Ben Harper headlines Summersalt festival in Canberra, while latest album Bloodline Maintenance is nominated for Grammy Award

For this week's gig in Canberra for the Summersalt festival, this means earmarking sometime to go skateboarding around Lake Burley Griffin before hitting Stage 88.

"I'll put in 10 miles on a skateboard in an unknown town just to see it," Harper says over Zoom, sitting in front of his collection of skateboards.

"If you see some old guy falling on a skateboard in Canberra in the next week, help him up.

"The only risk is overdoing it. Because once you've locked into a move, you have to get it otherwise you don't give up. Any move on any given day can take anywhere from 10 tries to 1000 tries. So I limit it before shows to like 30 minutes. 40 minutes tops."

Harper says the only thing that he loves as much as skateboarding is performing live.

And that's part of the reason why the American musician is choosing to spend the next month travelling around Australia headlining the Summersalt festival - alongside Australian duo Angus and Julia Stone - rather than heading to February's Grammy Awards, where his 17th studio album Bloodline Maintenance is up for Best Contemporary Blues Album.

"I'm a little nostalgic about missing out and I'm honoured to be nominated, but excited to be on tour," the three-time Grammy winner says.

"Having two/three years off with a pandemic, I just feel like playing live at this point is such a gift, such a blessing and such a privilege that playing live at this point outweighs damn near outweighs everything else."

MUST READS:

While many other artists would take the chance to highlight the songs from their latest album - in this case, Bloodline Maintenance - in the live performances, Harper says that won't be the case.

Not because he has 16 other albums - plus two upcoming releases that he plans on debuting tracks from - but rather, the songs on Bloodline Maintenance are so thickly produced that the songs are near-impossible to present them as a solo production. That's right - while Harper is bringing a wide range of instruments, it will just be him on stage, presenting his music in ways that will be new for many fans.

But that's not to take away from Bloodline Maintenance - an album that is both political and personal, and in many ways is a conversation between Harper and his late father.

In fact, the photo that appears on its cover is an old family photo, featuring the singer as a young boy, standing next to his smiling father.

It's a photo Harper has been looking at for years and says he kept circling back to. And when this musical conversation emerged over the process of Bloodline Maintenance, Harper knew he needed to use the photo on the cover.

"This is the first time I've made a record on my own that was written as a collection, one body of work where I've written one song for the next and around the next," Harper says.

"None of these songs existed and then they all existed together.

"I've done it for [fellow artists] Charlie [Musselwhite] and The Blind Boys [of Alabama], but I'd never done it myself. But why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I sit down and craft an album, one song to the next?

"You sound ridiculous, talking about having your own breakthroughs, and so on. It's nonsense, it's gibberish, it's only rock and roll, but I like it. And nonetheless, it was very rewarding, personally, to have accomplished a record like that."

Summersalt festival is at Stage 88 on Friday. Tickets from summersaltmusic.com.au.

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content: