Soul man

Ben Harper fills out

by Franklin Soults

I first heard the expression "filled out" from the unobtainable lips of my senior-year obsession in high school. She was explaining how some older guy she knew had physically matured while away at college, and her approving tone instantly seared the expression into my brain with the ever-handy branding iron of jealousy. Even after the pain subsided, the phrase stayed with me as an apt metaphor for all the admirable changes that occur in the natural movement from youth to adulthood.

A fine example is Ben Harper's third album, The Will To Live (Virgin). Arresting from the very first cut, well-balanced until the last, the album may finally propel this genre-straddling singer/songwriter -- who headlines the Paradise this Friday -- into the pop charts. But it isn't a breakthrough, exactly; it's more like the confirmation of his potential, the point when he comes into his own. Maybe he hasn't suddenly become a notable artist, but now that he's filled out, he's finally noticeable.

Not that his career so far hasn't been moderately successful. Although he's never broken into Billboard or MTV, his first two albums sold about 100,000 copies apiece in this country -- a very respectable number. Worldwide, they sold more than a million; he's even said to be something of a minor star in far-flung pop outposts like France and New Zealand. It could be that foreign audiences see him as a modern, clean-cut version of a traditional African-American folk artist. He often writes in a modified blues form; his signature instrument is a hollow-neck slide guitar from the 1920s called a Weissenborn; he professes his Christian faith in personal songs of religious devotion; and he allies himself with the downtrodden in explicit protest numbers. Yet compared to another serious-minded African-American folk artist, Tracy Chapman, he's hardly a major figure. True, Chapman's 1988 debut broke through in a very different musical climate, but I bet Harper's relative anonymity has just as much to do with the relative slightness of his early work.

Take his 1994 debut, Goodbye Cruel World (Virgin), a gentle folky affair with little more to offer than pleasant background music even at its most soul-searching or political. And if the music was too mild, the lyrics were usually too abstract, too bent on pat moral aphorisms, to come close to anything as penetrating as Chapman's "Fast Car." His 1995 follow-up, Fight for Your Mind (Virgin), offered a new direction with several sharp jolts of hook-laden rock and blues -- funky, fat-riffed numbers in the vein of Lenny Kravitz. Yet Harper's sensitive and self-effacing style kept pulling him off the glitzy hard-rock heights and into straight, soft folk songs. It brought down the album.

The Will To Live is where Harper balances his lesser version of Lenny Kravitz with his lesser version of Tracy Chapman, creating a whole new middle ground in the process. Not that his best characteristics have changed much. He still displays a remarkable knack for tricky rhythmic riffs -- deft starts and stops that seem natural coming from this ace skateboarder. And he still maintains a startling hangdog fatalism about love: "Meeting is such sweet sorrow/Cause someday . . . you're gonna let me down." But this filled-out album provides a much-needed cushion for these characteristics, so they don't have to carry the whole show. Partly it's a matter of better pacing, with the slow stuff broken up every two to three cuts by a rocker. Partly it's about small improvements in the songs: bolder dynamic contrasts, more-novel arrangements, even looser mixing (check out the psychedelic stereo separation that weaves through the disc).

Harper's combination of folk, rock, funk, and blues has the potential to make him a modern-day Bill Withers (you know: "Lean on Me," "Ain't No Sunshine"). What's getting in the way is that continuing retreat from the cruel world -- here it turns up as the vague new-age Christian sloganeering of "Jah Work." ("Some people believe/And some people know/Some people deceive/And some people show." Yeah, whatever.) This suggests the negative connotation that's the inevitable downside of phrases like "cushion" and "filling out" -- losing your youthful edge. There's no lyric on The Will To Live as warm and loose as Cruel World's "Mama's Got a Girlfriend Now," no love song as tense as "Please Me Like You Want To," no guitar showcase as bold as "God Fearing Man" (both from Fight for Your Mind). There's enough else going on that Harper gets away with it -- for the moment. With luck, love, and a decent diet, we all fill out in time. We have to try our damnedest, though, to make sure it's a beginning and not an end.

Ben Harper headlines the Paradise with openers the Watts Prophets this Friday, June 27; call 562-8800 for information, 423-NEXT for tickets.