The Daily Dig: Michael Franti & Spearhead's "Time To Go Home"

Today, I'm launching a new segment in which I'll be featuring a track I'm enjoying every day. It'll be different from Ed Skira's Don't Look Back (In Anger) in that it will highlight songs both past and present that I'm enjoying that day, but which haven't necessarily influenced my life at all.

The first track is Michael Franti & Spearhead's "Time To Go Home," which appeared on 2006's Yell Fire!. I've been on a huge reggae kick lately, listening to everything from the usual suspects (Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Lee "Scratch" Perry) to pioneers who aren't as frequently mentioned as those latter artists (Desmond Dekker, Toots & The Maytals) and even Jimmy Cliff.

Michael Franti's had a bit of an interesting career, since he seems to have made every kind of music you can think of.

He started in an "industrial punk" band (I guess you could call them that) called The Beatnigs. They garnered a small following in the San Francisco, but broke up after four years together. (Jello Biafra, who signed The Beatnigs to his Alternative Tentacles label, still doesn't know how best to describe them.)

In The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy, Franti made an abrupt turn from politically-charged punk to politically-charged rap, mixing his rhymes with industrial and jazz. While that might sound like commercial suicide, they opened for U2 during their Zoo TV Tour, and even soundtracked William S. Burroughs' readings for his Spare Ass Annie And Other Tales album.

Franti formed Spearhead in 1994 and changed his message to a more "peace and love" oriented one. He began using his music, which was now a fusion of hip-hop, reggae, rock and folk, to express his ideas that peace, globalization, the environment, commercialism and politics are all tied together.

I first discovered Franti in 12th grade, right around the time the U.S. was gearing up for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. MuchMusic's now defunct The New Music show featured Franti, who was in Toronto in March 2003, and prominently featured his "Bomb The World," with its incredibly catchy "You can bomb the world to pieces/But you can't bomb it into piece" refrain. I wanted to know more about this man.

I got even further into him with the release of Yell Fire!, which was based on a trip he took to Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and Iraq. While there, he made a documentary called I Know I'm Not Alone, which he says "examines the human cost of war." I highly recommend checking it out.

With all of this in mind, here's "Time To Go Home":