Ben Harper is wearing a suit, a very fine piece of tailoring. The rocker, who is more often than not attired in a casual uniform you might call hippie surf, has even enticed his Innocent Criminals into this realm of sartorial elegance.
"Oh yes, this is going to be the look for the next tour," Harper says, enjoying a brief respite at his Los Angeles home with wife Laura Dern and their children, Ellery and Jaya, before heading out for another year on the road.
"We're not really requesting as such but we're letting people know we are dressing up a little and if they feel the same, they should dress up when they come to the show."
The clothes may not make the man, but they certainly suggest there has been a shake-up in the Harper camp.
In his words, "he's finally gotten out of his own way" on the latest album, Lifeline.
It is the first album where his band share the credit on the cover and for good reason; it is the first album that they have collaborated on from beginning to end. After eight months touring Europe last year to support the double opus Both Sides Of The Gun, Ben Harper was over soundchecks, that hour-long opportunity to fine tune a set and the venue's acoustics now verging on a waste of time.
"It was time for this band to take me somewhere I hadn't been," he explains. "As much as I have had the Innocent Criminals' name on past records, writing has always been an introspective and isolated process and I wasn't having anything of the alternative. This was the first time I had gotten out of the way and co-collaborated.
"Beyond any other incarnation of the band, these players were bringing too much to the songs night after night, which was sparking peripheral ideas."
Harper dedicated soundchecks for the next two months to writing new songs and demanded his bandmates - guitarist Michael Ward, percussionist Leon Mobley, bassist Juan Nelson, keyboardist Jason Yates and drummer Oliver Charles - come armed with ideas inspired by two words: acoustic soul.
Some were more up for the creative competition than others.
"The process where we took the time from soundcheck to create was a bit touchy for me," Mobley says.
"The process of reaching into your inner feelings to put into the music is sometimes a very personal effort; having the venue people setting up, getting ready, made it very hard to reveal so much."
Harper says to keep the pressure off, there was no talk of recording an album early in the soundcheck sessions.
"I didn't want to give this any definition beyond being creative, even after we had two songs which I believe were Say You Will and Having Wings.
"I did think of putting to gethera collection of songs and maybe calling it Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals Sound checks.
"After the fourth song, I was craving hearing them and thought we might be on to something more special. That's when I booked the studio."
To keep the fast and flowing nature of the songs' genesis, Harper booked a studio in Paris for a week. The City Of Lights has always welcomed him as warmly as Sydney, his fans remaining loyal and his popularity assured for life.
Their Parisian studio carried a certain romance with its antiquated and mercurial 16-track analog desk and Harper is adamant Lifeline would never have sounded as warmly intimate had it been recorded elsewhere.
"I think geography definitely had a major impact. There's a creative charge in the air there and I had always wanted to have that energy be a part of what I do and for me to be a part of it at the deepest level," he says.
But the self-imposed recording deadline - they could only squeeze seven days into their schedule - as well as the unfamiliar equipment and Harper's role as benevolent band dictator, added some creative tension.
"It was emotional in there. The creative juices were balancing the fatigue. (But) you just cannot argue with tired," Harper says.
"There was a guitar slammed on the floor; there were some moments of gathering everyone in a circle so we - probably me - could re-focus.
"That was a true test of us being a band, that we were able to do that as grown men rather than losing it."
Drummer Oliver Charles says you can hear the emotion in the sessions in Harper's voice and he's right; the frontman has never sounded this raw and in-the-moment.
"We were exhausted by the end of the run," Charles says.
"By the time we got there, we were zombies. The exhaustion was bringing a lot of emotion out of us. We were homesick and when you're away from home for so long, things just start to mess with your head a little bit.
"Whatever was going on with (Harper), it's in his voice."
Now Harper sounds energised, excited about his musical future.
Musically, Lifeline covers the gamut of that acoustic soul umbrella he gave his bandmates all those months ago, from the gospel of Say You Will to the bar blues of Needed You Tonight.
"After Diamonds On The Inside, it would have been easy to subscribe to a specific mould of music because of what it did around the world," he says.
"But then I chose to make a gospel record and then a double album and now I am just going with what I feel in the moment. It's good times right now."
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