Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Entertainment Weekly	B+
Los Angeles Times
Mojo
NME	8/10
Q
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Select	4/5
The Village Voice	C

Henry's Dream is the seventh album released by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, in April 1992.

This album remains a big favourite amongst Bad Seeds fans, although Nick Cave himself was reportedly unhappy with the production by David Briggs. Briggs preferred a "live-in-the-studio" method he had used with Neil Young. This led to Cave and Mick Harvey re-mixing the album, and ultimately to the Live Seeds recordings, as Cave wanted the songs "done justice".

It was the first album to feature long-standing members Martyn P. Casey (bass) and Conway Savage (piano, organ), both Australian. The latter is a singer-songwriter in his own right and has contributed distinctive backing vocals to a handful of Bad Seeds songs; here he and Cave deliver a rousing duet in the chorus of 'When I First Came to Town'.

The album is considered by some to have a vague "concept", i.e. song narratives overlapping and/or sharing characters.

The lyrics of "Christina the Astonishing" are based on the life of Christina Mirabilis, a 12th-century woman generally regarded as a Christian saint.

"When I First Came to Town" is based partly on Karen Dalton's recording of the traditional song "Katy Cruel". Dalton's version was later issued on Original Seeds Vol. 1.

Cave later claimed the songs were heavily influenced by street beggars he saw in Brazil. "They'd get their acoustic guitars with one or two strings and bang away and make a racket that had no sense whatsoever. It was very violent and seemed to come straight out of the heart. Very unmusical."

Of "Papa Won't Leave You, Henry," Cave said in 2005, "I like that song a lot. That was another one written in Brazil. It's this sprawling, lyrical thing. We were playing that [in 2000] as a very slow ballad on a different chordal structure altogether, which then became 'Darker with the Day' [from the 2001 album No More Shall We Part]. It had a different melody, but very slow and it made for a haunting thing. That song was composed over a long period of time and something that I would sing to my little son, Luke. It was kind of a nasty fucked-up lullaby."

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