Ben Harper compares his new album, Wide Open Light, to a family photo album. Harper has made a habit out of taking his time looking through the old relic, relishing in the past and how it connects to who he is today.
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“I tend to not look through my family photo albums at a fast pace, and this album reminded me of the pacing of looking through a family photo album,” Harper tells American Songwriter. He says the project offers “lyrical snapshots from a lifetime.”
“As a photo is worth 1,000 words, a word can be worth 1,000 images,” he says.
Harper uses his words intentionally to paint vivid pictures across 11 honest and thought-provoking tracks. But he doesn’t get right to the words, instead guiding the listener into the album with the instrumental opening track, “Heart and Crown.” The beautiful, shimmering acoustic guitar almost feels like a musical hug embracing the listener, setting a meditative tone that’s carried throughout the album.
“Instrumentals can tell a story without words, and then songs with words have to have that poetic storytelling value to them,” he explains.
“Heart and Crown” calls back to the opening instrumental of Harper’s first studio album, Welcome to the Cruel World, released in 1994. Titled “The Three of Us,” the song also greets the listener with the sound of plucking guitar strings. Harper says he was told it was “not a great career move” to open his debut album with just instrumentation, which gave him all the more reason to do it. That meditative thread has been weaved throughout all of Harper’s studio albums, leading to the doorway of Wide Open Light, which arrived on June 2.
“It really is a pause record, it’s a sit-down record in a way that the one previous to that and many others haven’t been,” he says of Light, which features a photo of a New York City apartment building at nighttime on the cover. The only thing lighting up the dark street is the light glowing from a woman’s apartment, her silhouette in the window offering a sense of comfort. “That’s how I envisioned this record … you put it on and it hopefully will act as a life pause button in a way.”
The California native creates this effect on the album’s second track, “Giving Ghosts,” which marks the first time we hear his voice. The acoustic track contains what Harper cites as the most vulnerable lyrics on the album: Every day I look a little more like my father / And every day I look less like me / Now how brave is your love / Would a promise be enough / That some day again we would meet, he sings with husky vocals.
“‘Giving Ghosts’ for me as a whole was very cathartic to write because I needed a place to put that emotion and finally was able to,” he says of the song that looks at the passage of time.
It’s one of the many examples of how Harper paints with words on Wide Open Light, again demonstrating this talent on “Masterpiece,” which follows “Giving Ghosts.” The humble song finds him loving someone for exactly who they are, removing any sense of ego as he gently serenades, Carve your likeness in stone / Down to the light that shines in your eyes / Build a church in your honor / Stained glass windows facing east / Loving you is my masterpiece.
“On its best day, that song can be sung to an infant, to someone who’s been in love for a week or a month, or could speak to someone who has been married for 50 years,” Harper explains, adding that the images that come through in his songs are “defined by the listener because the images will shape-shift hopefully, as we evolve.”
“A song’s strongest suit is to be able to connect with different people for different reasons and then take that away from a song,” he adds.
Harper’s voice is understated and humble throughout the album, letting the lyrics do the talking while the melodies and instrumentation act as the supporting characters. The album also allowed him to expand his songwriting process which involves exploring his inner world. Yet he strikes the delicate balance of removing limitations on that exploration without being repetitive.
“To me, it means walking into the unknown optimistically,” he describes of the album’s title and how it translates to his songwriting process. “I love to write my way in and out of the unknown or write my way in and out of what I thought I knew. I found songwriting is also a way to learn about your subconscious. I love exploring the outer realm of possibilities when it comes to not repeating yourself and not being obvious.”
He cites “Yard Sale,” featuring his longtime collaborator, friend, and “creative comrade” Jack Johnson, as an example of a song where he could’ve gone the obvious route. The warm acoustic guitar melody evokes a sense of comfort, enveloping lyrics that chronicle a man going through a breakup. The man isn’t mournful or pleased that she’s gone; Harper merely acknowledges the truth: Love is a yard sale / Strangers wander up on your grass / To hold your future hostage / And bargain for your past / But all sales are final / No returns, not that you would / I’m pretty sure she’s gone for good.
Though he flirted with the idea of titling it “Gone For Good,” Harper says he consciously decided to go for the heart of the matter as opposed to the obvious choice. “That’s the most potent line from the song and that’s kind of the sum of its parts is the yard sale,” he analyzes. “The title is one way of sidestepping the obvious.”
Despite being 17 albums deep throughout his nearly 30-year career, Harper is always looking for ways to challenge himself, as he found the sweet spot in making a stripped-down album that also sounds professionally produced. Light was also an exercise in showing restraint that tested his resolve.
“I’ve been going more and more towards showing restraint, so that’s been tested a few times for me recently, and no deeper on display more clearly than this record,” he observes. “It’s about as pared down as you can get and still have a produced record.”
Other ways Harper is branching out creatively is by collaborating with Harry Styles. The two got connected when Styles was working on his critically acclaimed and Grammy-decorated 2022 album, Harry’s House. Harper plays acoustic, electric, and slide guitar on the deep cut “Boyfriends” and met the superstar during a studio session.
“I think that song had been in his world for a while and was still trying to raise its hand high enough to get counted on,” Harper recalls. “It was just a fantastic experience creatively and personally.”
Styles’ album went on to win Album of the Year, Best Pop Vocal Album, and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical at the 2023 Grammy Awards. Out of the session formed a friendship between Styles and Harper, so much so that it scored Harper a coveted slot on Styles’ Love On Tour, the singer himself inviting Harper to be an opening act during his 12-night run at the Kia Forum in Inglewood, California. The shows helped Harper’s audience expand; he says that strangers now come up to him in the streets of Los Angeles and praise his performances from the shows. It was the perfect litmus test as Harper was prepping Light, allowing him to perform the songs for a diverse crowd.
“It’s great especially to be able to play songs from this album and road test them in front of people who not only didn’t know those songs, but had no idea who I was,” he notes. “It was a great test to what potentially could be a response to the album.”
Later this year, Harper is also reuniting with The Chicks. Harper has been a longtime friend and collaborator of frontwoman Natalie Maines, having co-produced and co-written tracks for her debut solo album, Mother, in 2013. Praising The Chicks as “instrumentalist virtuosos,” Harper will join them for 10 dates across the U.S. in August and September.
“I’m a huge fan of their songs, and songwriting,” he raves. “It’s going to be fun.”
Among the other ways Harper is stepping up to new challenges is by joining the cast of Scott Z. Burns’ new series on Apple TV+, Extrapolations. Meryl Streep, Sienna Miller, Diane Lane, and Kit Harington are among the all-star cast members in the show that connects different stories surrounding climate change. Having never acted before, Harper says he was “up for the challenge” playing the character of Tyrone Downs, a musician activist. He appears in the season finale performing a cover of Marvin Gaye’s environmental anthem, “Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology).”
The role was a natural fit for Harper, who’s also a musician and activist, as conveyed on his 2006 album Both Sides of the Gun where he tackles the topic of climate change. Yet it provided him with an opportunity for growth in a way that no other endeavor could.
“That was prophecy as much as song,” Harper states of Gaye’s environmental anthem. “So [the] unenviable task of stepping into those shoes while also having to act for the first time—I’m the worst gauge of monitoring my own growth, but it felt like whenever you go out on a limb to do something you weren’t sure if you could do and do it, at the very least, it builds confidence regardless of how confident or unconfident you were before that. If you’re able to be patient with failure, which oftentimes I’m not, in hindsight, it’s also played its role in where I am, wherever that may be.”
Harper is carrying that sense of confidence and wonder into the next phase of his career. Rather than laying the path himself, Harper is allowing the muse to lead him, knowing that Wide Open Light will take him wherever he’s meant to be. That sense of peace is reflected in the album’s closing number, “Thank You, Pat Brayer,” a man Harper calls one of his songwriting heroes who he credits for giving him his first break as a young songwriter. Brayer’s name appears on songs by Alison Krauss, Alan Jackson, and more. He and Harper also collaborated numerous times over the years.
“I’ve always wanted to pay tribute to him at the highest level possible, so titling a song after my appreciation for him, I finally found a way,” Harper says of Brayer. “That kind of defines the record for me, appreciation for love, love, and loss, and an arrival point at coming to grips with where to go from here, and that doesn’t often happen.”
The tribute comes in the form of a peaceful instrumental, as Harper was intentional about bookending the album with a pair of instrumental tracks. The song captures the spirit of the record—the same one that is taking him wherever he’s meant to creatively venture next.
Harper has released a record nearly every 18 months throughout the entirety of his career. Along the way, he’s scored several that have peaked inside the Top 20 on the Billboard 200, including Both Sides of the Gun, Lifeline (with The Innocent Criminals), White Lies For Dark Times (with Relentless7), and Give Till It’s Gone. But he admits this marks the first time he’s releasing a body of work without another one on the way, a fact that he says feels “daunting.” But like his songs that have a way of traveling through time, Harper is allowing the spirit to move him when it’s time to create again.
“Songs that I wrote in my 20s fortunately still have meaning and then beyond that means something completely new and different from when they were written, so the 30-year arc of exploring songwriting for me is just learning about myself,” he says. “This record recalibrates wherever it is I’m going to go from here creatively. From here, all things are possible.”
Main image by Jacob Boll
