Michale Franit Interview

Michael Franti of Michael Franti & Spearhead

December’s Children: Growing up what were the records you were listening to?

Michael Franti: First, Stevie Wonder Songs in the Key of Life – it’s amazing, it was always spun in my house as a kid. And then I got really inspired Bob Marley, The Clash, and when I first heard hip-hop. (Hip-hop) changed my life, because it seemed like music that anyone could do; as long as you wanted to do it that hard and you put your mind and your soul to it. You didn’t really have to play an instrument, you didn’t have to be an acrobatic singer or have a great voice, you just had to say what you thought.

DC: You’ve always had a reggae influence to your music, but how did recording All Rebel Rockers in Jamaica affect the direction of this album in a cultural sense?

MF: Well, when you record in Jamaica, there’s just music everywhere you are. You’re just walking down the street and there’s musicians on every corner, every day of the year. You’re constantly around it, you see the rhythms that people dance to, and respond to. If people will dance to it in Jamaica, they’ll dance to it anywhere in the world, so it’s a pretty good litmus test for things. People will come into the studio off the street and just to listen to what you’re doin’ – you see them movin’ and responding to the rhythm.

DC: “Say Hey (I love you)” has been pretty successful, when you hear a song like that do you know right away people will respond to it?

MF: Yeah, I really loved the song, and when I took people into the studio to hear it they would say, “wow, that’s a really great song.” But I had no idea it would be the kind of hit it turned into. We had already put the song out to radio in the fall of 2008; it had a little bit of a run and faded away. And then in the spring or early summer of ’09 some Top 40 stations started playing it, then suddenly it went crazy, it was everywhere – t.v. shows, movies, beach parties, weddings, and on the radio all of the time. I never would’ve imagined it would get this popular.

The week it went into the Top 40 I almost died, my appendix ruptured and I was in the hospital. I was thinking, “Man, I’ve got a song on the radio and I’m not going to live to hear it.” But it was a good reminder for me, after twenty-something years of making music; it’s really great to have a hit song like that but at the end of the day it still doesn’t mean anything, compared to how important the people that love you and that you love are; and how precious our lives are, each of us, how precious every second is – it was a really strong reminder.

DC: You write very socially conscious lyrics, do you feel like that’s a musician’s stylistic choice or they’re inherent responsibility?

MF: Maybe some of both. I always write about what’s in my heart, I have a deep concern, I wanna make a difference. I don’t wanna be somebody who spent their whole life making music and not trying make a difference. Music really has the ability to inspire people, sometimes it’s a larger awareness of a political issue but sometimes it can just be inspiring someone. Like last night, there was a woman at our show that had lost 135 pounds, and she said she did it listening to our music. That really means a lot to me.

DC: Yell Fire is supposedly influenced by a trip you took to the Middle East, was that as profound for you personally as it was artistically?

MF: Going to Iraq, I went the year after the war started, so it was still really active. And I went to Israel, Palestine, the Gaza Strip, and played music on the street with the people. I wanted to see what life was like there. It’s a completely different experience from what I saw on t.v., to when I was walking around their streets, you know people have to about their daily lives even though there’s a war going on. How do they take control and make a life out of something that is really in complete chaos? It’s totally dangerous all of the time. But they didn’t want to hear songs about the war, or politics, or right or wrong; they wanted to hear songs that made them dance and feel good. For me it personalized the war – it’s not something that’s done between governments, it’s done between individuals. So often we miss that in the news, we don’t see the expense of the individual, I think if we did people would be less quick to drum-up support for wars, there would only be wars when it was absolutely necessary.

DC: Can a politically relevant song have the same punch live, when you’re in front of a crowd who’s there for a good time?

MF: That’s been the great challenge of my musical life, to be able to do both. I let the songs speak for themselves; I don’t stand on stage and make speeches about what I think it right or wrong. I try to write songs that have a universal meaning, because I really believe that it takes everybody to make the world a better place.

You wanna make people feel at home, you wanna make people believe in themselves, and you let them know that you believe in the. And from that you can inspire people to do really great things wit their lives.

DC: Corporate America seems to be mobilizing against music now in a way that I don’t ever remember having seen it done, where record labels, venues, music channels, websites, and radio stations can and often are owned by the same company. Does this make it hard to break through as an artist or does it help?

MF: The great thing about music today is that we have the internet, and for a lot of artists and record labels are saying, “Oh, my God the internet’s killing music.” But in fact, I see music more vibrant today, than ever in my long time of making it. More people have access to it every day, more people have larger record and song collections on their iPods than every before, more people can find out about artists and go to their websites and find out when their tours are happening. And because of that – the live tour market is more vibrant than it’s ever been. But the linking between the corporate world and music today has a lot to do with that, because it used to be that record companies were it, they sold the music and they controlled everything. But now it’s the licensing to films, or licensing to commercials, or the live show, or the merchandise, or the website. So the record labels aren’t as significant as they once were, and that’s changing things a lot in terms of the way people receive music and the avenues they get it, but also they way artists seeing their revenues coming in – it’s a different equation now.

Live Reivew

Live: Ben Sollee & Daniel Martin Moore

The Brown Theatre. Feb. 26, 2010.

By Brent Owen

“I used to be ashamed of my accent,” Ben Sollee told a nearly-full house at the Brown Friday night, the sort-of homecoming for the ensemble he and Daniel Martin Moore assembled for their tour supporting Dear Companion. The album, produced by Yim Yames, is a love letter to Appalachia and beacon to the dangers of mountaintop removal.

Everyone who took the stage was from Kentucky, and though they each hail from different corners of the state, they share a love for folk. The night wasn’t just about the music either — authors Jason Howard and Silas House read briefly from pieces of Appalachian literature. The evening was a celebration of a whole culture, not just another tour stop.

Moore and Sollee’s partnership was a long time in the making, and once you hear them together, you’ll wonder why it didn’t happen sooner. Switching between banjo and guitar, Moore compliments Sollee’s raucous cello subtly, so it’s hard to imagine one without the other. Both men have raw, passionate voices woven together with silk strings of soul.

Their band coasted through most of the duo’s new album, Dear Companion. Their performance of the title track was one of the more rousting moments of the evening, and the way their voices wrap around the melody of “My Wealth Comes to Me” left a haunting thumbprint. When Moore was left on stage alone with his acoustic guitar for his heartbreaking ode to mountaintop removal, “Flyrock Blues,” he and Sollee's determination to preserve Appalachia came into full relief.

Moore and Sollee chose their band well: Drummer and “Stomp” album Dan Dorff even used his own bodyto keep the band in time, and Cheyenne Mize fills out the band’s overall melodies with vocal harmonies, soulful violin or gently plucked guitar.

By the time they closed with an a cappella singalong of the old railroad ballad “Swing and Turn Jubilee,” which included opening act Maiden Radio, Howard and House, we had been so immersed in the culture of Kentucky, its hard to imagine how it so often goes by unnoticed in our day-to-day lives.

Maiden Radio — Mize, Julia Purcell and Joan Musselman — set the mood with their special blend of old fashioned Appalachian Folk music, mixing originals with covers of “Coal Miner’s Blues” and “Blackest Crow.”

Rodrigo Sanchez Interview

Read my interview with Rodrigo Sanchez of Rodrigo y Gabriela for My Old Kentucky Blog...

(click the photo link below)

Album Review: Backyard Tire Fire

Backyard Tire Fire
Good to Be
[Kelsey Street Records]

Backyard Tire Fire has been stuck in the underground for way too long. With blues based roots-rock bands sucking at the teet of pop-stardom everywhere, BTF still needlessly toils in the background. Pound-for-pound, these guys write better songs and will out-play the members of King of Leon with only a snare drum and their amps unplugged.

With their latest album, Good to Be, BTF has once again proven that they might very well be the best band no one has heard of. Frontman and songwriter Ed Anderson leads this trio with purpose, rounded out with his brother Matt on bass, and Tim Kramp on drums.

The songs here are catchy as hell – and each one resonates with the deep sense of personal longing Anderson exudes. “Roadsong #39” is a song with a smacking beat that recounts the trials and tribulations of being in a band that spends a significant amount of time on the road. I know this topic hardly seems original, but these guys aren’t a bunch of rich rockstars looking for your pity as they retire to the back of a million dollar bus. These are guys with real problems and real passion, who are scraping together to the pay the rent, to take care of their families, and trying to make ends meet – all while playing ratty bars and sleeping in the backseat of a broken down van.

But Anderson’s true gift in songwriting is creating quirky characters that seem instantly recognizable but wholly original. “Estelle”, “Brady”, and the anonymous protagonists in “Ready or Not” and “Learning to Swim” – all seem like abandoned character arcs from “Eleanor Rigby”. And at no point does Anderson’s soft tenor sound more solid and earnest than it does on “Food for Thought”, where he passes on the lessons learned from a life where dreams don’t really come true…but kinda do.

BTF matched with Steve Berlin’s production now seems like a match made in heaven. How has this not dawned on anyone before? The Los Lobos multi-instrumentalist has the perfect ear for catching this band at their best. He playfully handles their classic rock, blues based roots and their refined ear for pop-hooks, masterfully.

BTF has always blurred the lines that separate southern-rock from college-rock, and they do it perhaps to their detriment. The band is phenomenal, however, you’re not really sure what to do with them, and as sad as that may sound, if you can’t easily shelve it in a store (or search for it on iTunes, as the case may be), it becomes harder for a band to break-through. If Good to Be tells us anything about this band, it’s that they’re resilient and they aren’t here to get rich, which luckily for us means we’ll have a hard time getting rid of them.