|
Taken from Columbia Daily Tribune (July 06, 2017)
Endless summer: Michael Franti’s music encourages season of perpetual freedom
by Aarik Danielsen
[Chelsea Klette/Courtesy Mitch Schneider Organization] |
Whether you’re a child chasing lightning bugs or an adult trying to wring a bit more work out of the day, most people can find a reason to appreciate the longer light of summer.
If Michael Franti has a say, that sense of the season will only extend, spilling past August, September and into the rest of the year.
“Summertime is a time of freedom,” the Bay Area native said. More than 30 years into his career, Franti keeps reaching out to people, hoping to create a greater sense of freedom that starts with the musical but bends into the social and political.
Franti and his band Spearhead craft a dynamic experience that starts with their songs, but doesn’t end there. His understanding of music as a communal catalyst dates back to a youth spent attending punk shows.
“The best part of it was the audience ... it almost didn’t matter, some weeks, which band was playing,” Franti said.
Kids would show up and slam dance together during the concert, then socialize in the parking lot after the last chords faded out.
That’s not exactly the vibe of a Spearhead show — the band weaves together strands and strains of rock, folk, reggae and funk. But Franti and Co. want to bring people together — on its current tour, they have worked with locals to organize pre-show potlucks, complete with a group yoga session.
As someone with a finely-tuned social and political sense, Franti has noted a particular sort of anxiety among audiences in the first months of the Trump administration. He wants to create space for people to get their concerns off their chests.
“But perhaps even more important than all of us exercising our freedom of speech, is all of us exercising our freedom to listen,” he said.
Passionately working for change and keeping an open mind aren’t mutually exclusive pursuits, Franti said. They can converge in a sort of greater good.
“I think that is a roadmap to the future, to find solutions that take into consideration more than one person,” he said.
The band’s most recent record, 2016’s “Soulrocker,” represents a marriage of streams. The electronic music Franti grew up on — one of the first albums he owned was a Kraftwerk 7”, he said — dances with acoustic instruments and grooves. Finding balance and harmony between the organic and the electronic was, primarily, about serving the song and its message.
“The story of the song has to come through,” Franti said. In the mixing process, he listened to ensure the lyrics and any acoustic instruments on the track received their full due and expression.
There are a number of beautiful moments on “Soulrocker,” perhaps none more lovely than Franti’s vocal performance on the first bars of closing track “Love Will Find a Way.”
His reading has a lovely, vulnerable quality to it. It represents the only time Franti has recorded himself singing falsetto — “maybe that’s where the vulnerability” comes in, he said, joking that the melody landed in “Ed Sheeran range.”
As audiences hear Franti and Spearhead out, he hopes they will apply that listening in other ways, hearing each other out and trading their cares and disagreements in for a chance at turning summer into a state of being.
“One of our favorite things is, as a band, to watch people show up to a concert with their family,” Franti said. “There’s this transformation that occurs from people just sitting there with whatever they brought in from their life outside the show — and then the music starts and everybody goes through this series of emotions and dances and puts their arm around a stranger, and sings out loud.”
“They walk out of there feeling a little bit taller.”
|
