“I see music as an artistic infinity to where there is an endless amount of rhythm and melody and lyric to be sung, danced [to] and played,” Ben Harper explained to ABC RN's Other Worlds host Brent Clough in 1996.
“I just wanna be free to evolve in the infinite spirit of song.”
It might come over as lofty earnestness, but one things for sure: there was nothing conceited or contrived about what Harper, still early on in his career, had to say.
The American songwriter has never shied away from expressing his beliefs and ideals, and it's given his music very defined characteristics as well as an intensely loyal fanbase right from the start.
His grandparents' music store was a crucial first step into the formation of his outlook as a musician. After school, he and his friends would hang out at the shop trying out the various instruments.
He told The Nine Club in 2016, that once he heard the lap steel, he ‘never needed another sound.'
Furthermore, his family's ideological foundations were
“They're so anti-establishment that any success was a sell-out!” Harper shared with The Music in 2014.
“If you weren't giving half of what you made away then you weren't politically active enough, and that's where I come from – a real working-class, socialist perspective. No one in my family is ever beyond an ass-whippin', that's for sure. From each other, that is.”
Whilst social and political commentary are present throughout his 1995 album Fight For Your Mind through songs like ‘Oppression', ‘Excuse Me Mr.' and ‘People Lead', the spiritual is perhaps the overriding force, thanks to songs like ‘God Fearing Man', ‘Power of the Gospel' and ‘One Road To Freedom'.
“I grew up listening to spiritual music, Blind Willie Johnson and folk,” Harper explained to Drop D Magazine in 1996.
“Folk is bare bones music. You can't be too clever with it because it's the people's music. It's the blood in the veins of the common man. You can play around with the tradition a bit, twist it to make it part of your inner self but you don't really want to fuck with it too much.”
Ultimately, on this second record, he did screw with conventions by fusing blues, folk, reggae, soul and rock.
“Music doesn't have to be always loud but it should always be authentic, worth exploring,” he told Blues Magazine. “It's important to see just how deep it can go and how it can become a fuse with different colours of sound.
“I've been lucky in that I've never been or had to be mainstream. If anything, mainstream has in fact shifted to meet and fit me.”
Harper found this as gratifying as he did surprising.
“The fact that I even exist in the record industry is outrageous, because everyone said I couldn't do it,” Harper told John Kreicbergs of The Pitch in 2003.
“All the labels said, ‘No, it's not this, it's not that, it's not the other thing.' But man, I've been doing it so wrong for so long, it's now become a style.”
Indeed, Harper's style and message was a precursor to a continued flow of roots rockers and songwriters with a distinct spiritual, social and political edge who followed in his wake. From artists like John Butler, Xavier Rudd, Ash Grunwald, Jack Johnson, Donovan Frankenreiter to Angus Stone and The Pierce Brothers, who got to support Harper on tour in 2016.
Also vital to his sound is his band The Innocent Criminals, three of whom – bassist Juan Nelson, Leon Mobley and Oliver Charles) first worked with Harper during the making of Fight For Your Mind.
Although his 1994 debut Welcome To The Cruel World was well received for its sparse, emotionally intense songs, the follow up with the contributions of these players expands on the range and energy of the songs.
Harper pinpoints the making of this record as special in his musical timeline, something of a reference marker creatively. When he got his band The Innocent Criminals back together to make their 2016 record Call It What It Is, he saw it in a similar light to this 1995 record.
“This is a record that I think is directly connected to a record like Fight For Your Mind,” he said. “[There are] certain records you make, that you end up in competition with yourself… it's the same players that are on that record and it's got the same essence I hope.”
Seeing Ben Harper and his band in action live is something of a messianic experience to his fans. His audiences can swing from thunderous, wild roars of appreciation to then being reduced to pin drop silence as he explains or prepares to play the next song on his setlist.
Harper has never been comfortable with such fervour and adulation. Perhaps a perspective on his musicianship that he would be willing to accept comes from an artist for whom he has massive respect, and someone whom he has collaborated with in recent years.
“On stage or in the studio – working with Ben Harper holds the same excitement I experienced working with Chicago blues legends back in the day,” Charlie Musselwhite says. “I think it is safe to say that Ben has reinvented the Blues in a great way: playing modern while preserving the feel.”