Anybody else heard this album yet? It's awesome, one of the best albums I've gotten this year. I've been a fan since the Beatnigs years and I think this is his best work yet. Simply beautiful songwriting.
From the
Guardian:
At one point, Franti played to US troops in the Baghdad Sheraton hotel bar. Did they know his politics? "Well, I come in with a wooden folk guitar and I'm not wearing cowboy boots and I'm not with the USO, so they had me sized up." With some trepidation, he played them his anti-war song Bomb the World. "I thought, 'I can't sing songs about the war to people who agree with me and then not sing them to the people making the war.'" And how did they react? "Like, 'This guy's got balls coming in here and singing this song.'"
When he performed the same song to an Iraqi family, the reaction was somewhat different. "I went into the living room and sang Bomb the World and started to cry a little bit. And this family's looking at me like, 'Why the fuck are you crying? We've been crying here for years. You've come all this way, man. Now play something to pick up our spirits!'"
That moment helped inform the lyrics of Yell Fire!, which splits the difference between rock, rap, soul and reggae. Although a couple of songs take explicit pot-shots at the Bush administration, most are more oblique and optimistic: We Shall Overcome rather than Fight the Power. The most powerful scenes in the documentary are those that bring together opposing sides: US troops and Iraqi DJs at a Baghdad radio station, Palestinian farmers debating with Israeli soldiers. The message - that compromise and dialogue are preferable to polarisation and conflict - is hardly novel but it merits repeating.
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