Spilling Faith

Album: Give Till It's Gone (2011)
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Songfacts®:

  • This track from Ben Harper's tenth studio album, Give Till It's Gone, finds the alternative rock singer-songwriter questioning, "how long have I been looking down?" before concluding that every day is precious. The song was co-written by Ringo Starr who also plays drums on the track.
  • The song was largely written on the spot. Harper explained to The Huffington Post: "With 'Spilling Faith,' we had worked out the song structure - the song was between three and four minutes - and Jesse, the bass player in the band, sat down at the piano. Ringo loved what he was playing, sat down on the drums, we all went to our instruments, worked it up, and the next thing you know, it's swirling around the room. We worked out the structure and format, pressed 'record' and went. We get to the end of the song, we look up, and Ringo is still playing. We're all thinking, 'Okay, that's where it was supposed to end.' You can kind of hear the song kind of dip as we're all looking around, ready to bring it down, and Ringo looks up and just waves the stick like, 'Come on, boys!' Then, we just ventured off into this uncharted territory. We'd check in every couple of minutes, and he had his head down, crushing it, so we would go back to putting our heads down and just feeling our way through it. Let me put it this way... if he was still playing right this second, we'd still be there playing the world's longest song. Finally, we look up and see him give us the 'wrap it up' signal, and we landed, and that is one take."

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