Harper grew up in Claremount, about an hour's drive out of Los Angeles, and a visit to the music store his family owns there helps to put his unique musical gumbo of folk, blues , soul, R&B, funk, gospel, reggae and rock into perspective. Originally run by his grandfather, the Folk Music Centre and Museum, as it is called, is an Aladdin's cave of musical instruments from all over the world and was Harper's childhood playground.
While others his age tinkered with bikes or made model airplanes, Harper's playthings were classic guitars, not to mention the assortment of African drums, Chinese temple bells and Indian flutes with which the Folk Centre still overflows to this day. "If you look around the store you see what made me like I am," he muses. "People tell me it's strange that I'm all over the map musically. For me it's strange that everyone else isn't, because that's the environment I grew up in. It's my birthright."
On top of the acoustic folk, blues and country influences, as a black teenager growing up in California in the 1980s, Harper was also influenced by the LA rap and hip-hop scene. The result was that by the time he left home and moved to the city in 1990, there was hardly a style or genre of music that he hadn't absorbed.
After scoring a deal with Virgin Records in 1993, his debut album, Welcome to the Cruel World, appeared two years later to rave reviews. It was followed by 1995's Fight for Your Mind. His third album, The Will to Live, appeared in 1997, and introduced his band the Innocent Criminals. Burn To Shine came in 1999 and the in-concert set, Live from Mar in 2001. His fifth studio effort, Diamonds On The Inside, appeared in 2003 and was followed a year later by There Will Be A Light, a collaborative album with the Blind Boys of Alabama. With each album, both his fan base and the boldness of his musical vision has grown. But while his record sales now number more than ten million, he has assiduously avoided the world of vacuous celebrity, so that at the time of his last album, The Times' headlined an article about him 'The Invisible Superstar.'
Both Sides Of The Gun, Released in 2006, an album that Harper rates as his most satisfying and rounded set to date. One of the reasons for that, he says, is what he learned from working with the veteran Blind Boys of Alabama on There Will Be A Light. "With the Blind Boys record I felt I turned a corner sonically and creatively," he says. "That's what you get from working with people who've been doing it for 50 years. It was like going to school and learning all over again."
In 2009, BEN HARPER AND RELENTLESS7 have made a true album. White Lies For Dark Times is a timeless rock record, with a cohesive collection of music that is as raw, unrelenting and thunderous, as it is arrestingly haunting and emotional.
On the raucous opening track, "Number With No Name," Harper bellows "the very thing that drives you -- can drive you insane" over an infectious guitar line and a deftly serious groove that both thumps and propels the listener. The band then brings the listener full circle in the closing track "Faithfully Remain," as Harper sings, "the truth just wastes away in all we can't explain, but I faithfully remain." The beauty of these lyrics works as a breathtaking release which balances out the anthemic urgency of songs such as "Shimmer and Shine" and "Up To You Now," both of which are surely soon to be familiar staples at radio.
This is American rock, the way it is supposed to sound and feel.
In what may possibly be the greatest "how the band formed" story ever, Harper met guitarist Jason Mozersky in the late nineties, when the lead singer of Mozersky's then band, WAN SANTO CONDO was working as a van driver shuttling bands back and forth to the venue for a Texas promoter. (The three members of the 7 all hail from Texas) The part time driver, part time musician took a risk that all artists must take at some point in their lives in order to succeed. He asked the then captive Ben Harper, "Can I play you my demo?" Harper obliged, and in his own words "was blown away," and helped the band secure a record deal and release the self-titled Wan Santo Condo / Everloving Records, 2004. The band broke up after one record, but what survived was a lasting friendship between Harper and Mozersky.
In 2005, Harper began recording sessions that would become a double record entitled Both Sides of the Gun (2006, Virgin Records). He invited his now long time friend Mozersky to lay down some guitar work on a track. Upon invitation to continue recording the next day, Jason arrived at the studio with longtime friends, drummer Jordan Richardson and bassist Jesse Ingalls. The session would spawn not only the song "Serve Your Soul" but the framework for Relentless7.
In the summer of 2008, the chance arrived for these four uniquely talented members to reunite in the studio and dig deeper into the chemistry that was born during the Both Sides of the Gun sessions. It was soon apparent that their instincts were correct as the record quickly began to take shape. The songs from White Lies For Dark Times sound off with both the vast musical depth and experience of Harper, while commanding the pure urgency and intensity of an unknown band fighting for its life.
This is clear in the song "Fly One Time" with the lyric "I'm caught in between what I can't leave behind, and what I may never find" where BEN HARPER AND RELENTLESS7 capture universal emotion while the song pulsates into a bass, drum and electric guitar anthem that would captivate any arena and crush any small club.
In November 2008, the band debuted their new material on the Vote For Change Tour, where they also breathed new life into the Queen/David Bowie classic "Under Pressure," which has since become a staple of their live set. They ended the year cutting their teeth with a series of small club shows from famed venues such as Spaceland and The Mint in Los Angeles, to The Mercury Lounge and Kenny's Castaway in NYC. The band is scheduled to tour extensively across the world in 2009.
BEN HARPER AND RELENTLESS7 intelligently has one foot in Harper's past while every other limb and appendage reach towards the future. Any preconceptions or misconceptions in regards to a "Ben Harper sound" must now be adjusted, or thrown out all together. With BEN HARPER AND RELENTLESS7, the story of modern rock music is now being rewritten.
This biography was provided by the artist or their representative.
