Motivated by the unknown, Tibetan-Swiss multidisciplinary artist YESH speaks to the current moment through lyrical incantations of the past, drawing on Buddhist teachings, rituals, and practices of devotion in a refreshing and ever-evolving storytelling modality.

Known for her genre-defying sound and wide vocal range, YESH glides effortlessly between low and high pop-electronic frequencies. YESH’s uncanny ability to flip downtrodden and cutting lines into vibrant, reimagined futures is testament to her uniquely fluid manner of artistic expression as influenced by her diasporic identity and her time spent between New York City and Switzerland, where she was born and raised. Personally and professionally, YESH holds trust and intuition as the bedrock of her practice. Drawing across generations of knowledge systems and landscapes of personal and collective histories, her work concerns, but is not beholden to, the topics of identity, belonging, grief, memory, and the reclamation that follows.

Thus far, YESH has released several singles independently as well as a debut EP, hour 2147, which was released with Pique Project in 2020. Inspired by the esoteric tradition of Tantra, YESH collaborated with multidisciplinary artist, painter, and composer Alex Asher Daniel on the single Dakini off Daniel’s 2021 album Book of Spells. Earlier this year, for the April 2023 Issue of The Brooklyn Rail, YESH dropped her single Lhamo, produced by Yanling, with lyrics based on a Tibetan song her mom used to sing to her. “I threw a stone at the nut tree, 20 nuts fell on the ground, I only ate one, 19 I offered to the deities.” 

And as 2023 winds towards its end, YESH’s transformative and uniquely narrative art practice only continues to expand. Recently, YESH sat down with Tricycle to discuss her childhood introduction to music, her work with the collective XENOMETOK on their bardo-inspired 49 days project, and her recent casting in the upcoming Tibetan indie film Dharamsala.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Can you tell us about your early life? My parents were one of the first Tibetan refugees to find exile in Switzerland. They settled down in the Pestalozzi Children’s Village, a nonprofit organization that provides a home for war-affected families from all over the world. It was founded in 1945 in Trogen in Appenzell Ausserrhoden. I grew up in this children’s village in a house with 15 other kids and with many others from all over the world. The village is surrounded by hills, cows, and sheep. 

How did you first become interested in music? The strong presence of cultural exchange throughout my early childhood significantly shaped my voice and my artistic work. Music and dance were a part of my daily life. 

My comrades and I created our own dance group and we would perform at local gatherings. We also had a choir, where we learned songs in different languages. The mother of the Cambodian house taught us how to dance to Cambodian music, the mother of the Ethiopian house taught us to dance Ethiopian. Through that I learned their customs and traditions as well. Since it was a refugee village, living in the diaspora is what connected us and what allowed us to feel the solidarity of belonging, having a home and a community. And music was just a huge part of our everyday communication. 

Later, as an adult, I lost the connection to singing for a while until I started longing for a place where I could create freely, where I could express myself and set my own beat. About ten years ago, I suddenly knew I needed to set my focus on music and singing. 

Are there any teachers or moments in your life that have molded you into who you are today as an artist and how you approach your creative practice? I can’t really think of one particular teacher or moment. I like to think of life as a teacher in general. Some moments are like mini classes and the people you meet are your classmates. In the best case the whole world is a classroom and everything and everyone is interconnected and in constant motion. Just like music! That’s why I love collaborating with producers, instrumentalists and other artists. Creating together, flowing together–listening and observing what occurs when you create music in a certain time and space makes me feel present and alive. 

And then I also think, in contrast to life, death and losing loved ones is kind of a teacher. Letting go and coping with grief has shaped me as a person and also my creative practice. During a period of grief I came to understand that the breath of life and emotion held in every voice and in every moment is impermanent. The life philosophy of Buddhism of course helped me a lot to understand this lesson.

“During a period of grief I came to understand that the breath of life and emotion held in every voice and in every moment is impermanent.”

Could you tell me a bit about your collective XENOMETOK and the inspiration behind your performance piece, 49 days? XENOMETOK is a transdisciplinary collective and collaboration between artist Valentina Demicheli, Tibetan activist Paelden Tamnyen, and myself. Our first theater piece was 49 days. It’s a one-hour multimedia performance, orchestrated by electronic and experimental music, singing, traditional Tibetan drums, the Repa Dance, and moving images. We work thematically in the field of tension between reappropriation, Asian foreign perception, and self-perception. 49 days has to do with the period following death. The bardo is a between-state (marking the passage from death to rebirth, as well as the journey from birth to death). 

49 days bridges the individual and collective paths of three deceased sisters. The three sisters are caught in the tension between longing for a new world and an apparent afterlife. In this in-between, they experience memories of heritage and Tibetan rituals. Through this performance, we are creating a space outside of time, like the in-between of the bardo. Our next performance with this piece is in Brussels at the Kaaitheater in April 2024. 

How do you engage with these centuries-old rituals using contemporary performance styles? With old rituals, it is a bit like when you dismantle old clothes and playfully put together the patterns again in a different way. A learning by doing situation. For example, the Repa dance: we were able to borrow the drums from the Tibetan dance group in Switzerland and a friend introduced us to a Tibetan woman who studied at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts and taught us the dance. The engagement with the drums was physically exhausting because the drums are so heavy. And that led to the fact that we danced with the drums in the hourly performance for only about twelve minutes. 

Creating 49 days was a long process. We started off with having long conversations over Zoom, imagining a tale-like narrative. In a second step, we brought in an amazingly talented crew and cast of a choreographer, a light technician, a set designer, visual artists, and dancers that made the piece at the end what it is. We were reacting organically to a situation. On one hand, our fluid improvisational approach welcomed uncertainty and allowed the piece to adapt in different situations, and on the other hand, our everyday collaborative practice became like a repetitive ritual that we could always return to. This happened very naturally, just like how we grew up with Tibetan rituals when we were kids. 

How did you find a balance when combining traditional Tibetan musical techniques and digital, audio-engineered sounds? It comes very naturally to me. It’s like reinventing and enhancing an ancient culture. I’m interested in storytelling and the use of music and performance for self-expression, for identity formation. It’s also part of a cultural interaction. I feel my role as a Tibetan-Swiss woman, who was raised by a Tibetan-born mother and is now living in diaspora, is to keep Tibet relevant. And I’m using music and performance in a liberating way. I like to see my artistry or my voice as an extension of my maternal lineage. 

If I were to just do traditional Tibetan music I think I couldn’t add anything that I’m interested in. I think I would like to learn more from the traditional Tibetan music/musicians and create my own voice/language that speaks to me and the next generation. 

“I feel my role as a Tibetan-Swiss woman, who was raised by a Tibetan-born mother and is now living in diaspora, is to keep Tibet relevant.”

I think whether it’s in making movies, creating art or music, “our” own narrative needs to be told in order to change the perception of Tibet. There’s so much power in storytelling. But the challenging part about it is relaying that what I have to say is enough. Like, my voice is enough. Getting to this point has a lot to do with confidence. 

How has performing and creating 49 days deepened your own spiritual practice? My spiritual practice influences my creative practice and vice versa. I realize this especially when I’m singing—it feels like I’m dissolving with the surroundings and becoming lost in my voice and the space. When you dissolve with the room, your ego goes, the I is gone, and it becomes more like we or us. 

How do you get yourself into the present moment before you perform? What does this process look like for you? I close my eyes, I focus on the center of my body, breathe in and breathe out, and I envision the ocean in slow motion and how the water takes over myself. 

In addition to being a singer, songwriter, dancer, and performer, you were recently cast in the indie film Dharamsala. Can you tell me more about the film and how you navigate these various art forms? I think they don’t contradict each other. More so I feel like they elevate each other. You learn from each situation and from working with different people. I’m not a singer alone—I would not be a singer if I did not have an audience. I love creating and collaborating with people. All these experiences and art forms are becoming part of the storytelling. I would like to amplify the voices and turn up the volume for Tibetan women. I hope that we can continue building a strong creative foundation for the next generation to tell their stories through various forms of media. 

I have a minor part in Tenzin Dazel’s Dharamsala, which is her first feature film and focuses on Dharamsala, a small town on the edge of the Indian Himalayas that has been the heart of the Tibetan exile world for six decades. It is the residence of the Dalai Lama, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, and home to many other important Tibetan cultural and religious institutions. But along its narrow shop-lined lanes and in the houses clinging to the hillsides, it is also where the hopes, aspirations, and pain of Tibetans living far from their homeland are lived, and where the drama of ordinary human lives unfolds.

Since it was my first appearance in a movie it was an honor to work with such a talented Tibetan and Indian cast and crew, and to slip into a role, a character that is different from my stage persona and myself, was very inspiring and liberating. 

Are there any other projects you’re working on? Is there anything else you would like to add? I’m currently working on my debut album with Asma Maroof as the executive producer. I’m very excited about it because it’s about everything that matters to me and it feels like a stepping stone towards change.

The post Remixing Ritual appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

There was a palpable sense of anticipation in the arena. As the lights went down, the scattered energy in the venue focused on the curtains surrounding the stage. While it is hard to explain, I sensed Tina Turner before I saw her. I felt an undeniable sense of power and charisma as she took her place behind the curtains. As Turner’s artistry, determination, and spirituality had long inspired me, I could not pass up the opportunity to finally see her live for her final 2008–2009 concert tour, “Tina! The 50th Anniversary Tour.”

When the curtains finally opened, there was Turner perched on a platform some thirty feet in the air with a radiant smile on her face. She surveyed the audience before stretching out her hand, signaling her crew to lower her to the stage. For two and a half hours, the show delivered everything one would expect from a Tina Turner concert: a whirlwind of song and dance in a glitzy rock concert replete with a dazzling array of lights and special effects. At the center of it all was the incredible star power of Turner herself. And yet, the most transcendent moment in the show was the encore. The dancers and special effects were gone, as were the shimmering lights and costumes. The spotlight shone on Turner alone as she gripped the microphone and stared out at the crowd with a soft, contemplative smile. Then, she sang her haunting live rendition of “Be Tender With Me Baby.” Don’t let go, don’t let go, just stay with me another day, she sang. 

This moment was what made Turner special: as an artist, she had an almost mystical ability to engage in a soulful communion with her audience, with an entire arena singularly focused on her and her on them. To be in Turner’s presence, whether seeing her live in concert or in person (as I later would at the Broadway premiere of her musical), was to be enveloped in this charismatic force field that she emanated. As a religious studies scholar who has spent several years working on a biography of Turner, I believe that her ability to create this force field was due, in part, to the depth of her spiritual practice that centered on Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism and included aspects of Afro-Protestant Christianity and metaphysical religious beliefs.  

Turner was raised in the Afro-Protestant Christian traditions of 1940s and 1950s Tennessee. In Nutbush, TN—memorialized in her 1973 hit song “Nutbush City Limits”—Turner attended two local Black Baptist churches with her family. On the other side of the state, near Knoxville, Turner also attended a Black Pentecostal church. While Turner would later write in her memoir Happiness Becomes You that she found church hot and boring as a child, she also explained that she saw the value in teachings like the Ten Commandments. Turner was also deeply influenced by the more mystical sensibilities of her maternal grandmother, who believed in the power of signs received in dreams, preferred to spend her time in nature rather than church, and understood the medicinal value of the plants and roots around Nutbush. Both Afro-Protestant Christianity and nature-based spirituality contributed to Turner’s religious formation.

To be in Turner’s presence was to be enveloped in this charismatic force field that she emanated.

In the late fifties, Tina met early rock music pioneer Ike Turner, and by 1960, they had formed the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. Ike and Tina married in 1962, and while professionally the duo recorded a string of hit songs—like 1960’s “A Fool in Love” and 1961’s “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine”—their personal relationship was marred by Ike’s frequent abuse of Tina. Tina’s unhappiness in her marriage led her to begin exploring her spirituality anew. Both Ike and Tina held fascinations with astrology and mythology, but in 1966, Tina went by herself to see a psychic in London. In her 1986 autobiography, I, Tina, Tina explained that this psychic gave her the crucial prediction that one day she “would be among the biggest of stars” and that her partner would “fall away like a leaf from a tree.” Tina remembered that she especially “held on to what that reader said,” and that meeting sparked a long practice of consulting with and learning from psychics of various kinds. 

Nonetheless, the biggest change in her religious life would occur in 1973 when she was introduced to the Nichiren Buddhist practice of chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (“Devotion to the Mystic Law of the Lotus Sutra”). Beyond the literal meaning of the words, Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhists understand the chant to be “the ultimate Law or truth of the universe.” An engineer at Ike Turner’s recording studio Bolic Sound first mentioned the practice to Tina, followed by her youngest son, Ronnie Turner, and finally a woman named Valerie Bishop. “Obviously the universe had been trying to send me a message, and I was finally ready to receive it,” Tina told Clark Strand in a 2020 interview for Tricycle. Bishop gave Tina a thorough introduction to the practice and taught her the chant. Tina later wrote in I, Tina that from chanting, she could feel herself “becoming stronger—becoming less and less afraid” of Ike. In her 2018 autobiography My Love Story, she explained that the practice “removed uncomfortable attitudes from [her] thoughts. [She] started to think differently. Everything became lighter.” From there, she began to develop her practice in a largely clandestine fashion because of Ike’s disapproval. 

In 1976, Tina left Ike and began living with the late jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter and his family. With the Shorters and supported by Herbie Hancock and other Soka Gakkai members, Tina developed her Buddhist practice and officially joined Soka Gakkai. She became an active practitioner of Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhism, and during the difficult times just before her major solo success, she and Wayne Shorter’s then-wife Ana Maria Shorter would chant four hours every day. Before shows, Tina would chant and pray for up to an hour.

By the time her divorce was finalized in the spring of 1978, Turner was appearing on television and performing solo concerts, with her solo album Rough being released later that year. Turner dreamed of establishing herself as a successful solo artist and filling stadiums, so when she met producers Lee Kramer and Roger Davies in 1979, she would chant for hours every day to will them into her life as her management team. The duo agreed to work with her, and Roger Davies continued to work with Turner as her primary manager for the rest of her career. In 1984, Turner’s dreams came to fruition when she released her Private Dancer album (featuring the songs “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” “Private Dancer,” “Let’s Stay Together,” “Better Be Good to Me,” and “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” among others). The rest, of course, is music history: Turner’s tenacity and determination fueled one of the most compelling comeback stories of the 1980s. Each of her solo albums was accompanied by record-breaking global tours that cemented her status as a dynamic performer and iconic artist. Turner took every available opportunity to explain that the “power behind” her success was her spiritual beliefs and practice, especially her practice of chanting.

In Happiness Becomes You, she spoke of making a vow—alongside Herbie Hancock and Shorter—to be a musical “bodhisattva of the earth.” In chapter fifteen of the Lotus Sutra, innumerable bodhisattvas spring up from the earth and vow to propagate the Buddha’s teachings in strife-ridden future ages. Specifically, these bodhisattvas vow to endure all manner of hardship to spread the sutra’s message. In making this vow, Turner was determining, alongside her friends and fellow Buddhist artists, to use her music and work to uplift, inspire, and transform others’ lives. From my study of Turner’s reflections on the connection between her Buddhist commitments and her performances, I am convinced that she was reconnecting to her vow to be a musical bodhisattva in those moments when she quietly smiled onstage while looking out at her audience. To this day, Turner inspires me to use my own talents—that is, my training as a scholar in religious studies—to contribute to the lives of others. Further, she encourages me to reconnect to that purpose in the midst of my work.

Alongside this vow, Turner also voiced her determination to one day become a teacher, using what she learned from her practice of Buddhism to help others. In 2009, after she retired from touring, she began to fulfill this dream by recording spiritual messages and her chanting practice for the album Beyond: Buddhist & Christian Prayers. This interfaith album featured Turner, the Swiss-Tibetan singer Dechen Shak-Dagsay, and Swiss music therapist Regula Curti. This album interwove Christian hymns and prayers with Tibetan Buddhist chants and Turner’s Soka Gakkai Nichiren Buddhist practice. The next album from the trio, Children Beyond, added a multiracial children’s choir and saw Turner singing prayers drawn from Islam and Hinduism. The next album, Love Within: Beyond, saw Turner return to her childhood religious formation by singing gospel. On the Beyond albums, Turner advocates for an approach to life that puts wisdom drawn from the space of contemplative practice—a space she refers to as “the beyond”—at the center of one’s existence. 

Between the 2009 release of the first Beyond album and the 2020 release of her memoir, Turner suffered a series of life-threatening health challenges and the death of her eldest son, Craig Turner, in 2018. Despite these challenges, Turner made a final public appearance in 2019 at the Broadway premiere of Tina: The Tina Turner Musical. Taking the stage after the curtain call, Turner explained that her life was like “poison that turned to medicine,” echoing the Nichiren Buddhist notion that suffering can be transformed into something beneficial. As I sat in the audience at the Broadway premiere and heard Turner say this, I thought about a quote from Soka Gakkai International President Daisaku Ikeda from the Wisdom of the Lotus Sutra, Vol. 1: 

Those who understand the wisdom of the true entity of all phenomena can transform any kind of karma into a radiantly brilliant mission. When you are absolutely confident of this, you will be filled with hope. Every person and every experience you encounter will become a precious and unique treasure.

I could not help but feel as I sat in the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre that Turner embodied this idea and demonstrated it with her life. I continue to be inspired by this. 

Five years later, on Wednesday, May 24, 2023, it was announced that Turner had died peacefully at her home in Küsnacht, a suburb of Zurich, Switzerland. On her 1996 Wildest Dreams album, Turner sang the lines, “now when I lay me down to sleep / I will be dancing in my dreams.” And now, this great Buddhist icon has indeed laid down to sleep. She has become one of our great ancestors. In Buddhist traditions, it is often said that a person can take up to forty-nine days to be reborn. So perhaps Tina Turner has already come back to teach us all once more. In a 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Turner said she wanted to be remembered as the “Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll” and that her legacy was that of a person “who had stayed on track, stayed on course from the beginning to the end because I believed in something inside of myself.” So shall it be.

The post Tina Turner’s Vow appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 2019, I spent a breezy summer afternoon lying on the grass of a local park, nodding my head to Lana Del Rey’s just-released album. That day would turn out to be emblematic of much of my summer: wistful and pensive, yet hopeful. My most recent romantic relationship had unraveled, and the album was a soothing balm; I listened to it on repeat, daily.

The fourteen-track record turned out to be Del Rey’s most critically acclaimed album to date, a collection of music exploring the longing and loss often associated with heartbreak. What I felt from her work was immediate comprehension: someone, somewhere else, had experienced something similar to me and had put it to words and music.

Being seen in this way wasn’t a new feeling. In fact, I often felt that tingle of recognition when studying the dharma. The very first words I’d read from Thich Nhat Hanh, back in 2015, had readily imprinted on my heart: “Everything is impermanent. This moment passes, that person walks away. Happiness is still possible.”

Once again, I was suffering deeply, and all the teachings said, “Yes, you are suffering. Every being experiences pain. Here’s how you can hold it.” That’s why the first noble truth, the truth of hurt, was so powerful to me. Instead of putting on a brave face and denying my struggles, I acknowledged my difficulties. It was not shameful to do so. In fact, Buddhist wisdom normalized it. 

To this day, that’s what draws me to dharma and music alike—that commitment to understanding oneself and the world. For me, the two have always been complementary.

It is true that popular music “tends to offer the lozenge of amnesia to just about everyone,” as music critic Daniel Felsenthal writes. And sometimes what we want and need is to lose ourselves in a rhythmic, three-minute summer bop. But there’s much more to pop music than that. Indeed, the kind of songs I’ve often gravitated toward encourage listeners to shine a light on their experiences, without shame and without fear.

Like the dharma I’ve studied, pop music can motivate us to open our eyes and recognize the joy and pain of living in a world we cannot control very much or very well. Its best songs are about celebration, heartbreak, loss, healing, and acceptance, and how music has the power to help us feel less alone.

A Dharma Dive into Some of My Favorite Recent Songs

Take the four recently released songs below. Each one contains its own dharma themes, if you know where to look—or listen. Hear them out yourself, and then check out this extended playlist for songs I think are ripe for mindful listening. 

Ancestress, by Björk: “When you die / You bring with you what you’ve given”

Death, of course, is a perennial topic in dharma and music alike. We have countless records of humans grappling with the mystery and awe of death, both in the Buddhist texts and in the arts. In “Ancestress,” Iceland-born Björk grapples with the passing of her mother. But amidst gripping instrumentals and stark vocals lies a reference to karma, the push and pull of our lives. This isn’t the everyday, tit-for-tat understanding of karma, but rather the recognition that what you’ve given in life weighs on you at the end, as light as a feather or as heavy as mud.

Hold the Girl, by Rina Sawayama: “The girl in your soul’s seen it all, and you owe her the world / So hold the girl, hold the girl”

When I first heard this song from Japanese-English artist Rina Sawayama, I felt goosebumps. It may have been Sawayama’s soaring vocals or the song’s orchestral arrangement, but more likely it was the metta, the lovingkindness, that came bubbling up. The song is all about loving oneself after a long period of neglect, about the kind of metta practice we too easily forget: the one directed at ourselves. 

SAKURA, by ROSALÍA: “Cherry blossom, cherry blossom / Being a popstar never lasts”

In Buddhism, impermanence is considered one of the aspects of existence: Everything changes, at one point or another. In “SAKURA,” this isn’t a cause for lament but rather a call for tenderness, as the Spanish musician ROSALÍA sings. With the time that we have, why not make the best of it, with a heart full of love and courage?

Washed Away, by Kelela: “Moving on, a change of pace, and I’m / Far away”

If you’ve ever been on retreat, you may have experienced the feeling of coasting that comes up once you’ve hit your stride, a feeling that “Washed Away” evokes so well. Lyrically sparse, the song says so much. The artist herself called the song an “ambient heart-check,” about cleansing and renewal, especially for marginalized folks who have been hurting for so long. To me, that sounds exactly like what retreat is for: stepping away to reset and refresh and possibly set the ground for change.

What themes arise when you think of your favorite songs?

Being Mindful with Music

Here’s one method of listening to music while keeping dharma practice in mind. It is best if you find a quiet enough space where you can listen attentively, whether with headphones or a suitable speaker. If you have room for reclining or spontaneous movement, even better.

1. The first step is to pick a song. Listen to it once, from start to finish, with your eyes closed. Don’t listen for anything in particular. Instead, pay attention to whatever arises in your body and mind. These could be sensations, emotions, memories, or images. Whatever comes up, just watch it come and go.
2. Once the song is finished, either keep in mind or jot down any thoughts you have about the experience. Be brief. How did you feel while listening? What about the song had a particularly significant effect on you?
3. Listen to the song again. This time, pick something particular to focus on. Perhaps the lyrics, the vocal performance, the beat, or the instruments. It’s your choice. Keeping in mind that artists are intentional about their work, consider what effect your area of focus has on you as a listener or what the artist may have been trying to evoke.
4. Again, once the song is over, write down any thoughts you have. Look at all your notes and consider what dharma themes emerge. These don’t have to be direct correlations; they can be little resonances or connections.
5. On subsequent listens, choose something different to focus on and see what comes up. And don’t forget to enjoy this practice! It is one of discovery and play. 

The post The Dharma of Popular Music appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

After the Sistine Chapel frescoes were restored in the 1990s, cleansed of five centuries’ worth of soot and candle wax, visitors could at last see Michelangelo’s vivid colors as he had painted them. Since 2006, record producer Giles Martin has been doing something similar for the Beatles tracks originally produced by his father, George. He has now remixed Revolver. Its latest incarnation, Revolver: Special Edition, can be streamed, downloaded, or purchased as a deluxe box set that includes a hardbound book by Paul McCartney and either CDs or vinyl discs (so you can still watch it revolve). There are bonus tracks of alternate takes, rehearsal takes, and demo versions, some of which left me gobsmacked—“I’m Only Sleeping” with vibraphone, “Yellow Submarine” as a sad folk song with no submarines. This seems like a good time, then, to strap on our dharma ears and give a fresh listen to what aficionados consider the Beatles’ finest album. 

Revolver was born in 1966 of an extraordinary synchronicity. Political liberation and antiwar movements, the sexual and psychedelic revolutions, the opening to Eastern spirituality, even the transformation of fashion from ’50s bland to blazing technicolor, all were reshaping the culture at a dizzying pace. At the same moment, Beatlemania had boiled over into more dangerous forms of hysteria, including assassination threats that ended the group’s touring days forever. Confined to the studio, they would now use the studio itself as an instrument, creating exponentially more complex kinds of music that gave expression to all the new cultural energies. Having become the most popular group in the history of the world—having made it, in John Lennon’s phrase, “to the toppermost of the poppermost”—they could now do whatever they wanted. And they did.

The obscuring grime, as it were, that Giles Martin has removed from the 1966 tracks was a by-product of now-outmoded studio technology. The four-track systems in use at the time were adequate for the simple guitar-driven Merseybeat pop songs like “She Loves You” and “Please Please Me” that the group recorded just three years earlier. But when, say, the strings of “Eleanor Rigby,” the Motown horns of “Got to Get You Into My Life,” the classical Hindustani ensemble of “Love You To,” and the cosmic soundscape of “Tomorrow Never Knows” were crowded onto those four dinky tracks, it was sonically suffocating. 

The breakthrough that has now given them breathing room came, oddly enough, from law enforcement: a new system, driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence, that was developed to isolate the voices of organized crime figures on noisy wiretap recordings. Martin first learned of it when he worked on Peter Jackson’s Get Back documentary, where a specialist was brought in to transform the jumble of studio chatter into separate voices. Returning to Abbey Road Studios, Martin had the same specialist capture the individual voices and instruments on his father’s master tapes. Then he cleaned up the tracks, spread them out, and reassembled and rebalanced them in a format that’s as rich as the restored Michelangelo. Now it all pops: the finger snaps you never heard on “Here, There and Everywhere,” the discrete components of Ringo’s drum kit, and—as if they’re right in the room with you—those gorgeous voices, blended in joyous harmony. 

Side One 

The album’s opening sentence, “Let me tell you how it will be,” is a signal to buckle up and open your ears. George Harrison’s “Taxman” is a protest song, though not one likely to rally the proletarian masses—it’s a sneering lampoon of the steep tax rate that George had to pay as a newly rich rock star. With its cutting satire, its killer Indian-inflected McCartney guitar solo, and its falsetto refrain of “Taxman!” (a droll echo of the Batman TV series theme), it clears the deck for what’s to come: an album unlike anything the Beatles, or anyone else, had made before.

The next track, “Eleanor Rigby,” makes good on that promise. After all the peppy love songs that launched the first wave of Beatlemania, it’s pure existential grimness. Forgoing the first- and second-person discourse that’s essential to the earlier songs (“I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “From Me to You,” etc.), the lyric assumes a third-person bird’s-eye view of the tragic human condition. The happy harmonies give way to Paul’s lone, mournful voice; the ringing guitars are replaced by a string octet’s jabbing, stabbing staccato, directly inspired by Bernard Herrmann’s strings-only score for Psycho. The chorus poses two sweeping, pointedly unanswered questions: 

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?

This is not far from the big questions that are the starting point of buddhadharma. All the suffering beings, where does their grief come from? All the suffering beings, where can they find relief? A clue to the first question is in the repeated word “lonely.” Unlike solitude, which can be delightful, loneliness is the sense of fragmentation, of aching incompleteness that one can feel even in a crowd. It arises from our misidentification as separate, finite selves, chunks of matter lost among a multitude of chunks of matter, each of us too preoccupied with our own unhappiness to care much about the others, till one day we are, like Eleanor Rigby, buried along with our names. 

After that nadir of despair, subsequent tracks offer some first-draft answers to the second question, the way out of suffering. (Is this a conscious design? I assume not—but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.) In “I’m Only Sleeping,” John rejects what was called, in ’60s parlance, the rat race—the frenzied pursuit of empty goals, “Runnin’ everywhere at such a speed / Till they find there’s no need.” As an alternative, he celebrates the yawning lazy life as a path of freedom, where we paradoxically but effortlessly “float upstream.” Underscored by George’s dreamy backwards guitar solo, it’s in the spirit of the happy Zen hermit-poet Ryokan (1758–1831), who couldn’t even be bothered to fold his legs like a proper monk: 

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself …
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out.

— Translated by Stephen Mitchell in The Enlightened Heart 

Perhaps the first time most Americans heard a sitar was in “Norwegian Wood,” on 1965’s Rubber Soul, played beginner’s-style by George. Here, just a year later in “Love You To,” he rocks it; accompanied by tabla and tamboura, he winds the song out into a rousing mini-raga, something unprecedented in Western music. Thanks largely to George, raga music was suddenly in the air, and his teacher, Ravi Shankar, became an international superstar. Also suddenly in the air were acid and free love. In contrast to the previous track’s low-key, quasi-monastic approach to liberation, this song takes a hippie-ish, hedonistic, quasi-tantric approach: “Make love all day long / Make love singing songs.” It’s the paisley-streaked vision of enlightenment as a perpetual psychedelic orgasm. Hey, we were young—and for those of us who stuck with it, the vision eventually matured.

In fact, the next track points toward that maturity. When we finally tire of sensation-seeking and addiction to intensity, we have a chance to discover the boundless, all-sufficient ease of just being. Love, by the same token, turns out to be not a mad whirlwind of emotions, but just being … together. “Here, There and Everywhere,” one of the most perfect love songs ever written, beautifully conveys that simple, relaxed intimacy and its transformative power. The song’s introduction declares that I need my love with me … why? “To lead a better life.” Aha. Then, much as meditators find tranquility first in quiet sitting and later wherever they go, this song’s lovers find their shared tranquil sweetness first in the immediacy of here, then there, and finally everywhere.

These themes are supported by lots of tasty musical nuances, like the way “Changing my life with a wave of her hand” ushers in a key change. Taken too literally, lines like “I need her everywhere” can sound like a confession of attachment. But sublime love songs like this one rise (usually unintentionally) to address the real Beloved, which is not a person, shining through the human beloved. And that Beloved we indeed need, and fortunately have—and are—everywhere. 

Next up? “Yellow Submarine.” This one’s deceptive. On the surface, it’s a kids’ song with neato sound effects, or a campfire song for potheads—if Ringo can sing it, anyone can sing it. Harmless fun. But it also invites us to go below the surface. Dharma life is all about diving deep, into ourselves, into the unknown. That can be a scary prospect. But if we have teachers and preceptors who’ve gone there before us (“In the town where I was born / Lived a man,” etc.), they can reassure us that this adventure has a happy ending (“So we sailed up to the sun”). But we can’t go it alone. Hence this jolly anthem of sangha solidarity: “We all live … ” And to truly arrive at our destination, we must welcome into this life of ease all sentient beings, without exception: “Every one of us is all we need.”

The last track on Side One is “She Said She Said,” John’s confused-acid-trip song, recounting an incident during a US tour when the band was holed up in a house in Beverly Hills for a few days off. Word got out and they were promptly besieged, with helicopters spying on them and girls coming in through the bathroom window, while they entertained visitors like the Byrds and Peter Fonda. Under these less-than-ideal conditions, John, George, and Ringo took LSD with their guests, and Fonda started unhelpfully showing off his bullet wound from a near-fatal childhood mishap, proclaiming, “I know what it’s like to be dead.” This, my friends, is a recipe for a bad trip. Lennon’s response, though, is a display of intuitive wisdom, signaled by a shift from 4/4 to graceful, easy-swinging waltz time. 

I said, No no no, you’re wrong,
When I was a boy everything was right … 

In the midst of chaos, that’s a sanity-saving reconnection with the all-OK-ness we knew in childhood: untainted original mind. 

Side Two

“Good Day Sunshine,” the Side Two opener, is, like “Yellow Submarine,” deceptive. With its old-timey barrelhouse piano, soft-shoe rhythm, and (literally) sunny lyrics, it seems naively simplistic. But starting from the first chorus, it introduces subtle changes of meter and tonality that sketch out a bigger context, as if to say, “Yeah, I can do complexity. I choose simplicity. I’m in love, it’s a sunny day, and that’s plenty for me, thank you very much.”

“And Your Bird Can Sing”: Lennon dismissed this as one of his “throwaway songs.” Agreed—it’s the album’s weakest track. But arguably it still has dharma overtones, with its talk of having everything you want and seeing the Seven Wonders, yet still being dissatisfied. “For No One,” McCartney’s melancholy breakup narrative—cast, unusually, in the second and third person—may be the only prominent pop song with a featured French horn solo. It’s a poignant piece, but to some ears Paul’s upper-register singing here is painfully saccharine. “Dr. Robert,” John’s ode to a notorious New York physician who supplied speed-laced “vitamin” shots to celebrity clients, reminds us that not all the chemical exploration of the ’60s was aimed at consciousness expansion. Moving right along…

As it fades in from the silence, the syncopated guitar hook that introduces “I Want to Tell You” feels like some sort of luminous beacon signal, calling to us from distant skies. Harrison’s brilliant last song on the album, it stands in ironic contrast to his first, with the taxman’s confident “Let me tell you.” It’s easy to be that confident when you’re thoroughly square, when all you know is the rule book. Here the rule book has melted; having turned on, tuned in, and dropped out of the square world, George has gone into free fall. But he makes the rookie mistake of trying to explain it to someone who isn’t experiencing it—maybe a friend, a lover, or, for the Beatles in 1966, the teenybopper fan base that were scratching their heads over the band’s new direction. 

Explaining never works: “All those words, they seem to slip away.” The song powerfully conveys the sensation of cycling through multiple planes of consciousness and, each time we touch down on the earth plane, stammering in wordless frustration. And then off we go again: “I’ll make you maybe next time around.” The frustration is rendered emphatic by the queasy, dissonant piano chord banged out in insistent quarter notes. But by the end, we find resolution in the wisdom that such cosmic voyaging finally achieves:

I don’t mind,
I could wait forever, I’ve got time.

If I’ve really seen transcendent eternity, there’s no more urgency, no hurry to make those who are still stuck on the earth plane understand what I’ve seen. As I reach in from vast timelessness, I’ve got time … in the palm of my hand. And then: OK, see you later, that luminous beacon (the guitar hook, reprised in the outro) is calling me back skyward, fading to silence, as Paul unwinds the word “time” into curlicues of Indian-style melisma. Wow.

This is wisdom. In Ram Dass’s seminal book Be Here Now, there’s a hilarious illustration of a barefoot hippie, arms waving in the air, running frantically up the aisle of a church, yelling to the square congregation, “Listen to those words you’re singing!! It’s really here! They’re all true!” Ram Dass notes wryly, “Don’t be psychotic: Watch it. Watch it.” The lyric does get one thing wrong, though: “It’s only me, it’s not my mind / That is confusing things.” Of course it should be, “It isn’t me, it’s just my mind.” (After years of being bugged by this, I at last found a passage in George’s 1980 book I, Me, Mine where he says exactly the same thing. Thank you.)

“Got to Get You into My Life” is Paul’s exuberant love letter to a new state of consciousness, “Another road where maybe I / Could see another kind of mind there.” By his own account, the object of his affection was marijuana, but the song, like all true art, transcends the circumstances of its creation. It applies to us now, when a text or a teacher reveals an exciting new vista, or we come out of a sitting session with the delicious, empty openness of existence at last radiantly clear. And then: I’ve got to get this into my life, to be no longer a tourist but a resident, “Every single day.” Ignited by that prospect, and urged on by the wailing horns, Paul’s singing here is irresistibly joyous, rising above his tendencies to sound cloying when he’s sweet and lightweight when he tries to rock. Here he reaches an apotheosis of rocking sweetness. 

And finally, Mount Everest: “Tomorrow Never Knows.” How revolutionary was this three-minute epic? Let us count the ways. It’s the first known pop song with no rhyme. The first with no chord changes. (Despite repeated teasing flirtations with B-flat, it never leaves the key of C.) First to use sampling, first to use backward loops. And it’s rock’s first great foray into buddhadharma, by way of psychedelia. 

The lyric was inspired by John’s reading of The Psychedelic Experience, adapted from the Bardo Thödol, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, by the Harvard psychonauts Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner. Leary and company had realized that the traditional Tibetan guidance for enlightened dying also worked for the “ego death” accessed through psychedelics—and that the lack of that very guidance was what led to the panic that precipitated bad trips. The song’s opening lines, “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,” lifted directly from the book, arrived on the airwaves just in time to help a whole lot of inexperienced trippers cool out. (But again, I have to quibble with a line about the mind. After 50-plus years of teaching meditation and seeing people struggle to turn off their minds, I would change it to “Ignore your mind.”)

It’s rock’s first great foray into buddhadharma, by way of psychedelia. 

John famously told George Martin that he wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama calling down from a mountaintop. (Everest indeed.) This effect is achieved in the last verse by filtering his voice through a Leslie speaker cabinet, normally used for a Hammond organ. The ineluctable pull into the Beyond (“Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void”) is enacted musically by the constant drone of George’s sitar and tamboura, by backwards guitar licks that sound like time being sucked down the bathtub drain, and by Ringo’s propulsive drumming. His syncopated kick-and-snare pattern is the lone staccato element, relentlessly pushing us forward through a legato sea. With his usual thematic precision, he uses a conventional snare backbeat in the first half of each measure, only to blow things open in the second half with an out-of-left-field syncopation. Expected/unexpected, solidity/space, form/emptiness, again and again and again.

The most striking sonic element is the tape loops—sixteen of them in all, each just a few seconds long—of various distorted Eastern and Western instruments, played forwards or backwards, slow or fast. The mysterious “seagull” sound is Paul’s laugh, sped up. In those predigital days, all of this had to be put together by hand and in real time, with technicians stationed throughout the Abbey Road building, running loops of physical tape around pencils to maintain their tension, and all four Beatles at the recording console, working the faders.

The most mind-blowing words of this mind-blowing album are its very last. They start by counseling us to perform our role in the samsara-movie all the way through (“play the game Existence to the end … ”), then invite us into the space beyond the movie.

… Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning
Of the beginning

That’s not your standard rock ’n’ roll repeat-and-fade ending. It’s not repetition at all. Like a friend of a friend or the crème de la crème, it’s the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of the beginning, and on and on and on and on, spiraling into infinite regress: all of birth and death and birth and death, all of world and void and world and void, all pinwheeling away and away and in and in and in. 

That flipped my lid right open when I first heard it in 1966, and it still does today. Thanks for playing, guys.

The post Of the Beginning of the Beginning of the Beginning appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Buddhism might not be the first theme listeners think about when they listen to Scottish band Belle and Sebastian’s new album A Bit of Previous (Matador Records), out today. But a discerning ear will pick up references to past lives, infinite rebirth, universal compassion, and impermanence. (Read the album’s title again.) Tricycle caught up with Stuart Murdoch, Belle and Sebastian’s frontman, about his Buddhist practice, his attention to the everyday in his lyrics, and how these come together in the beloved indie pop band’s first album in seven years. 

Tricycle: In discussing your new album, A Bit of Previous, you reference some Buddhist notions like past lives, infinite rebirth, and universal compassion. These seemed more than recurring motifs, but almost unifying themes. Can you talk a little about the series of events that brought Buddhism into your life and music? 

Stuart Murdoch: Well, it’s been percolating for a long while. Spiritually, my background isn’t in Buddhism but Christianity. I’ve been a Christian for a long time, but about eight years ago, just after the birth of my first child, I was going through a difficult period and decided to investigate meditation. So I went down to my local Buddhist center, the Kadampa Buddhist Center, looking to meditate and got hooked into the Buddhist teachings. I was really surprised because at that point, I was 45 years old, and I never expected something to come along that would change me so radically. But it did. It changed my way of thinking. I think it changed me as a person. It helped me deal with everything I was going through at the time. When something goes in that deep, it’s natural that it ends up coming out in your writing and in your music.

Your music does so many things. Your songs are beautiful, they’re touching, but they’re also funny in a quotidian way. They have this really “everyday” quality to them. What happens to your music when your “everyday” is shifted in the way you’re describing?

For me, it would be difficult to sit down and write a song that was only about higher things. I think that wouldn’t really be my style at all. And so I stick with the quotidian, I stick with the everyday. I stick with my everyday experience. And, you know, normally I just let songs flow to me. I don’t have to try too hard. But the interesting thing is that I just can’t help coming back to the sort of principles that I’ve been learning about in the temple. I’ve noticed now that I tend to wrap quite a lot of Buddhist advice up in the song, and it really comes out in the way that I’m speaking to the characters of my songs.  

The single “Unnecessary Drama” chugs along in this kind of beautiful squall, and then we hear the line, “Enjoy the fervor of your love life, because it doesn’t last.” This is a really beautiful and Buddhist sentiment, almost like a line from the Dhammapada. 

[Laughs] Absolutely. And that’s probably the least Buddhist song on the LP because it’s a real rocker. But it does have a little bit of the dharma in there. 

Did you find that your community around you, overtly or implicitly, was transformed with you? 

Two years ago, when the pandemic first arrived in Glasgow and everything shut down and we couldn’t make music anymore, what most natural for me was to start leading some online classes. I gave a class every Sunday night where I would lead a meditation. Initially it was mostly Belle and Sebastian fans who were curious and people who were sort of stressed out with the pandemic. But that was precisely the reason that I thought it would help to try and meditate with people and offer them a way towards a peaceful mind. I’ve carried on with that for the last two years. 

What an amazing thing to have that both for yourself and for others. It must have really centered you through the first part of the pandemic.

Absolutely. It was totally as much for me as for anybody, because if you’ve ever had a chance to lead a meditation or teach the dharma, you’ll know it’s very rewarding. Sometimes you only find out what you know when you try to pass it on to other people.

Oh, for sure. Especially for beginning Buddhists you hear often, “I’m so excited by these ideas. But how does it apply to my life?” And it seems like I hear you saying like that from the very beginning you’ve found your studies immediately applicable to your daily life, and immediately informing your everyday life. How did you so quickly make that connection between these ancient texts, and your everyday—these quotidian things that so preoccupy us all?

I think the Kadampa teachings, the Lam rim [“stages of the path”], are all about finding a peaceful mind. We’re digging down and trying to quiet the mind. In the past, I would get angry and frustrated at many aspects of my life or what is happening in the world. You know you can get angry reading the news, or if someone knocks into you on the street, or somebody is making too much noise or driving you crazy at work. So, one of the things that I’ve learned is to reimagine these problems. There’s this metaphor of looking out to the world as if it’s covered in broken glass. The broken shards are all the problems of the world. You could walk around and try to cover over all the broken glass, but you’ll never do it. It’s impossible. So, the best thing to do is to put on a good pair of boots. You have to change yourself and it’s only by changing yourself, having this armor for yourself in the dharma, that you are going be able to deal adequately with the problems of the world. 

Are there particular styles of meditation or techniques that have been most effective or that you find yourself returning to over and over as your kind of armor? 

On the meditation side of things I keep it very simple. I feel that when you’re quiet in the mind you can bring anything into your heart center. And then it naturally becomes a part of you. Once you focus on that, you can really meditate on anything. In the sessions I lead, we usually start with a breathing meditation just to bring everybody in. And then once the mind is calm, once the mind is focused on a more singular object, you can bend the object–whether you’re just using bright light, positivity, or you’re focusing on health and compassion. It’s pretty simple stuff. As well, one of the other things I love so much about the Buddhist practices is that they’re very scientific. If you don’t want to, you don’t have faith in things that you can’t see, you’re very welcome at a Buddhist center, because you always start scientifically and practically—with the mind. If you say meditation to a lot of people they might think, wow, that has to have something to do with faith or God or something. But really meditation is just being able to focus on a virtuous object, which means focus on a good emotion. And then that emotion will grow in you and become part of you. It is very, very practical.

You discussed some challenges that you faced in your life that led you to explore meditation and Buddhism. What was the process like for transforming the challenges that have come up in your life? 

The elephant in the room for me is that I still go to church, and I’ve been going to church for 14 years. I’m not a practicing Christian, but I have certain beliefs. My teachers in the Buddhist center, they’re very cool about this. And they’re always explaining that everybody has different karma. Everybody has different people and things that they go to refuge for. Even just the other day, my teacher was saying that I go to Buddha, but you might go to Jesus or God or even your Aunt Agnes–who was the wisest person that you ever knew. I love that it’s very open. Even a bit further down the line when it gets a bit more “Buddhist,” it’s not so much that there’s a contradiction but more that the practices start getting very precise. And I feel that at the minute my karma isn’t leading me that way.

The post How Buddhist Practice Helps Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch in His Everyday Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When June Millington and her sister, Jean, first began singing and performing music in their early teens, they never thought they would one day become part of one of the leading all-female rock bands of the very masculine 1970s music scene, let alone the the first all-female rock band to release an album with a major American record label.

“It was like being in our own club,” Millington, now 73, told Tricycle. “Nobody could possibly have understood. To say that we were going to play electric guitar and bass was like saying that we were going to the moon.”

A new documentary, Fanny: The Right To Rock, directed by Bobbi Jo Hart, chronicles the band’s rise to fame and recent reunification 50 years after their first album. The film is currently being screened at film festivals across the country and features musicians including Bonnie Raitt, The Go-Go’s, The Runaways, and Todd Rundgren reflecting on the impact Fanny had on the American rock scene. In addition to tracing the band’s roots from the Philippines to their 1970s heyday, Fanny also explores how the Millington sisters and early drummer Brie Darling reunited in 2018 for their latest album Fanny Walked the Earth, which features Millington’s classic guitar riffs and songwriting. For longtime fans, the release of Fanny Walks the Earth and Hart’s documentary are long-overdue tributes that cement Fanny’s role in music history. 

Born in the Philippines to a naval officer father and a Filipina mother, the Millington sisters spent their early childhood immersed in Filipino culture before moving to California in the early 1960s. While attending Catholic school in Manila, Millington heard the guitar for the first time, and her life changed forever. “Right before we moved from Manila to Sacramento I had actually heard a mysterious young girl playing guitar at the convent. I never saw her face, but I heard the sound down the hall and I walked over like I was sleepwalking,” she says. “She never turned around but I watched her for a few minutes before I went back to the classroom.” That was the moment she fell in love with the guitar and knew that music would be part of her life. 

Just a few weeks later, Millington’s mother gifted her a pearl inlaid guitar for her thirteenth birthday. The siblings would hone their love of music and performance on the ship from Manila to San Francisco—a journey that spanned several weeks. “There’s a photo of us, me and Jean, playing two guitars for the officers on the ship,” she recalls. “They must have had us singing at lunchtime or dinner. That was our first audience.” 

Along with keyboardist Nickey Barclay, drummer Alice de Buhr, and percussionist Brie Darling (a fellow Filipina American), the Millington sisters formed Fanny’s original lineup while the musicians were still in their teens. ​​The group made history in 1970 when they released their self-titled debut album, becoming the first all-female band to release an album with a major American label. In spite of the sexist music press of the time, the band quickly became known for strong songwriting and for covers of rock classics like “Hey Bulldog” and “Badge.” A 1971 New York Times review of a live show noted in its headline that Fanny’s immediately apparent star power “pose[d] a challenge to the male ego.”

Coming of age within the dynamic California music scene and mingling with legends like David Bowie, John Lennon, and The Kinks, the band members found themselves in a whirlwind of celebrity friendships and—as the new documentary details—the sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle of the early 1970s. Amazingly, though, even when she was performing at places like the famed West Hollywood club Whisky a Go Go, Millington says she was able to embrace stillness. “I would go in and out of being in my center where it’s really quiet. I’m doing my bit, but I’m reaching into the silence for my bit, whereas it’s all happening outside of me,” says Millington of her life as a performer. “I’d perceive the crash and the boom and the loudness of the music, and then I’d go back into the stillness.” This internal grounding amid all the chaos was a harbinger—or even an unconscious practice—of her future spiritual journey.

Even at the height of Fanny’s fame, Millington began wondering what else was out there. “​​I was a real seeker. I was looking for not just a place to land but a place where I could get knowledge,” she says. “I wanted to start to feel more safe in this world because I definitely felt very unsafe.” That feeling of unease began long before she had ever stepped on stage. Millington recalls being deeply affected by growing up in the ravaged landscape of post-war Philippines. “I had this feeling like ‘I just don’t understand it, but I feel like I’m in danger. I gotta figure something out.’ But that never reached my consciousness in the sense that I knew what I was looking for.”

While Fanny was cranking out albums—five in five years between 1970 and 1974—the singer turned to books and poems. “I am a bookworm, quite frankly, I just swallow books. So it was perfect for me to look in that direction.” 

Millington began researching Tibetan Buddhism while browsing bookshops on tour. “The first book that really hit me like a sledgehammer was Chögyam Trungpa’s Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism,” she says. “It was so profound that I had to go over it again and again. Sometimes I would just read one paragraph, and then rest and meditate on what exactly he was talking about,” Millington continues. “Because I knew nothing, right? I didn’t grow up in that tradition.” 

Although a broader interest in Buddhism and other Eastern traditions was taking off in the 1970s in the US, Millington says she often felt alone when it came to her spiritual interests. “I didn’t know anyone who was getting into Buddhism the way I did, even when it came to just reading about it,” she recalls. “I did hear that some of the Beach Boys were doing a mantra so I went to the Transcendental Meditation Center in Hollywood and got the mantra,” she adds. “I realize now that it was a general mantra, but it did get me started [with meditation.]”

“I don’t think people were embracing things. I think they were embracing the lingo,” Millington continues, “but I don’t think they were getting into it in the way that when you really open your heart, and you step on the path, you can make a lot of changes.”

Indeed, Millington’s spiritual journey often left those around her, including her bandmates, somewhat bewildered. One manager would even tease Millington about her “rabbit food” when she embraced vegetarianism. “The rest of the band kind of put up with me doing yoga every day and my breathing exercises and all that kind of stuff,” she recalls. “That was at a very basic level, but those practices definitely opened me up [to Buddhism].” 

Soon enough, Buddhist themes of compassion and generosity began showing up in Millington’s songwriting, as in the 1972 song “Think of the Children,” which contains the lyrics: 

Are you ready to think of the future?
To think about somebody else?
It may be your children’s children
And not just yourself

There’s a kingdom below the ocean 
And it stretches beyond the sun
There is more than we ever imagined
It’s for everyone

Eventually, she didn’t see much of a division between her songwriting process and her Buddhist practice. “They’re the same,” she says. “To me, music is sort of gliding within light. And Buddhism is, let’s say, floating within light.” 

Millington ended up leaving Fanny in 1973 to explore new avenues, including her spiritual studies. “I needed to settle into a space where there wasn’t a whole lot of movement, so I could do my Buddhist meditations and go into the teachings and learn about the nature of suffering,” she says. She began studying under the late Ruth Denison at her center in Joshua Tree, California, and is still practicing today.

Now a co-founder of the Institute for the Musical Arts in Goshen, Massachusetts, Millington continues to write songs, produce music, and mentor emerging musicians. While she no longer does yoga regularly, she still meditates regularly and practices Buddhism at home. “I remember my teacher Ruth Denison saying, ‘Make the world your cushion. Make the world your meditation,” she says. “So I try to make everything be in that frame of mind, and it has really worked.” 

The post June Millington: Buddhist, Rockstar, and Pioneer  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The pilgrimage began with an Instagram post: A maroon zafu, vase of flowers and a neat tangle of brightly colored cords sprouting from a modular synthesizer. In the background lay the lush green fields of Green Gulch, the Bay Area farm and Zen practice center. 

The image was enough to draw S Whiteley, a 28-year-old composer and sound artist, from New Mexico to Marin County, in search of a mind similarly enraptured by Buddhism and electronic music. “It seems like I’d find my kind of people there,” he said. “And that’s exactly what happened.” 

Soon enough, Whiteley found the person behind the Instagram image.

Originally from Los Angeles, Danielle Davis had brought her Eurorack synth to Green Gulch, where she lived in a yurt with an itinerant roommate, leaving her plenty of space to conduct sound experiments. 

Like Whiteley, Davis’ intellect was piqued by Buddhism in college, but her practice deepened later while studying Chan in Taiwan and during her yearlong residency at Green Gulch, which is owned by San Francisco Zen Center. Whiteley, who is from New Jersey, took the bodhisattva precepts at Upaya Zen Center, where he lived in residence for eight months before moving to the Bay Area. 

On the porch of the yurt, Davis and Whiteley bonded over shared interests in Zen, experimental music, the link between contemplative practices and creative states of consciousness, psychedelics, the Deep Listening philosophy of Pauline Oliveros, and outside-the-box compositions of John Cage. 

“Part of the reason our collaboration is so successful is that we share a certain realm of consciousness, a certain way of being,” Davis said, “and that space is one we’ve both cultivated for a long time both within and outside of monastic communities and Zen centers. It’s a sense of: What happens from this place of stillness and silence and spaciousness? What arises? Can we listen to it? And can we follow it?” 

What arose initially were strange sounds, drones, and burbles that floated from the duo’s laptop and synth through Green Gulch gardens, above the valley farm, and out to the restless Pacific ocean. 

After four months at Green Gulch, Davis and Whiteley moved to Great Vow Monastery, a Zen residential center in Clatskanie, Oregon known, among other things, for its kickass marimba band. (Whiteley describes his travels from Upaya to Green Gulch to Great Vow as a “beautiful kind of organic pilgrimage.”) 

During the creative practice periods at Great Vow, their improvisations blossomed into songs, eventually leading to Soundness of Mind, the duo’s first album. For a name, they chose Liila, a Sanskrit word roughly translated as “creative play” that evokes the generative flow that arises when the ego subsides.  

The album has been a surprise hit for the duo, who now live in Portland. Their supply of cassette tapes has sold out and critics from discerning mainstream music sites have praised Liila’s larkish vibe. When you Google “Zen music,” you get a lot of waterfalls, wind chimes, and sleep-inducing synths. Soundness of Mind is blissfully free of such cliches.

“Whatever the layperson might assume that electronic music grounded in Zen practices ought to sound like, this 28-minute album frequently upends expectations; it is as playful as it is reverent, and the heady results push at the limits of what ‘meditative’ music can be,” wrote one reviewer. 

In addition to their creative work, Whiteley, who goes by S, is studying for a doctorate in musical composition from the University of California, San Diego. Davis is training in somatic therapy. 

From their temporary home in Portland, the duo spoke to Tricycle about the creative process and Zen philosophy behind two of their tracks: “not one not two” and “silent illuminating.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

***

“not one not two” 

Soundness Of Mind by Liila

DD: This one was created during the creative practice period of about two months at Great Vow Monastery. Part of the reason we wanted to go there is because they have a strong musical influence. They have a collection of 20 marimbas and there’s a monastery marimba band… 

SW: If you look it up on YouTube, there are videos, and it’s all these bald monks…

DD: Jamming. 

SW: Yeah, jamming. And they’re, like, weirdly tight. They were very, very well rehearsed. And it’s very funny and wonderful.

DD:  Built into the schedule at Great Vow was an hour and a half each day for creative process. We had a little corner in the old gymnasium (the monastery is a converted elementary school) where we would set up in play. I would make (sonic) patches and we would experiment. We used this combination of the synth, electric, and acoustic instruments that were onsite. 

And then every few weeks, we did like the Buddhism style of “crits,” where everyone listens and experiences and then reflects something about their experience—nothing critical at all. And then at the end, you give a final presentation of your work. 

SW: I remember people being really moved by it (the song). There was a very stoic priest who had lived at Great Vow for a long time and was a very serious, intense priest, and he cried his eyes out when we performed. I remember him saying, with this tear-soaked face, that it reminded him of what’s possible. That was really touching. 

DD: That performance was the 30-minute version, which had a lot more going on, more of an arc, with mood shifts and stuff—a space travel-y journey. Perfect for a bunch of priests, you know? And then when we were making the record, we really trimmed the song down and tightened it up. Basically, we took the middle section and put it into the record. 

silent illuminating 

Soundness Of Mind by Liila

SW: In essence, this is a piece about samadhi. It’s kind of like this light is pouring out of you …

DD: … like an exhale … 

SW: Yes, exactly. This song was always at the end of our set when we were performing, this exhaling experience of momentary bliss, which can come in waves while sitting in meditation. 

We were playing a digitized version of a Persian instrument called the santoor on a MIDI keyboard. It’s kind of dancing around, and there’s a synthesizer that sounds like a whale dancing. This song is trying to emulate this levity, this buoyancy and radiance that can come with this illumination—that can come about during a long period of silence. Suddenly you’re sitting and the sun comes through the window and you feel this enormous sense of peace in the middle of sesshin, and then the next moment, it’s like a hell realm, you know? 

DD: And it’s not necessarily silent. My experience of that is that suddenly all of the sounds in my environment are exactly where they should be, and it’s a perfectly harmonized symphony of the air humming through the HVAC system and the birds outside and people clunking around. And it’s all perfect. That’s what this track is alluding to: everything is illuminated. 

SW: It’s not like an aural silence. It’s a silence of the spirit, or the ego.  

The post Zen Music That Sounds Nothing Like ‘Zen’  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Almost five years ago, a video of monk and musician Kanho Yakushiji singing the Heart Sutra went viral. Yakushiji arranged a chorus of voices on top of the scripture, one of the most popular sutras, and when the video of his live performance was uploaded to the Web, millions of people watched, shared, and reposted. 

Like the audience, who clearly felt the aliveness of this Zen Buddhist text that is chanted every day around the world, I was so moved by the soulfulness of this monk. 

Yakushiji serves as deputy director of Kaizenji temple in Imabari, a city in Japan’s Ehime Prefecture. Japan has a strong tradition of danka, or the father-to-son succession of a temple, but Yakushiji initially rebelled against this expectation and instead became a musician. He eventually trained in the Rinzai tradition at Kenninji temple in Kyoto, Japan, and is now the sixteenth generation of his family to care for Kaizenji.      

Though he initially thought about music and Buddhism as separate entities, Yakushiji now views music as an expression of Zen practice. His two identities—a Zen monk and an artist—are no longer separate. He released his fifth album, The Prayer, in September of 2019, and just before the pandemic began, he started a music video project whereby he chants in historic Japanese temples to introduce listeners around the world to Zen and chanting. Now that international travel is restricted, the project has taken on a new meaning. I spoke with Yakushiji about his music, Zen training, and how he brought these passions together.   

When did you realize you had a talent for music? My father also loves music and I became interested in music because of him. He took me to karaoke when I was little, and we used to listen to records together. He liked guitar as a hobby but didn’t play well. I started playing his guitar when I was in junior high school. And I used to chant the Heart Sutra every morning before going to school.

How do you reconcile the tension between tradition and innovation? I believe [that both] keeping the tradition and change are necessary. Arranging the sutra as music means “change.” Not everyone approves, but I believe change is necessary to remain with the times and give a new generation a chance to learn about Buddhism.

Who introduced you to soul music? It was my voice teacher and singer, the late Mr. Dainoshin Watanabe, who taught me to sing with soul and to enjoy music wholeheartedly. Until I met him, attending a voice lesson in Kyoto, I was listening only to rock. When I first heard soul music, I realized that I wanted to be able to sing emotionally like that.

Watanabe taught me to feel the rhythm in my body and sing, so I would sing while keeping my body moving to the rhythm. Since it’s not easy to sing emotionally from the beginning, it helped to first let my body feel the rhythm and be in a neutral state before singing. I learned to grasp the music in new ways, [tuning into] rhythm and breathing speed, instead of simply following the melody. [From then on,] I started to sing with the goal of being one with the music.

When did you go back to train in the monastery? When I was 27 years old, Kissaquo [the band I formed as a student] debuted on a major record label. It was then that we hit the biggest wall. When we were starting out, we worked extremely hard and did everything on our own, but the environment suddenly changed and we had to engage with many people in order to create music. Many people had many opinions about us. I no longer knew what I wanted to convey through my music, what was right, or what I wanted to do. I even started to dislike singing. When I stopped to pause, something drew me to read Buddhist books. 

The decisive moment came following a concert on the island of Kyushu. An old man approached the table where my bandmates and I were signing autographs, and his eyes were filled with tears. “Tonight I heard a song that reminded me of when I was a boy,” the old man said. “Like you, I had wonderful grandparents who helped raise me. I miss them, but your song reminded me of those happy times and I thank you.” I remember, you remember. Suddenly, the space between the past and the future, my paths as a monk and as a musician, duty and desire, weren’t quite so far apart. I realized all is one. It wasn’t until then that I saw how singing and Buddhism may be similar. The interaction inspired me to write my most personal song called “I Am”:

Who am I?
Laugh Laugh
I’m strong
Is that me?
Told at the reunion
“It won’t change”
No, no, not really
You just don’t know

In the mirror, I’m at the end
I have no choice but to live in the present
While telling
The tears that overflowed
I tried my best to laugh

Everyone has a secret
Trick, hurt, hurt
Even if it’s hard to look back
The past hasn’t changed
Just straight to that fate
Don’t take your eyes off 

In the eyes, beyond the darkness that spreads
Project that day
The dreams and memories that were thrown away on the way
Collect
I’m sure I will live there now
Because there should be an answer

I’m here now
my everything
Hesitation
It’s natural that there’s a human being 

Things that change over time
No need to divide
Take all
Live the present now
Only one person
Only one
Only one

I’m “I”

After writing these lyrics, my heart was refreshed. For the first time, I considered becoming a monk and decided I would begin my training. At last, the path had revealed itself. My childhood in the temple had taught me that the sacrifice and hardship of entering the monastery would be considerable, but when the way is illuminated, I knew to follow. I decided to face myself and train as a Buddhist monk in 2010.

I spent two years of my training living a traditional life centered on zazen [seated meditation]. I spent my days cleaning, growing vegetables, doing alms-gathering, and practicing zazen. I struggled for the first three months of the training and did not have any breathing space until I got used to this new way of life in the monastery. 

After about three months, I began to experience sensations and moments of beauty that I had never felt before. Once, when I was outside doing zazen, I saw a spray of water illuminated in the sunlight. The subtle shadow and movement of the water made me suddenly understand time—it was a feeling of movement. The state of enlightenment was still a long way off, but at that moment I could see my heart a little. I realized then how my mind was always buried in something and it prevented me from clearly seeing my mind. I think that by being separated from the things that were always around me and by integrating movement and mind through zazen and samu [mindful physical work] in my training, my mind started to be clear.

How did it feel learning to chant sutras in the monastery? I learned the sutras that are regularly read in Rinzai-shu [Rinzai Zen Buddhism], such as the Heart Sutra, Daihisin Dharani, and Avalokitesvara sutra. About ten to 20 of us at the training dojo used to chant every morning, and the chorus of the many voices brought emotional and calming sensations to me. At that time, I wondered: What if I arranged a sutra chant musically by layering the chorus?

It felt as if my heart was being supported from the bottom. After chanting, I felt like I could face forward, and my mind was renewed. It occurred to me then that if I arranged the sutra with a layered chorus, I should be able to bring about the same deep emotional feeling.

When did you think to unite your music life and Zen life as one life—wearing koromo, rakusu [monastic robes], and chanting sutra? What shifted in you? Initially I thought about music and Buddhism separately. I started to realize the message of the songs I wrote was connected to Buddhism and the two worlds gradually became one. The major turning point was when I made the musical arrangement of the Heart Sutra in 2016. I realized I didn’t have to separate music and Buddhism anymore, and I came to the conclusion that I should simply convey my message in my own way.

In what ways do you continue to appreciate and practice Zen in the traditional expression? Rinzai-Zen is “koan Zen.” I consider my songs to be my expressions or responses to koans. Everything in our everyday lives is a practice and gives us a koan. My expression of those koans? I write and sing. While my current life is not centered in zazen like when I was in training, I’d like to appreciate and be mindful of every aspect of my daily life.

How is your struggle with the identities of either monk or musician now? I’m not stuck with any one identity anymore. I became a monk who happened to like music. I will just be myself and convey my message.

Throughout the pandemic, you have continued to make videos of you singing the traditional chants of Sesonge, Heart Sutra, and Nilakantha. What do these chants mean to you in the time of COVID-19?  I had started this video project before the pandemic. At the time, I never imagined we would be in the situation that we are in today. The pandemic continues. We have lost a lot, and we have also gained a lot. The Sesonge teaches us to nurture our own hearts and minds; the Heart Sutra teaches us to cherish connections; and the Nilakantha Dharani contains the merits of the thousand-armed Kannon [the bodhisattva of compassion]. 

Currently, the pandemic makes it difficult for people to visit Japan, but I hope that these videos make people feel like they have traveled in Japan and help them feel at ease. In the future, I’m planning to collaborate with traditional Japanese performing artists to introduce Japanese culture from various angles.

How did you decide to gather Zen monks from around the world for your Heart Sutra “Telework video” in the midst of COVID-19? I hope that this video will be sent to the whole world as one of the messages from the monks, and that those who see it will feel calm and feel that they are alive now. 

I wanted to share the power of the voice of people and the power of connection with many people.

It was after I met you through Instagram and we had a conversation about the documentary about you. Through that, I was connected to people from various countries, and in the end, I was really happy that about 60 monks participated.

You and Chodo-san [the interviewer’s partner, Sensei Robert Chodo Campbell] even participated! I have never met most of the monks who participated. My wish is that we can meet and sing together. That is a dream for me.

♦

This interview, which was conducted in English and Japanese, has been edited for length and clarity. Thank you to Akira Ozawa for his translation support.

The post Chanting in the Time of COVID-19 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is many things: Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Tibetan spiritual leader, beloved popular culture figure, and now—as of July 6, 2020—record producer. At the age of 85, the Dalai Lama has come out with his debut album, titled Inner World. Fusing music with Buddhist chants, His Holiness uses his resounding voice as an instrument, reciting traditional Tibetan Buddhist prayers and presenting teachings on issues close to his heart. The first track, “One of My Favorite Prayers,” opens with the soothing sounds of a bamboo flute while the Dalai Lama recites a prayer composed by Shantideva, the 8th-century Indian Buddhist philosopher of the historic Nalanda University: “As long as space endures / And as long as living beings remain / Until then may I too remain / To dispel miseries of the world.” But why did one of the world’s foremost spiritual leaders decide to embrace the music industry to disseminate his message of peace?

Inner World is the product of collaboration with musicians Junelle Kunin and Abe Kunin, a husband-wife duo from New Zealand. Several years ago, Junelle had suggested an album of mantras and conversations with the Dalai Lama. His office turned down the idea, but in 2015, during an audience with the Dalai Lama in India, she again pitched the idea, in a letter she handed to one of his assistants. This time, His Holiness accepted.

When asked why he agreed to make the album, the Tibetan spiritual leader told Junelle that music has “the potential to help people in a way that I can’t” and that it has the ability “to transcend our differences. It can return us to our true nature of good-heartedness.”

The album, which took five years to produce, contains eleven tracks. In seven of them the Dalai Lama chants sacred mantras of several important buddhas in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, including that of Manjushri, bodhisattva of wisdom; Menlha, the Tibetan name for the Medicine Buddha; Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion; and Tara, a Buddhist deity and female counterpart to Avalokiteshvara. In a track titled “Compassion,” widely released online last month, His Holiness recites the six-syllable mantra Om Mani Padme Hum, one of the most well- known Tibetan Buddhist prayers. 

What’s striking about Inner World is that it blends musical genre and Buddhist teachings. In the track “Ama-la” [mother] that features Bengali sitar player Anoushka Shankar, daughter of Ravi Shankar, the Dalai Lama states, “the real teacher of compassion in every human being’s life is our mother” and in another track titled “Humanity” he says “…too much emphasis on self-centred attitude and too much emphasis on we and them are the basis of killing, exploitation or injustices.” In the seventh track, “Wisdom,” His Holiness pays homage to Manjushri in Tibetan and chants the mantra of transcendent wisdom in Sanskrit, while a slow guitar weaves a mellow tune alongside saxophone and bass.

The overall soundscape of the album has a slow and sustained tempo, interspersed with flute, guitar, and sitar solos. Though the rich and resonant bass is rife throughout the record, it does not dominate the Dalai Lama’s voice, which comes across clear and crisp. I found Inner World both meditative and inspiring, and think it will charm its way into the consciousness of both Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. According to Rolling Stone, proceeds from the album will go to Social, Emotional, and Ethical (SEE) Learning, an international education program founded by the Dalai Lama and Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and to the Mind and Life Institute, an organization that encourages conversation between contemplative thinkers and scientists.

While the album is a pleasure to listen to, it may seem odd to some that His Holiness is breaking into the world of music. While some Buddhists take precepts that encourage them to abstain from listening to or making non-religious music, the Dalai Lama is, in fact, no stranger to the world of entertainment. Reportedly a fan of The Beastie Boys, who put together a series of Tibetan Freedom Concerts in the 1990s, he has in the last few decades met with a number of prominent musicians, including the late Adam Yauch of The Beastie Boys, Patti Smith, and even Lady Gaga. Since the 1990s, he has also met with many Hollywood film stars, some of whom have used their platforms to support his fight for a free Tibet.

 Yet it is important to remember that His Holiness’s journey to become a global icon—and a living symbol of peace and nonviolence—has involved considerable hardship. The Dalai Lama fled his summer palace, Norbu Lingka in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital city, in early 1959, sometimes walking eighteen hours a day crossing the Himalayan mountains. After 15 days, he and his entourage reached a small village in southern Tibet, from which he crossed into India on a dzo, a cross between a yak and a cow.

“The country was equally wild on each side of it, and uninhabited,” the twenty-four-year-old Dalai Lama wrote in his memoir. “I saw it in a daze, of sickness and weariness, and unhappiness deeper than I can express.”

The Dalai Lama lost his country and everything that he knew. But he never lost his charisma and aura, which has captured the hearts of many around the world. To the Tibetans the Dalai Lama came to symbolize more than ever their spiritual tradition, culture, and identity, which were in danger of being lost forever in their homeland under Chinese occupation.

Without ruminating too much on his own loss and seeing the enormity of the crisis at hand, His Holiness established a government in exile and educational, cultural, and religious institutions to empower a new generation of Tibetans, who now carry on the nation’s rich traditions. In 1960, on the first anniversary of the March 10 National Uprising Day, when Lhasa rose up against Chinese forces, the Dalai Lama stressed the need to take a long-term view of the situation in occupied Tibet. In exile he told his people that the “priority must be resettlement and the continuity of our cultural traditions.”

He has, on several occasions, described himself as “a simple Buddhist monk.” And it’s clear to anyone who hears the Dalai Lama speak or teach—and now, chant—that this spiritual leader has maintained his humility and childlike inquisitiveness despite facing terrible difficulty. (Once, while visiting a nomad, His Holiness asked the nomad to show him how to operate bellows made from a sheepskin. When the Dalai Lama failed to ignite the fire with the bellows, he filled the tent with his laughter.)

To me, it is not surprising that Dalai Lama has come out with this album Inner World. It has been his lifelong mission to promote inner peace and happiness. As we trudge through this dark time of a global pandemic, mass job losses, the dangers of war, and revolutionary actions in the streets, His Holiness’s wisdom and compassion through this recording can bring inner transformation in how we look at ourselves and the world at large.

The post When the Dalai Lama Drops an Album appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

These lines could easily be mistaken for meditation instructions, but they’re lyrics from the opening track of Dan Deacon’s new album, Mystic Familiar, his first solo record since he released the critically acclaimed Gliss Riffer five years ago. Many things have changed for Deacon in that time—not least among them, he started meditating. 

The electronic musician has long straddled the worlds of contemporary classical and independent pop music. With the release of his first studio album, Spiderman of the Rings, in 2007, Deacon became known for his unique live performances, with their innovative uses of audience participation, and his collaborations with the fellow members of the Baltimore-based artist collective Wham City. He went on to release four more studio albums, work with the So Percussion quintet, the Kronos Quartet, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and compose several film scores, including Twixt (2011) by Francis Ford Coppola.

With Mystic Familiar, writes Pitchfork reviewer Andy Beta, Deacon infused his “manic, chewed-power-line indie pop … with a mystical inquiry into the nature of change and the mutability of nature.” This added dimension was born out of Deacon’s daily meditation practice. 

I had the chance to speak with Deacon about his practice over the phone, and he was excited to discuss it as he was nervous about his lack of expertise. Deacon began meditating two years ago, but while he may not know a lot of Sanskrit or Pali terms, he describes his experiences with meditation with an incredible acuity—providing insight into the challenges and rewards of developing a new practice and incorporating it into one’s daily life and creative process.

I listened to your album, just as a fan, and I was struck by what seemed to be a lot of Buddhist themes. I reached out to your publicist on a hunch that you had a meditation practice, which turned out to be true. So I want to start off by asking, did you hope that your practice would come across in this album, or were you surprised to hear that someone listened to it and thought, “This sounds Buddhist”? I would put that in the surprise category, for sure. But I try to remember that everyone listens to music differently, and hears things based upon their past musical and life experience. Two people standing right next to each other listening to the same recording can have completely different reactions to it. I’m always excited when I hear how someone interprets the music differently than I thought one would.

When did you start meditating, and what brought you to it? I started maybe two years ago. I was in a period of artistic doubt, working in isolation, and I was looking to external stimulus for inspiration. And my schedule was in constant flux, traveling to different time zones and performing at weird hours.

I had many false starts with meditating before that, and thought I was incapable of doing it, that it was beyond my mental or physical limits. I wasn’t allowing myself the space to be bad at it. I’d thought that I had to just sit there with my head completely clear. That obviously didn’t happen. The paradigm shift was that it was OK to suck at meditating at first. When I realized I was bad at it, it was almost exciting, because that meant I just had to keep at it, a little bit every day—and not punish myself if I missed a day.

I used that app, Headspace, at first. I found it to be helpful having another voice say, “And if your mind wanders, just gently bring it right on back.” I’d be like, “How did you know? How did you know, Headspace man?” But eventually, I found it a little easier to try it on my own.

Do you have a particular method that you return to now, whether it’s MBSR (mindfulness-based stress reduction), zazen (Zen meditation), or shamatha (calm-abiding)? I’m really ignorant to almost everything you just said. It’s extremely new to me, and it has been a personal experience. When the offer for the interview came in, I went to the Tricycle website, and I had this mass flush of imposter syndrome, like, “I don’t know how to meditate. This is going to be an article exposing me as a fraud.”

Basically, I sit in a chair, take my glasses off, close my eyes, and start trying to focus on my breathing. That’s still remarkably challenging for me. My brain is all over the place, especially if I have coffee.

I don’t know if this counts—I also don’t know if it matters if it counts or not—but I have a really old computer and phone, and I used to get frustrated when they would take forever to load. But now I cherish those moments. I can set it aside, close my eyes, take some deep breaths, and do a scan up and down. Then, whenever I’m ready, I’ll look at the computer or phone, and it’s ready to go. I’ve been trying to steal all these micro-moments while meditating.

I’m extremely interested in learning more about different methods and practices. But I don’t want to purport myself as any sort of expert.

That answer is so surprising to me because the track titled “Sat by a Tree” off the new album seemed like an overt reference to Buddhism, since the Buddha attained enlightenment under a tree. What’s the story behind that song? I was sitting by this tree, and I was trying to meditate on being in its presence. I love to sit in nature and try to call upon it. But I try to remind myself that I’m going to instill human traits onto nature. The trees aren’t just stoic, wise creatures. There’s also going to be sarcastic asshole trees, funny jerk trees, and annoyed trees, as well. Eventually, it was like, “Look, dude. What do you want from me? I’m just a tree.” I was confounded. I was like, “Oh, this is not what I expected.” They’re like, “Well, I didn’t expect you to sit here either. I just work here.”

I realized I wasn’t even relaxing enough to know why I was meditating. I was meditating with an end goal in mind, but I didn’t know what that end goal was. I thought the sheer act of meditating would bring it on, if that makes any sense. Then, I started realizing that it wasn’t a capitalist exchange of meditation for inspiration.

The tree’s sarcasm was like, “What would you even want to do if you had the ability to relax?” If you’re on this quest to try to relax or be calm or make peace with yourself, what does that even mean to you, and why do you want it? What would the result of that be? That hit me like a ton of bricks and became the foundation of that track, which became the foundation of the record—this idea of getting questions from external entities.

The album’s name, Mystic Familiar, is a reference to those external voices. Where did that title come from? I was playing a lot of board games with friends, and one friend who’s a game designer used the term mystic familiar, and I was like, “What is that?” He said, “Like Merlin’s owl or a witch’s cat—some entity that can communicate with a human being in a supernatural capacity.” I got really into this concept and related it to the [creative] blockage I was having. I was trying to write music in my voice, but I felt very stifled and plugged up. But I thought that if I could put what I was trying to write into a character’s voice, into an external entity, it would be easier to articulate.

When I was feeling very low and very depressed, and doubting all my processes, it was very hard to have lyrics like “Become a mountain / become the sky / become the seas.” I was feeling like crap, so how was I supposed to scream these words out into the world and have them be real? But at the same time, it’s what I wanted to say.

Also, while meditating, an image would go through my mind of a cat sitting in the rain in the courtyard outside my studio window. Most of the time, a cat in the rain is like, “Get me out of here.” But I envisioned this cat just sitting very peacefully, emanating that all of time is right here, is right now. I don’t know if I would’ve come to some of these thoughts on my own. I know that’s weird to say, because they did enter into my brain, but for some reason, the idea of the familiar made it a lot easier.

There were two Buddhist musicians who I believe have been influential on you: John Cage and Philip Glass. Were you aware that meditation has been a pretty significant part of their lives? I don’t know if I knew if John Cage was Buddhist. I knew it was an aspect of Philip Glass’s life and approach to music. But like you said, their music—and John Cage’s writing and philosophy in general—was very influential on me.

From a musician’s standpoint, they both have very meditative qualities but in completely different ways. I’m drawn to the music of ’70s American minimalist—that maximalist approach to minimalism, a slowly shifting gradient of sound that you could just close your eyes and let envelop you. That’s what I like the most about making music. Having a loop and tweaking it until it falls into a completely new place, and time sort of stops passing. It becomes another thing, like the air in the room, and you get lost in it.

When I first started getting into John Cage’s music in college, I focused on the textures and the techniques he was using. But after a while, I started thinking more about the spacial relationship of the sound, and it became really meditative for me. I’d been wondering about how and why, but I wouldn’t sit in front of a beautiful lake and ask how or why. Cage’s and Glass’s music got me into just appreciating music and how it colored the air.

What do you think it was about their music that let you stop attacking it with your analytic mind? Probably its sheer beauty.

One of my favorite things to do is go tubing down a river for as long as possible, and see where it takes me and how it’s constantly shifting, every turn different from the next. I go to the same creeks multiple times each year and see the different accumulation of fallen trees and the changes in the water level. There’s a microstructure that, if you pay attention to or open yourself up to, exposes itself. Cage’s and Glass’s music has that same quality, where the macrostructure is beautiful and intriguing, but when you let it fully envelop you, you start hearing all of this nuance that could easily be lost if your mind is elsewhere, or too analytical, or fixated on what’s going to happen next.

I try to approach my own music with that in mind. I want there to be a macrostructure that you can easily latch onto, which is why I write mostly in pop music structures, but I also want you to be able to find all of the various layers, micro fluctuations, and constant gradient changes. That’s what fascinates me the most about minimalism and Cage’s approach to space, sound, and silence.

Yeah, when a piece starts off with a phrase that’s easy to grasp and you can watch it build until it’s so complex and overwhelming that you can’t fully get a handle on it—that can bring you to a spiritual place. Absolutely. I feel like it also can have the exact opposite effect, where it can be really overwhelming at first—especially [Glass’s 1976 opera] Einstein on the Beach, which can be so frantic and jarring—but once you embrace the flow, it can be very, very soothing. And a pattern emerges. The frantic pacing becomes almost like a super slow pulse, rather than a rapid-fire succession of sounds.

You got into meditation practice in between your last album and this one. Meanwhile, you scored several films and performed around the world. At a time when my life was all about my career, something that resonated with me was the phrase, “Zen is good for nothing.” It’s pointless. You end up exactly where you started, but you just do it. I found that very valuable. When you started meditating, did you have a sense that it was inherently non-careerist? Yes. As soon as you said, “meditation is good for nothing,” I was like, “Oh, good, because nothing could really use something going for it right now.” Nothing gets a bad wrap.

I know exactly what you mean. In the music business, you catch a wave, and you ride it as long as you can. That wave eventually is going to break, and if you can swim back out, hopefully you’ll catch another wave that’ll crest. Pursuing every dangling carrot can be exhausting and disheartening. I got into making music because it was my favorite thing to do. What I didn’t realize was how my hobby would change when it became attached to economic consequence and obligations. I’ve had to make an active, conscious effort to remember that, even if I’ve been writing all day for quote-unquote work, I have to embrace the hobby aspect of it.

That’s what this record was, at first. I was doing all these film scores and collaborations, and I cherished any moment I could steal to write music for myself. But as the record started taking form, it shifted from pure hobby into a project, and my relationship with it changed. I had to be conscious of that. I had to start each day meditating on how much I love that this is my job. I still struggle with being a professional artist and someone whose main hobby, source of relaxation, and period of mental self-care, is writing music. But I think knowing that I need to set that intention helps me quite a bit.

That’s why I tried to start each day meditating, and I would interrupt the studio process quite a bit to do it.

What did these breaks in the studio look like? My studio’s in my house, and my partner works during the day, so I’m in the house by myself all day working on this record. Sometimes I wonder, “Have I started working on the record the moment I woke up, because it’s the first thing I think about?” When I’m making coffee or eating breakfast, I wasn’t thinking about eating. I was thinking about how I’m going to go upstairs immediately afterward, and which file I’ll open or what instrument I’ll set up.

If I found myself thinking like, “Can I even envision playing this on a festival stage? What will a reviewer think while they’re listening to it?” Thoughts like these are the spikes in the road to my inspiration. So, I would stop, and I would try to center my thoughts on being present, not worrying about what the sounds will be but what the sounds are. That really helped to get me out of my head and into the studio more.

Whenever I realized that I was lost in a loop or anxiety that was turning my excitement about recording into dreading deadlines, I could hit the pause button on the screaming chatter in my head, or just let the thoughts pass by. Sometimes, I would just push the chair back from the desk and try to meditate without setting any time limits on it.

It also made it easier to be OK with not knowing what to do next. I found it was more exciting to be like, “I don’t know what these choices can be,” and to just allow myself to go with the flow. Otherwise, I was too tense. It was like trying to control the weather. It’s impossible. It can’t be done.

On your previous albums, you already seemed to have an interest in more spiritual questions. The track “When I Was Done Dying,” for example, reminded me of descriptions of bardo, or the state between this life and the next, in Tibetan Buddhism. Where does this interest in death, or what Buddhists would call impermanence, come from? Well, my mother died when I was in high school, and I grappled with that for a while. She had cancer, and it was a rough go. I was raised Catholic, but was no longer identifying with being Catholic at that point in my life. As a kid, growing up Christian or Catholic, when someone dies, people say, “Oh, you’ll see them in heaven.” As I got older, I kept wondering, What would that be? What form would my mother take, and what would she have been up to in the time between? Would it be an infinity of eternities, or would it have been a blink of an eye? I don’t know. I became fixated on that idea in my lyrics. I used to cloak it. My [2009] album Bromst is largely a concept album about someone becoming a ghost and the anxiety of becoming a new entity. But I don’t think anyone would’ve known that Bromst was a concept album. I never stated it when the record came out. It was just for me.

The title for “When I Was Done Dying” revolves around something my younger siblings would say when they would see photographs from before they were born. They would refer to it as when they were dead, using that little kid logic of “If I’m not alive, I’m dead. So before I was born, I was dead.” Everyone would laugh and be like, “You were never dead,” but they’d be like, “Yeah, but I wasn’t born, so I was dead!” That really stuck with me. People tend to have a lot of anxiety about what will happen in the future when we no longer exist on this earth, but I wonder if I went through a period of anxiety before I was born, like, “Oh my God, I’m going to be born. What am I going to do? What is existence going to be like? I don’t know. What if it’s nothing?”

That’s why I don’t see death as much of a negative. It’s impossible for me to understand what my life would’ve been like if my mother hadn’t died, or what her life would’ve been like, or if I wasn’t born, or if she weren’t born. It’s not for me to speculate. When someone you care about leaves your life earlier than they should, especially at a young age, you learn their life isn’t defined by their death.

While thinking about it sometimes brings me great sadness, it’s also utterly inevitable. To feel loss is beautiful and profound. That you can only feel loss for something that truly, truly meant so much to you—it’s so wonderfully lucky to have something that could mean so much in the first place.

Wow, yeah. Cycles, such as the water cycle, are a theme on the new album. Do you have opinions on reincarnation? Is that something you think about? I do. I think about it quite a bit. I don’t know what will happen—obviously, I don’t know. Like I said, I’m a bit out of my depth. I feel like I’ve been brought onto a cooking show, but I only just figured out that you could add spices to make the food kind of tasty.

All your questions were really inspiring for me, and I really appreciate you taking the time to ask me them and being cool about my ignorance to something that means so much to so many people. Hearing all the parallels that you’re finding in my work to existing Buddhist texts—I’m really excited to check them out, because these are clearly thoughts that I’m having, and I’d love to put context to them.

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