Michael Franti

Fri 15th Oct, 2010 in Features

So, what do we know about Michael Franti? The tall, handsome, gentleman was born forty-four years ago in Oakland, California, to mixed-race parents who, fearing their small son would be ostracised within his biological family, arranged for him to be adopted into a local white family where he would grow to adulthood with his four adoptive siblings: three white, one African American.

Kicking off his music career when he was twenty – with industrial punk band The Beatnigs – Michael became famous for his work with The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and Spearhead, becoming a bona fide star and respected activist. He’s not the placard waving type; there are no images of violence and anger in his awareness regime. It’s with a smile, a booming voice, a killer band, waist length dreadlocks and bare feet — he quietly shirked shoes ten years ago when he realised how many of the kids he met couldn’t afford shoes — that Franti broadcasts his messages of hope and calls to action.

His latest, and seventh studio, album The Sound of Sunshine is a sidestep from it’s politically charged predecessors. A celebration of being alive and surrounded by friends, The Sound Of Sunshine must be one of his most well-received messages yet: the record debuted at number 17 on the American Billboard charts, the best commercial result for a debut of his career.

There’s a more positive inspiration in the underlying source material for this record. I get the impression that it all kicked off when your appendix exploded. What the hell happened?
When it ruptured I was in a yoga class and I was doing kind of a sit up. Anyway, I felt this pop. I had been having this pain for weeks; I’d gone to the doctor and they thought it was my gall bladder. So, when I felt this pop I was like, “Great. So on top of having a gall bladder situation I’ve also got a hernia.” That’s what it felt like. They couldn’t figure out what was happening to me for a week — my belly became all distended — but eventually they gave me a catscan and figured out what it was.

Geez, it must have been excruciating.
Yeah, and I was on tour at the time so every day I was just getting on stage and then getting off stage and crawling into bed.

Whoa. Even for someone like you, it must have been a tough call trying to identify a silver lining there.
There was a week when I was really, really sick after it ruptured and they hadn’t yet figured out what was going on with me. As they kept ruling different things out I kept thinking, “Man, if it’s not my gall bladder, what could it be?” They had initially ruled out that it was my appendix so eventually I just thought I was dying. I was thinking maybe it’s some kind of really serious cancer.

During that week before [doctors confirmed it was my appendix], yeah, that was the toughest time for me. I really felt that. Eventually I just became so grateful to be alive; and that’s where these songs came from.

Well, I’ve been giving the title track a bit of a blast and it’s just perfectly titled: vivid and uplifting. What stories are you telling through other songs on the album?
There are lots of songs on the record about friendship; there’s a few romantic songs but most of the record’s about love between people who are just friends – or family members. And, almost every song is a song you can dance to. The first song on the record is the sound of sunshine coming up; that’s the upbeat song – the “playing out on the beach” version. Then the last song is the sound of sunshine going down – sitting on the beach at the end of the day watching it go into the water. Sitting there with your friends and having a beer or smoking a joint and just enjoying the end of the day, you know? That feeling when the sun sinks down.

Alright, so there’s no doubting the themes prevalent here, but we’re not talking about a concept album are we?
No, it’s not. It’s not really a concept album but it is a record that you can play and just let go around and around. As we were writing the songs and sequencing the record we wrote way more songs than we could ever use and we kept taking more songs off. Just getting it to the songs that we felt like you could just play. Then you could just let it keep going.

Give me an example of how the celebration of friendship was captured.
Well, we recorded most of The Sound Of Sunshine on tour. There’s a song on the record called The Only Thing Missing Was You; one night I had my studio set up in a hotel room in Canada and I started messing around with the song and my buddy Jay — who’s my song writing partner — was there. We started recording and finished it at probably five or six in the morning, then went on stage later that day and played it for the first time. That following night my drummer came backstage and we recorded the drums in the locker room of this hockey team and it ended up being one of the songs on the record.

I don’t know who the artist was, but I read an interview last year and they said they never roadtested songs in front of a live audience because they were fearful the unfinished work would end up on YouTube. I can’t decide if that’s paranoid, selfish or sensible. What are your thoughts?
We did it in exactly the reverse. Not only did we write songs and play them live for people to record and put up on YouTube, but we actually made videos so other bands can play the song and make their own version of it and put it up on YouTube. Even before the record was out. The very first song we did it for was The Sound Of Sunshine which spent eight weeks at number one on the radio in America, and the record hasn’t even come out yet. So…

That’s brilliant. You people are always recording yourselves goofing around on tour and uploading the clips. So prolifically, too.
We do it every show — almost every day on tour — so that people who are on tour with us or people who want to come and follow the tour can do that.

You say you wanted this album to communicate a sense of hope and possibility for any one who needs it, which is an idea that informs your general being, I think. When was the last time that you saw you’d succeeded and how was it personified?
Recently, a couple contacted me and said they had seen a television show that I had done about being adopted. They had just decided to adopt a child based on the performance I had done on that show. I was really moved by that. There was another woman that had come to one of our shows and she told me that she had lost a hundred and forty pounds after being in a wheelchair because her back was so messed up ‘cause of her weight; that she had done it through listening to my music. Those are the types of things that make me feel like, “Wow, I should keep doing this.”

Out of the box. That’s incredibly “micro” considering the “macro” reach that your charitable organisations, like Soles For Souls, have. Where does the inspiration to make a difference for others come from, in you?
As a little kid I was pretty restless – always getting into some kind of trouble. I think that also I was a fighter. I felt alone in my family many times and so I learned to kind of stick up for myself, and as I grew up I found that I had this desire to stick up for other people who couldn’t do that for themselves. That’s kind of where my political perspective has come from.

I heard an idea that no matter how successful or included you become as an adult you’re always, internally and emotionally, the kid you were at fourteen. What do you think about that for a concept?
I agree, except for one thing: you can always change it. You don’t have to live like you were when you were fourteen, it informs who you become as an adult. I grew up with an alcoholic [adoptive] father, and I didn’t become an alcoholic. There was a time where I blamed him for problems in my life and then I learned that I could change those things and I didn’t have to blame him any more.

So, yeah, I agree. But you can make your own life.