The Amplify Decatur Music Festival has two missions: to entertain and give back to the community. All proceeds from the festival pour directly back into the Decatur Cooperative Ministry, which prevents and alleviates homelessness in Decatur and Dekalb County. The headliner for this year’s Amplify Decatur Music Festival is the multi-Grammy Award-winning guitarist and songwriter Ben Harper. He continues to refine his masterful playing and composition into a rich and eclectic blend of folk traditions. Harper joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to talk about a life immersed in music and where it’s taken him lately.
Interview highlights:
On growing up at his family’s California folk music store and community center:
“It was hurdy-gurdies for breakfast, and banjos for lunch, and bagpipes for dinner,” said Harper. “Through those hallowed doors of the Claremont Folk Music Center have walked everyone – Pete Seeger and Reverend Gary Davis, to Taj Mahal and Jackson Browne and Leonard Cohen. And to get to sit as a young child and a grown adult at the hem of their garments, I just feel the privilege. The weight of the privilege only grows stronger with age.”
“When I was a kid, David Lindley would come into my family’s music store, and he would sit at the lap steel,” Harper recalled. “Not only would the entire place stop – and it takes a lot to stop commerce… but not only would David seemingly stop the activity within the shop, but something in my internal melodic time-clock stopped as well. Everything around me stopped when he would start to play. It never let up. It never let go.”
A new album owing inspiration to David Foster Wallace:
“As I was trying to compose ‘Winter is for Lovers’ and coming up with different ways to approach the album, I was simultaneously reading ‘Infinite Jest.’ And I was a bit lost in making winter is for lovers. I was going to use different guitars for every different stanza… and it’s not that I was hitting a wall, but that concept wasn’t working,” said Harper.
“As I was reading ‘Infinite Jest,’ it hit me. Something struck me to where I was so obsessed and fascinated by how he had written the book…. It felt like there were, not discordant, but there were different stories that were simultaneously being told at once but somehow were inextricably linked. So I dug into an interview that he had done, and I found that that is what they were. He was writing these things concurrently and, at a certain point, realized that they were all one. It was one story. And I was able to take that brave, brave literary principle that he had, for the most part, invented through ‘Infinite Jest,’ and apply it to ‘Winter is for Lovers.’”
On making “Childhood Home,” an album with Harper’s mom, Ellen:
“Creating songs with my mom – not only creating them but recording them, producing them, being able to sit at the table with my mom at a major record company and discuss strategy – it almost took until that time for me to grow up,” said Harper. “It was very much a recognition of my mom’s struggle, my own childhood struggles with identity. My mom and my family, we’ve all been through so much together, and… it cleaned the slate. It hit reset on an emotional level for my mom and I in a way that I don’t think anything else could have done.”
“Singing with my mom is the number one most comfortable music experience I’ve ever had,” he added.
Ben Harper performs at the Amplify Decatur Music Festival on April 23 in downtown Decatur Square. Tickets and more information are available here.
