Review: Michael Franti and Spearhead at Salvage Station
I have to confess that by halfway into the first song by Michael Franti and Spearhead at their July 8 stop at Salvage Station, I had written down some jokes.
From the show’s opening — a three-minute video of women, men, and children from exotic and sumptuously-shot locations around the world making “heart hands” — along with a voiceover from Franti extolling how every person on Earth has “the ability to give, deserve, and to nurture, and this is what is commonly known as love” — I was wondering what this whole thing was going to be. When the man of the hour jogged onto the stage, with headset mic on and guitar around his neck, clapping the count off and starting into the first lines of “I’m Alive (Life Sounds Like),” and everyone freaked out — bouncing, clapping hands above their heads while aggressively upbeat keyboards jingled across the outdoor venue — I took in the scene and took to my notebook with some choice bits about the impossibly shiny, happy thing happening around me. They were going to be wry, clever, and admittedly a bit cynical.
But I can’t do it, because what I saw at the sold-out concert blew right past irony without even a second glance. It shut down my witticisms purely with a non-stop unapologetic outburst of positivity. In short — the show was snark proof.
How could I roll my eyes when Franti — who has been delivering his message for nigh 30 years now — was singing about how it’s dark today, but it’s going to get better (“Better”)? Or that today would be a good day to just have a good day (“Good Day for a Good Day”)? Or when he’s moving through the crowd during “Meet Me When the Sun Goes Down” to stand atop platforms arranged throughout the place so he can sing straight to the people in the back and even pull them up on stage with him to join in? When every sixth or seventh set of shoulders had a child atop them, smiling and digging the vibe? Look, I may spend a lot of time at the dark and screamy shows, but I’m not about to, as they say, “yuck somebody else’s yum” when everyone there looked like they were having a blast.
The Asheville stop along Franti’s “Big Big Love” tour was a benefit for local environmental nonprofit MountainTrue, and the performer had some words of thanks for that organization and a choice message about banning plastic grocery bags. But from the look of things, Franti’s got a big draw no matter who brings him to town. The line of cars along Riverside Drive included plates from both out of state and in the area, and several clusters of pre-gamers looked to be of the road-trip, tour-following sort you’d see outside jam band shows.
But Franti and Spearhead aren’t noodlers. Their style mixes up a pretty infectious groove of rap, folk, funk, soul, and reggae — though not as much of the last as I expected. (That was left to openers Fortunate Youth.) It conjures up an island feeling for sure, but it’s hard to imagine listening while just sitting and tailgating at the beach with a Corona in hand, because Franti makes you want to move. And most people I saw at the show didn’t stop moving, whether they were twirling and hand-dancing in the outskirts of the venue or right in the middle of the crowd, bouncing in time with everyone else.
The Salvage Station show was a family affair — be it the families in attendance, the extended musical “family” of fans and followers, the bonds of the band, or even Franti’s immediate family. The singer brought up his wife Sara Agah and son Taj to sing on “Life is Better With You” and performed a duet on a new song, “All I Need,” with Louisa Maggioni, who is both the tour’s social media manager and the wife of Spearhead guitarist Claudio Urdaneta.
Between the interactions with the fans, pulling people up to the mic to sing along, and even encouraging the crowd to do a dance initiated by one of the kids onstage during “The Sound of Sunshine,” I don’t know if I remember a performer putting so much energy into making the audience feel included. And the crowd ate it up well into the evening.
Even on the solemn notes — like speaking about his father’s death in 2021 — or on the inconveniences of life, such as noting that he was wearing shoes onstage for the first time in 20 years due to an injury, Franti kept pointing to better things coming, or even the better things already right here.
And, yeah, maybe I picked up some of that Franti energy myself. It’s hard not to when he lands lines like “Bad shit happens…But good shit happens, too.” This musician is not subtle and he’s not trying to sneak his message in under the door. A lot of songwriters I adore would take a whole song of tragedy and perseverance to get to that truth, and here Franti nailed it with one line. I don’t even remember the rest of the lyrics from the song — I don’t have to, because I remember that one. And if they had been selling that on a shirt, I’d have bought it. (I checked: they weren’t.)
The fact that bad shit happens does not escape Franti’s songwriter’s gaze. He sang about loneliness in “Work Hard and Be Nice” — “And everybody don't want nobody to know/That everybody's got a soul with a great big hole/In the middle of it”; and disagreement on “Good Day for a Good Day” — “Why does everybody in the world seem so divided?/Why does everybody gotta hate each other, who decided?” He’s not coming at these tunes with blinders on, and he’s well known as an activist who speaks and sings about conflict around the world. Bad shit happens — even really bad shit like poverty and war but Franti’s music always comes from the direction of peace and love.
That can be a tough stand to take, but it’s one he seems to take head-on by driving his point home again and again — which is probably why so many of his lyrics, both in verse and chorus, consist of the same upbeat lines over and over. That’s just marketing 101 — stay on message and don’t let anything steer you off course. Just keep on saying “love, love, love,” and that it’s going to get better and better and better.
Sure, there’s always room for “Yeah…but,” — but what if you turn that off for a night and just go with it? The Franti fans I saw at Salvage Station seemed to have a pretty great time doing just that.
(Photos by Arlo Abrams)
