Some Ben Harper Tabs

The people at Virgin Records have set up a fancy website for Ben, and one of the ideas they had was a kind of online guitar tutorial featuring some tabs and charts of a few of his songs.

Through my work tabbing Jeff Buckley's songs I was asked if I wanted to get involved. Let's just say it was a hard offer to refuse!

My understanding is that the three songs we worked on, one from each album, were chosen by Ben, and then he left it up to Tom Dolan at Virgin and myself to see what we could come up with. (The songs are "Pleasure and Pain" from Welcome to the Cruel World, "By My Side" from Fight For Your Mind, and "Faded" from The Will To Live.)

You can find Ben's official Virgin website here. The Music Maker section contains the good stuff.

I had no contact with Ben at all during most of this process, and most of the basic tabbing and chord-charting had been done by the time Ben arrived in January for a tour of Australia. However, folks in LA managed to organise for me to meet Ben backstage in Melbourne, and he very graciously sat down with me and discussed the three songs in question.

Not only that, but it turns out Ben is a big big Jeff Buckley fan, and very keen to learn how to play his songs, especially "Lover, You Should've Come Over". I showed him how I played it, backstage at the Melbourne Concert Hall, and promised to send him the tab I was working on of that song (the one that is now on this site). Now I'm just waiting as patiently as I can to hear the cover version I hope Ben intends doing! ;)

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