As Ben Harper sings on the title track of his latest release, Burn To Shine, "How I miss the good old days but I'm so glad they're gone." His music is a savory concoction of "the good old days" and the ultramodern. It's as if Robert Johnson and Jimi Hendrix had a close encounter of the musical kind at that fabled Crossroads.

Besides the usual arsenal of electric guitars, Harper also relies on an antique Weissenborn acoustic lap gu...