Ben Harper

Bio: At the end of a nine month European tour, Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals landed in a Paris recording studio and completed their new album, Lifeline, in just seven days. The result: a soulful masterpiece with beautifully direct lyrics, undeniable grooves and an effortless energy that recalls the best works of Otis Redding, Bill Withers and Beggars Banquet-era Rolling Stones. Yeah...it's that good.

Ben Harper (vocals, guitar): A dream of mine had always been to make a record in Paris. But to fly everyone over and put them up, it would be too expensive; it just seemed like something I would never get to do. At the first soundcheck on the European tour, I was like, “Wait a minute -- we’re in Europe for seven weeks with our best technicians and our best equipment, why don’t instead of soundchecking every day for seven weeks, how about we take that time and do pre-production for the next record?” We used the soundchecks as pre-production, and every day we’d get to the stage and work on new material. I’m glad we did this record this way. It was basically the band and I taking a bunch of ideas that were eventually going to turn into songs, throwing them out on the table, and saying, okay, this is how far these are to this point, let’s collectively make them better. The only guideline was “acoustic soul.”