You can thank Ben Harper for making you looking bad this mother's day: While us everyday folk placate our moms with offerings of flowers and a side of Lululemon yoga pants, Harper instead teams up with his on a heartfelt collaborative album. Childhood Home, which the singer-songwriter and his mother Ellen Chase-Verdries wrote together (he penned six tracks, she wrote four), is released today and couldn't be any more precious. The 10-track LP features an assortment of gentle, folk-leaning numbers with Ben's delicate guitar strumming and Ellen's harmonizing vocals.
"My mom and I making a record together is something we have talked about doing for a very long time," Harper recently said. "I guess you could say a lifetime." It was Ellen and her parents, in fact, who encouraged a young Harper to take up music: his grandparents established The Folk Music Center and Museum in Claremont, California.
"I was a single mom, so he would come to the music store pretty much every day after school, and help out while I was working. " Ellen, a multi-instrumentalist, said. "I think he just absorbed a lot of it."
Photo: Danny Clinch
