Living legend and vocal powerhouse Mavis Staples is proud to announce her 12th studio album We Get By, featuring eleven tracks written and produced by Ben Harper. Harper’s conscious, expressive writing and thoughtful production captures Staples at this moment in time as she offers up love, hope and history during a politically divided era.
PRE-ORDER WE GET BY HERE
“These songs are delivering such a strong message,” Staples said. She looks to the formidable and progressive opening track Change as an example of the strength in the words she is belting. “We truly need to make a change if we want this world to be better.”
LISTEN TO CHANGE HERE
Of course, collaborating with Harper for an album’s worth of new music is part of a larger trend in Staples’ work. An inductee of both the Blues and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Staples has famously collaborated with Prince, Bob Dylan, The Band, Curtis Mayfield, Nick Cave, Neko Case, Arcade Fire, Hozier and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, just to name a few.
The album’s cover is a powerful photograph titled “Outside Looking In” by American photographer, author, musician and director Gordon Parks. It is part of a series of photographs published in Life as a photo essay titled “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” which helped expose Americans to the effects of racial segregation.
Parks was the first African American staff photographer and writer for Life Magazine, co-founder of Essence magazine and a tireless advocate for as well as a documentarian of the Civil Rights Movement. After he died in 2006, The Gordon Parks Foundation was established to permanently preserve his work and in 2017, Mavis was named a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Award, which is given to individuals who have enriched our lives in ways that reflect Parks' ideas and goals by using creative means to inspire the next generation.
MAVIS STAPLES IS PERFORMING AT BLUESFEST 2019, BYRON BAY