Michael Franti made special stop in Pittsburgh to perform on the WYEP airwaves at Club Cafe before he returns for an official show at Cadence Clubhouse in Allison Park on Sept. 11.
Listen this evening for a rebroadcast of Franti's conversation with WYEP's Kyle Smith at 7 p.m.!
Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Kyle Smith: Michael Franti is here, and we've got three of them on stage tonight. We're live from Club Cafe, a room full of listeners and members. You mentioned at 30 years was the release of home that came out the the debut album 30 years ago this year.
Michael Franti: We were four years old.
Carl Young: I was actually three and a half.
Smith: I have that photo from about 28 years ago from one of the shows. And you haven't aged much, that's for sure. And there's still a lot of joy for every Michael Franti show that's happening. So it's a heck of a way to spend your day off, performing and doing stuff here in Pittsburgh. Thank you.
Franti: Yeah, we love it. We were just talking upstairs about how, you know, normally on a day off, we're looking for something to do, so we found something to do. Thanks for coming out.
Young: Can’t do better than this!
Smith: It’s really amazing your legacy so far. And, you're kind of in the middle of the Togetherness tour right now.
Franti: Yeah, yeah, early start of it. We started in the middle of May, and we go to the end of September.
Smith: And you'll be back here in Pittsburgh for a proper show, Sept. 11. The Cadence Club. Tickets are already on sale for that You'll get the full Michael Franti & Spearhead experience at that time. Tou've had 13 albums out there as Michael Franti & Spearhead studio albums. You've had a lot of other things too, and you've toured with U2 and John Mayer. I remember seeing the On the Smoke and Grooves tour in the Twin Cities a long time ago, your own festival that you've been doing for a while. You really walked barefoot across most of this world.
Franti: I remember one of the first times I played in Pittsburgh, we played at Three Rivers Stadium, and we were opening for U2, and this was my previous band, The Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy. I remember that tour because I grew to love U2. But before that, I didn't really know their music. They had just seen our song “Television, the Drug of a Nation.” And they used the video for that song to open up the show for their Zoo TV tour. I like their music, but I wasn't like a huge fan.
And so after the first week, Bono came up to me. He's like, “Michael?”
“Yeah?”
And he goes, “Can I have a quiet word with you?”
And I'm like, “Oh shoot, are we in trouble?
He goes, “No, no, there’s just this one thing. You know my guitar player?”
And I go, “Yeah.”
He goes, “His name is ‘The Edge,’ not ‘Ed.’”
So for like the whole first week, I was like, “Yo, Ed, I like them sneakers. Yo Ed great guitar solo. Yeah, Ed I'm loving that hat, man. Whatever you're doing is great and I love it, you know?”
Smith: Did he call you anything?
Franti: Not to my face, no.
Smith: There's one thing leaving a Michael Franti & Spearhead show, it always brings about joy and brings people together. Togetherness through music and the ability to heal and and share that love. But what is big? Big love?
Franti: Big love to me is if I can love my family and my friends, my wife, that's big love, and it's hard to do just that all the time. But I believe that love can go out beyond borders, beyond nationality, beyond gender, beyond sexuality, beyond politics, beyond religion. And that when we can love out beyond in that way, that's what I consider to be big, big love. And nobody gets it right 100% of the time. But I think it's something that's worth trying to do all the time. And that's what that song is about.
Smith: Putting that positive energy out there. You're kind of the modern guru of hope and love and peace. It's been 30 years strong of doing that.
Franti: You mentioned healing a minute ago. Music has been something that's been healing in my life. When I was born, my mother's biological mother was Irish, German and Belgian. My biological father is African American and Nottoway Indian from the mountains of Virginia. And I was adopted by the Franti family, who were second generation immigrants from Finland. And they had three kids of their own. Then they adopted myself and another African American son. I have one sister who's a lesbian and one brother who’s a police officer. We're kind of like the All-American family, you know?
But we grew up in this really mixed melting pot of a house. My father, who raised me, was an alcoholic. Over the years that I grew up in the house, I always felt like an outsider. I always felt like, as a child who's given up for adoption, I felt like I was unwanted, unappreciated. Then as I grew and became an adult, I realized that there's no one in the world who doesn't feel that way at some point in their life, like they're unwanted or unlovable or unappreciated, or like they're the weird kid in school or at their job or whatever. We all feel that sense of wanting to belong, you know, and music is the thing that gave me that. So when dad is yelling at mom or whatever, and when he's drunk at nights, I would listen to music, you know, it was the thing that got me through.
Later in life I had lunch with my father one time alone. Because when you have five kids, you don't get to really have lunch like that, you know? And so, he was 66, 68 at the time, and he had a stroke when he was 66. When he had a stroke, he blossomed into this really beautiful human being. Being somebody who is sarcastic and cynical and rage on the other end. And there was very little in between. But he became this person who complimented strangers, who had talked to people on the street about their lives and just made amends to everyone he had ever hurt.
I went and sat with him that day. And I said, “Dad, you've changed so much.”
And he said, “You know what, son? I really haven't changed.”
And it was like the trombone of disappointment went off in my head.
He said, “What I mean by that is I've always felt this way inside. I was just never able to express it, was never able to show it until now.”
It taught me that people can evolve and people can change. And sometimes we think of our parents as always having been our parents. Then when we become parents, we just realized that they're just weird teenagers trying to parent weird teenagers, you know, and they just look older, and have more ointments and stuff.
So my father was somebody who really taught me that, that, that people can evolve and change and my music has been dedicated to that. And the next song I want to sing is the song when we had been making music for 22 years and we finally had like after 22 years, a hit song, and it went into the top 10 in the week. My appendix ruptured. I ended up in the hospital. I was looking at the doctor getting this text, “Your song has now reached number nine on the charts.” I'm like, “You better freaking fix me because I want to hear my song one time on the radio.”
But after the surgery, I would just lean in the window and soak up the sunshine. If it wasn't sunny, then I'd put my headphones on and listen to music that took me someplace sunny. And so I wrote this song in the hospital there
Smith: We are live from Club Cafe tonight with Michael Franti, and we've got three of them on stage tonight. They've got a day off, so they're spending some time here with the listeners at Club Cafe and also on the airwaves. And you're celebrating 30 years of Spearhead, and the release of “Home.” But Michael's been recorded since the 1980s, and we're celebrating 50 years this year here at WYEP. So this is a real treat. We've been around for a long time, you know, whether you're playing for some folks here or whether you're at a children's hospital, a correctional facility, how do you keep your spirits up when, after doing all those events and dealing with people who aren't in great spots?
Franti: Yeah. Well, my wife was an emergency room nurse for 10 years, and she would be with people every day who were in incredibly vulnerable places. And when we first got together, she’d get off work at 7 a.m. the morning, and wherever I was in the world, I'd call her and we'd ask each other this question, “Who did you make feel significant today?”
And we would share an experience of something that happened. And one of the ways is to talk about it. And I have always tried to make music that wasn't happy music per se, but made music that was about having ease of heart so that whatever is inside, if it's incredible sadness and pain or great joy that it can pass through with ease. And that's how we get to happy, you know?
So, for example, like in a song we have called “Brighter Day.” I was just kind of in a really low place during the pandemic, and I had out of a couple of musician friends who had taken their own lives. So I listen to my guitar just as if I was playing it for somebody else, or if someone was playing for me. And it comforts me. And then what I do is I just say whatever's going on in my life. And find a melody for it. So in that situation with the song “Brighter Day,” I was down and so I just started humming and playing the guitar and then he started to find the words that were going on inside me.
“Don't give up when your heart is weary. Don't give up when your eyes are telling. Don't give up when your voice is trembling. When your life needs mending. Don't give up when the hurt is me. Don't give up when the world seems to be broken. I'm still hoping. With my heart open. For a brighter day.”
So when I write songs, I always try to write something that's transformative. I talk about whatever is hurting me, and then I'm just trying to encourage myself, like, I can get to this other side, get to this brighter day. And then the bridge of the song. I always try to find something that's lifting. Some music helps me. Talking to friends helps me. And if all else fails, chocolate.
Smith: Well, your approach definitely to songwriting has changed over the years. Did you move a conscious way in that way, too?
Franti: You know, when I first started writing songs, I was coming out of a house where I was just feeling like I didn't belong. And I moved to San Francisco, which is like this haven for misfits and weirdos. We would always joke if you had a button up for an eye, you know, you'd fit in in San Francisco. When I was there I was really into punk rock and hip hop because it was like the feeling of it wasn't necessarily what was being said. Although I really love the do it yourself spirit, but it was just like the feeling of letting go of this pain and through rage and letting anger and, and so when I started in music, that's how I began.
When the HIV crisis came in, I had a lot of friends in San Francisco who died. It was one of the really ground zero places for HIV and Aids. And I fell in love, and I been madly in love with this woman. And I was like, before I, we sleep together. I should get tested because who knows who slept with who. And along the way, and at that time, no one was really practicing safe sex in the way that they do today. During that time, you used to have to wait two weeks for the results come back, and I would come back in a letter in the mail. So during those two weeks, I was like, going through just like all this questioning of, wow, who I slept with and who they slept with, who they say, who they slept with. So my song that I wrote about HIV changed from like this angry songs, like f the government because they're not responding to this song called positive, which is a really, intimate song about my feelings at that time.
Then I had another situation where we played in a prison on Thanksgiving. I had written all these songs about the prison industrial complex and how the justice system was so messed up, and and I sang those songs, and afterwards this guy came up to me and he goes, “You know, I've been here for 22 years, and the first time we've had live music. I was so touched, and it's Thanksgiving, and I really wish you would have sung a song about how much I missed my family on Thanksgiving.”
And it really made me think about how music works and that music really is this way of unlocking emotions and feelings, and you never know what anyone is going through. And a song that you wrote that was about a specific thing in your life could land in somebody's heart in a way that's completely different and for their moment in their life. And so I try to write songs that are like that now, that are about feelings and values and not just about specific issues.
Smith: I didn't realize until a couple weeks ago that you have a nonprofit, and I was just reading about that. If you could tell some folks, because you've done a lot of great things with your nonprofit called Do It For Love.
Franti: Yeah. So we bring people with advanced stages of life threatening illness and children and adults with special needs and wounded veterans to see any live concert by any artist in any city in America. And people just write to us and say, “I'm my sister on stage for breast cancer and wants to see Garth Brooks” or whatever, and we get them to the show. And the way that it started is it was a woman named Hope December, and she was writing me on Twitter saying, “My husband Steve has very advanced stages of ALS and you're his favorite artist and he would love to see you. It might be the last show you ever get to go to see.”
So, we invite them to this festival, and at this point, Steve, his body is completely stiff, as you, you know, because the ALS develops, you lose all mobility, and until you eventually die of paralysis. And he was in a wheelchair that his wife was operating the joystick on. And we brought them up on the side of the stage. And I sang this song, Life is Better with you for them. And, I look over and I see Steve Whisper and his wife's here, and he saysm “Oh. I want to get up and dance.”
And so, with all her strength, she lifts his stiff body up out of the wheelchair, and they have this beautiful slow dance in front of 20,000 people who are all screaming and cheering and crying and laughing and I'm doing the same thing.
And this tough dude is crying, and so afterwards I said to Steve, I said, “What did this mean for you to be here today?”
And he said, “You know, Mike, yesterday when I was wheeled around the festival, I'm living life very differently. And, you know, my face is contorted. I drool sometimes and people just look the other way generally. But after that moment onstage, suddenly I became Steve.”
People were like, “Hey, Steve, come dance with Steve. Come have a beer with the Steve. Steve, come hang out.”
And he said, “I was able to feel like I was just me again.”
And so, we looked at each other, and said “Let's do this for as many families as we possibly can.” And to date, we've sent 12,000 people to concerts. Fantastic.
Smith: Hope it's a powerful thing. Radical love and hope. Michael Franti is Live and Direct here from Club Cafe. We've got a room full of WYEP members and they're on the Togetherness Tour. They'll be back Sept. 11 for a show at Cadence Clubhouse, and we're really happy that you're here. We've got some more time for a couple more songs. I would love to hear some more music.
Smith: Live from Cub Cafe, it's Michael Franti. Thank you so much for being here. This is really, an amazing treat. And your day off, you stop by and know that you'll be back for a full, proper show at Cadence Clubhouse on Sept. 11. But, what a special night. When I was going over some of your older material and some of the other things, I swear I saw something or an interview portion about when you learned to play guitar, and I couldn't find any reference to it. I don't know if it was like a television interview or a clip that I heard from another interview.
Franti: Well, for the first part of my life in music, I just used drum machines and samplers and engineering equipment. I taught myself how to make beats. And then one time I went on this trip with 25 American and European artists to Cuba to collaborate with 25 Cuban musicians. And they were all passing this guitar around this table at night, followed by bottles of rum and, you know, cigars and stuff. Gladys Knight sang a song and Peter Frampton ripped this guitar solo, and the Indigo Girls are there singing. And the guitar came to me and I turned it backwards, and I was like, I had no idea what to do. So I was like, I will never, ever be caught in this situation again, ever. So a year later I bought myself a guitar and I put it in the corner and I was like, if I leave it in the corner, it will magically teach me how to play the songs.
Like a year later, I'm in this teepee at this hippie festival in Oregon. And again, this guitar is going around the circle. And like, I had just done this really great show and the guitar comes to me and I was embarrassed again. So finally I went and sat and played. A friend of mine had this pot farm up in Humboldt County, and it was a really great place to learn a guitar. So I sat there and I just, like, played two chords. And Emily from the Indigo Girls had taught me my first chord was just the G chord. And so I just sat there and played the G chord, and I went to the C chord over and over again until I finally was able to get it.
Then I got this guitar, and that was around 2000 or so. And this guitar is named after my grandma, my biological father's side of my family. Her name is Grandma Brown, and she had worked as a domestic house cleaner until she was in her 90s. And so, when she was very close to passing away, I get this call: “Come to the hospital, quick. Grandma's close.”
I rushed to the hospital, and I walk in there and she's hooked up to, you know, tubes in her nose. She's on a heart meter, and my heart's trembling. Her eyes are closed, and she just looks really gone, and I go up and I kiss her on the forehead. And I said, “Grandma, how you doing?”
And she looks at me, and said “Michael, is that you?”
We become very close and. And in that moment, I just was so scared. I didn't know what to say, so I just said the first thing that could.
“Come on, Grandma, why are you in the hospital?”
And she looked at me, she said, “Because I'm pregnant.”
I said, “Who got you pregnant, Grandma?”
“Reverend Mitchell,” she said, “Why do you think I'm in the hospital? I'm old.”
So she just had this beautiful way of, like, disarming any situation through humor or through food, or through playing a piano in her living room or reading from her old Bible or something, anything to make people feel good and at ease.So I thought if I could have my, guitar do some of that, then that would be a worthy name for my guitar. So this is Mama Brown.
Smith: With 30 years under the belt with Spearhead at Home. I mean, we've been recording for longer, but it's a 30 year anniversary this year. A lot of artists have a lot of challenges in their time, but what do you think was like your defining moment or the challenge?
Franti: I don't know if I've ever had really one yet, but one of the neat things about being a musician of the modern elder age group is when I first started playing music, I'd see people at my shows who are, like 18 years old in the front row, and then they became 28 and then began 38, and then they brought eight-year-olds to the show.
Yesterday we had someone come to our show who is 94 years old, and we had kids there that we always bring up people on stage who are, like, you know, young people as well as people in their 70s or 80s or they're like, yesterday a woman came up who was 94. And, and so for me, like the great, if there was a defining thing, it would be that I want to make music that is for the human experience as we move through our stages in life. And it's hard, it's tough to be somebody who's, you know, I'm 58 now and I don't my body doesn't move the same way it used to. I have to take care of it really specifically now.
But more than that, it's like you start to have different questions when you reach this age. And I want my music to be asking those questions and have optimism for us when we're confused and worried or scared about what's happening in the world, or are pissed off about what's happening in the world. I want it to be done in a way that anyone can enjoy it from, you know, age eight months to 98 years old. And, so I hope that would be the defining thing from what I do.
Smith: Michael Franti live from Club Cafe. I do want to ask you one more question. If you could tell people about Soulshine Bali because I didn't know about this. I didn't know about this until a couple of weeks ago.
Franti: Well, when I first started in music, the first record deal that I got, instead of buying, or spending money on cars or house or jewelry, I bought recording equipment so that I could always record and wouldn't have to rely on the record label for that.
When I started to make some actual money touring, instead of buying cars or jewelry, I started building a little hotel in Bali, and we went from being just five rooms and a yoga studio to now being 40 rooms, two restaurants, and a music venue. We just got our five star certification from the hotel. I wanted there to be a place that people could experience what I experienced the first time I went to Bali, which is like I was in really, you know, just messed up in my head kind of. And my body was sore and tired and I went there and I just had my heart cracked open. And it made me think about the world differently, made me think about my life differently, and hit the reset button on my life.
So that's what we dedicated this hotel for people to have meaningful conversation, to do whatever wellness activity they want. Some people that means doing something with fitness or yoga. Other people means taking story writing or storytelling classes, or hand drumming classes in the morning. And then in the evening we have live music, and we do all kinds of retreats there. Sometimes people just go and bring their family there and stay there. So it's called Soulshine Bali and it's it's a great place to if you want to have like a meaningful vacation and hit the reset button on life.
Smith: It seems like the Balinese culture is very art driven as well. I was reading about it and it was like a lot of everyone's focus is on creating or making some type of art.
Franti: Yeah. We're blessed to have Raga because that's where I met him. He came on during the pandemic. We went from being a band that toured all the time and having this yoga hotel and that had, you know, 90% occupancy to having no shows in our hotel went down to 3%. Occupancy in the 3% was me and Sara and our son Taj. But during that time we started doing these live stream concerts. So I needed to put a band together. So we found Raga!