LITTLE ROCK — Singer, songwriter and social activist Michael Franti has been all over the map, with his music, his performances and the causes he has helped champion. And he has never felt downright happier about life than right now, on a tour that brings his Spearhead band to The Village in Little Rock for a Friday show.
You can hear it in the grooves of his new album, The Sound of Sunshine, released two weeks ago and inspired by Franti’s brush with the sort of health emergency that can focus a person on the importance of family and friends.
While on tour with Counting Crows in August 2009, Franti was laid low by a mysterious pain that took doctors eight days to diagnose. It was a ruptured appendix, and during his painful recovery, Franti came to appreciate merely looking out his hospital window and seeing the sun shine. He took that as encouragement to hang in there.
“I was in pretty bad shape,” Franti said recently after appearing on The Ellen DeGeneresShow, where he performed the title cut of his new album. “Just to be alive, yeah, I started writing songs, and they were definitely upbeat. I wanted to reflect that, especially in these difficult times. I learned the best things in life aren’t things.”
While hospitalized, he got word his song “Say Hey (I LoveYou)” had become his first hit single. As he recuperated in Bali, the Indonesian island he considers his second home, he started writing the songs that would be on The Sound of Sunshine.
He has packed a lot of outsider’s perspective into his 44 years. Born to an Irish-German-French mother and an American Indian-black father, he was given up for adoption and raised by a Finnish-American couple in the San Francisco Bay area.
A graduate of the University of San Francisco, Franti formed his first band, an industrial punk outfit, The Beatnigs, in 1986. After five years, he moved on to a mix of industrial music and hip-hop called The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. The band’s forays into political commentary got them noticed by U2, who gave them a spot opening on U2’s Zoo TV Tour.
Yet more political commentary came along with Franti’snext band, Spearhead, formed in 1994 and still the name he uses for his band. He has released seven albums under the Spearhead name, all the while combining the sounds of hiphop, reggae, rock and protest lyrics against what he has seen and heard during his travels and tours of the world. He was one of the first musicians who took note of the war in Iraq by going there in 2004, without the protection of U.S. military escorts.
He filmed his experiences as he traveled in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Israel. The result was a documentary, I Know I’m Not Alone, released a year later, calling attention to the human cost of wars. He preceded that with a CD, Yell Fire!, that served as the movie soundtrack. A song on it, “Light Up Ya Lighter,” got media attention for its incendiary lyrics.
Franti’s next CD, All Rebel Rockers, was recorded in Jamaica and released in 2008. Following the election of Barack Obama, he played at three inaugural concerts in January 2009.
“I always keep up with the political process,” Franti says, “but my politics have never been left or right.”
An imposing stage presence at 6 feet 6 inches, Franti - a vegan who stays fit with running, pickup basketball games and yoga - also stands out for his penchant for going barefoot wherever he goes (keeping a pair of flip-flops handy for restaurants and airlines).
“I’ve been barefoot for 10 years now,” Franti explains. “It started out a three-day experiment to see what it was like for those folks in poor countries who had no shoes and it became something permanent.”
In a tie-in, he helps the shoe charity Soles4Souls raise money and collect shoes for people around the world who need them.
Michael Franti & Spearhead 9 p.m. Friday (doors open at 8 p.m.), The Village, University and Asher avenues, Little Rock Opening act: Tamarana Admission: $25 in advance, $28 at the door (501) 570-3033 or thevillagelive.
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Weekend, Pages 37 on 09/30/2010