Michael Franti is basically a six-foot-six human ray of sunshine. Known for his high-energy, singalong shows, his themes of unity and love, and his passion for community outreach, he’s been touring internationally for nearly four decades and continues to burn ever brighter.
We reached him in Portland, Oregon. He’s in the thick of his Michael Franti & Spearhead Togetherness tour, which started in April. He has one lone Alberta stop: Calgary on August 31.
Longtime fans in attendance may be shocked to see him wearing … shoes! Franti has famously gone barefoot for decades. That changed recently.
“It’s a ridiculous story but it’s worth sharing,” says Franti. “I jumped off a mountain and I had a parachute on and I was going down into this building that was on fire to rescue a box of puppies and then I came out and tripped over a snake that bit me.” He pauses and laughs. “Okay, no, I stepped off a stair and landed on some grass and rolled my ankle inward. It tore my ligaments. So nothing very exotic or superpowerish.”
Luckily Franti still has a superpower, if anyone does: his music.
Fascinated with live shows as a teenager, he started with spoken-word punk group The Beatnigs in 1986, then The Disposable Heroes of the Hiphoprisy, an industrial hip-hop group, in 1991. In 1994 he launched Spearhead, which later became Michael Franti & Spearhead after they left the label that owned the original name. Thirty years later, the band is still touring.
Togetherness is a concept Franti says he’s been thinking about a lot.
“I’ve realized that 90% of what we are as human beings is the same,” he says. “We need to eat, we need jobs, we need a roof over our heads, we want to get our kids to school on time. Contained within the difference is the beauty of the world. Our individual stories, our journeys, our food, our language, our culture, the way we celebrate, those are the things that make life really beautiful.”
“That’s why I’ve called this tour Togetherness. I feel like ‘different’ today is being presented as bad. And other. But I’ve learned that if you really want to create togetherness, you have to learn to embrace the things that are different and see the beauty in the things that make us different,” he says.
An activist since he was a young adult, he says the way he tries to create change has evolved. When he was younger he’d to scream into the microphone about everything he was angry about, but he found it wasn’t making a difference the way he’d hoped.
Now he tries to connect with people.
“Not necessarily about issues but about values, human connection, about respecting and appreciating nature, about the desire to have gratitude for all the abundance that we share and enjoy,” he says.
“When you connect with people through values then they walk away from it and that’s how they end up voting, that’s how they end up making decisions. Not because I told them to vote for whoever but they know that that value is something they want to live their lives by.”
Franti’s songs focus on shared humanity, on being good humans, on fighting for justice.
The last song he wrote was just the morning before we caught up with him, with his five-year-old, Taj.
“What was the hook?” Franti says. “Oh yeah. ‘This is how I feel about the way I feel about you.’ It’s about wanting to describe to someone how you feel when there aren’t really words about you feel. It’s just in your body.”
He woke up with Taj that morning. “And we were just cuddling in bed and there’s no way I can say that in words, what that feels like.” It’s something he finds profound, he says. “Especially for someone like me. My mother held me for one hour and then offered me into foster care and I was adopted. I never really felt super close with my adopted family so to have this child of my own who’s there with me every day like that on tour and we wake up every day and go on adventures … it’s impossible to describe. So that’s what I was trying to get across.”
To hear more stories from Franti, including his connections to Edmonton and Calgary, listen to Leo Cripp’s interview
Michael Franti & Spearhead are performing in Calgary August 31. Tickets and details here.
