Taken from his new album ‘Bloodline Maintenance‘, due via his new deal with Chrysalis Records on Friday, July 22nd, Ben Harper cuts through with a new style on a song that speaks directly about an issue that it seems too many want to just avoid.
The musical new direction has Harper’s signature lap steel, supercharged through a powerful Dumble amplifier, to create an unruly tone he describes as “a sort of a merging of Robert Johnson and Jimi Hendrix.” It is, he says “like I was moving forward and venturing into places I had never been befor. Taking everything I’ve learned from every other record and kind of setting fire to it all and starting over. And I knew the sounds I was hearing in my head were so unorthodox that I had to do most of it myself.”
And the overdue difficult topic? Well… the emancipation proclamation was on January 1st, 1863, and Harper is emphatic “Slavery – we need to talk about it.“
