Haden on NBC’s Law & Order:

Special Victims Unit (2012). He’s even hit the boards to play Dr Mark Bruckner in a successful Broadway revival of On A Clear Day You Can See Forever (2011). Connick has moved from each identity to the next seamlessly. However, as he began writing the songs that would appear on Every Man Should Know and its spin-off predecessor, Smokey Mary (2013), Connick had a new role in mind: himself.

‘‘You know, my wife has been telling me for years, ‘Harry, you frustrate me, because nobody knows you — you’,’’ says the 45-year-old singer, who is married to former Victoria’s Secret model Jill Goodacre. ‘‘For some reason I never really wrote tunes about me. I don’t know why. I thought it was more fertile ground to just make stories up. Then you have no boundaries, you can write about everything. But I thought she had a point, and I started to think, ‘Maybe I should write more about me, my life, tell people a bit more about what I do’.

‘‘So that’s kind of where this record ended up.’’ It actually ended up as two albums. Taking licence to write from a more personal point of view also allowed Connick to blow through any stylistic parameters he might have felt, yielding 26 songs that, he says, ‘‘were all over the place — Mardi Gras music, parade music, funk music, country tunes. I didn’t set out to write anything, I just wrote tunes. I had a great time’’.

He acknowledges having been ‘‘a little worried that it might sound too all over the place’’, but ultimately he and coproducer Tracey Freeman decided that there was indeed a unifying element to the material.

‘‘I figured the common thread is me,’’ Connick explains, speaking by telephone from his home in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City.

‘‘My buddy Tracey, who’s been with me on all the records, said, ‘Man, that sounds like a Harry Connick tune!’, and I’m like, ‘Really? It’s nothing like everything else I’ve written’. And he’d be, ‘No, bro, it sounds like everything you’ve done’.

‘‘So it’s kind of like having a style,’’ he says. ‘‘I really don’t hear it — but, if other people do, I trust them that it’s there. And that’s really cool.’’

The idea of two separate albums from the same sessions arose in part from practical considerations.

‘‘I knew what the record company wanted,’’ Connick says. ‘‘I knew, when they heard songs like some of the funk

tunes they’d be like, ‘Dude, seriously, what do you want us to do with this? This is really kind of niche, obscure’. And I get it.

‘‘So it was really Sony who said, ‘Look, why don’t you put out two records? Put out one right before Mardi Gras and then another one later’,’’ he continues. ‘‘So I said, ‘I have a feeling I know which ones you want me to take off’, so we took those off and that was Smokey Mary, and we kept the other ones for Every Man Should Know.

‘‘You know, somebody told me, a long time ago, that you’d know you’ve arrived when you can cut your best work and not let it affect you,’’ Connick concludes. ‘‘Now I finally know what they were talking about.’’

Though Every Man Should Know is stylistically broad — its 12 tracks range from the country tinge of Time To Go and the jazz overtones of One Fine Thing to the New Orleans second-line rhythm of S’pposed to Be, which appears on both albums — there’s no question that the second album digs a little deeper into Connick’s heart than does the more spirited fare on Smokey Mary.

‘‘When you’re writing about love,’’ he says, ‘‘there are so many shades, from heartbreak to infatuation and everything in between.’’

The Greatest Love Story, for instance, was written specifically for his wife, but it’s also the first of his songs ever to directly reference his mother, Anita, who died of ovarian cancer when he was 13.

‘‘Her life and death were so significant to me, it took years and years to even talk about her,’’ Connick says, ‘‘much less write about it.’’ He cried the first time he sang the tune in the studio, Connick adds. The next track on the album is Come See About Me, whose theme of lost love was purely imaginary but still cut to Connick’s emotional core.

‘‘That’s something that was very difficult for me,’’ he admits.

‘‘I’m in a happy relationship, thank God, with my wife, and I started really thinking about what would happen if she left me — which is kind of how I used to write, make stuff up. But I wouldn’t make stuff up about me, it would just be about some guy.

‘‘And the thought of Jill being with another guy and moving on is . . . It’s almost inconceivable to me,’’ Connick continues.

‘‘I don’t know how I could live. It’s a combination of heartbreak and jealousy and frustration.

‘‘I can’t imagine the pain. So I started thinking, ‘What would I do? What would I say?’. I would call her, say, ‘Jill, I don’t want to bother you, but... Could you come on over? Could you come see about me?’. It was kind of a dark place.’’

Connick tried to shine a little light into another kind of darkness with Love

Wins, a song dedicated to Ana Grace Marques-Greene, the daughter of his former tenor saxophonist, Jimmy Greene. She died in the Newtown, Connecticut, school massacre. Connick sang at her funeral, and was inspired to write the song — all proceeds from which will go to the Ana Grace Fund, established by her family — after hearing one of the speakers at the funeral. Another of the album’s songs, Being

Alone, explores a different emotional space.

‘‘It’s not really a love song,’’ Connick says. ‘‘It’s about just being alone, being by yourself.’’

Every Man Should Know features a variety of guests, including Connick’s longtime friends Wynton Marsalis on Being Alone and Branford Marsalis on Let Me Stay. Trumpeter Leroy Jones and vocalist Kim Burrell also are heard, and guitarist Brian Sutton is one of several Nashville musicians whom Connick used on several of the album’s tracks.

‘‘The tune comes first, then the instrumentation comes next,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s nice to have friends in high places where you can say, ‘Hey, man, can you come to the studio real quick and play this tune?’. Wynton will say, ‘No problem’. And, when you get to their level, it’s not about chord changes, it’s, ‘What are we playing about?’. I can tell them what the song is about and they’ll play to that, which is the sign of a really mature musician.

‘‘But that means that the foundation, the song, has to be very, very strong before you can start saying, ‘I want Wynton to play on this’, or anybody else, you know?’’

With two albums already out this year, Connick is now concentrating on touring, which he expects to take him through this year and into 2014. He has another film due out in December — Angels Sing is a family drama co-starring fellow musicians Kris Kristofferson, Lyle Lovett and Willie Nelson — but for the time being Connick has put acting on the back burner in favour of music.

He’s particularly looking forward to seeing what new music may come out of this year’s experiments.

‘‘What makes all this interesting for me is that I don’t know what’s going to be next,’’ Connick says. ‘‘I don’t know if the next record is going to be standards or instrumentals or even more personal. That’s what makes it fun. They’re all kind of tailor-made, sort of like snapshots of where I am at the time, so it doesn’t make sense to plan too far ahead.’’