A few years ago a friend said to me, just take one of Unmani’s Satsangs and put it on music. A good idea but I knew it would not be as simple as that. Yet this album is the result of two years of songwriting in which I started to merge Unmani’s expression with my music. Unmani is my wife and a well known teacher and writer. In my lyrics I started to combine Unmani’s expression with the expression of visitors and participants of her meetings and retreats, and with my own life experience. I feel inspired by Unmani’s words and have a lot of passion to turn them into music. In return Unmani gets inspired by my music so it really works as a feedback loop. Sometimes music reaches our heart where the spoken word does not. And of course, it is essentially a wonderful way to express myself.
I started recording the album in January in India and it took me the whole of 2017 to finish this album. It covers the different styles of music which have inspired me during my life. I wrote some pieces for classical guitar but I also recorded a blues rock song. Sometimes I had a clear picture of what the song should sound like and other times it had to grow and unfold itself step by step. I hired some musicians who coloured this album in a way that I couldn’t have done on my own. Yet I couldn’t deny the way I actually play the songs in public. That is just me singing and accompanying myself on the guitar. That’s why I completed the album with two ‘Live’ recordings to give you a taster of how I play at the end of Unmani’s meetings and on stage.
I didn’t try to make a spiritual sounding album. There are so many spiritual sounding albums already. And there are more ways to express the truth of what we are than only through mantra’s and ambient music. These are great of course, but not my choice for this album. I liked to use the musical styles that I’ve been playing throughout my life. Above all I returned back to the classical guitar for the album. I love the diversity of the instrument. But I also didn’t deny my roots in Rock and Blues.
It is not a purely a Non-Dual album, whatever Non-Duality is anyway. Or Advaita Vedanta, which is the same to me. The lyrics are about that what I meet in life, that which touches me, and inspires me. These are the things I’ve tried to translate in my songs. I love the focus that Unmani’s expression gives me but I don’t let it limit or box me. There is only one song that I didn’t write during the last two years. And that is also the only song that I didn’t write all by myself. I wrote it with a friend, Marcel Visser, about twenty years ago. The song is called Pull Your Own Strings. I wrote the lyrics when I was going through big shifts in my life. I kept singing it throughout the years, and it is one of the things that has brought me here.