RockOm

Jai on dreams, new directions and his latest album, Thunder Love
By Trevor Harden, trevor@rockom.net

In the world of American yoga/kirtan music, a small handful of prominent names rise to the top, one of which is Grammy-nominated musician Jai Uttal. Thunder Love, Jai's latest release (out March 24th on Nutone Records), marks a turning point in his career on both a professional as well as personal level. The album features Jai not only as a vocalist and interpreter of Sanskrit mantras, but also as an English-speaking songwriter and fuses sounds, elements and genres that are new to his ever-widening musical palette.

RockOm: Your musical/spiritual background and Nutone’s founder Terry McBride seem to be a perfect fit. How did you come to find a home at Nutone Records?

Jai: I was hearing about Terry for a while, but the last three albums have been on Sounds True, a smaller label. I’ve been really happy to not have a record deal with a major label as I’ve had very mixed experiences in the past. My relationship with Sounds True was a one-off, distribution deal and it felt really good to not be tied down to any label – to be totally free, totally independent. I was working on Thunder Love and because there was no label I spent a long, long time on it for a variety of reasons. But somewhere toward the end of the process I started to wonder, “What’s going to happen with this album that I’ve spent so much time making? How am I going to put it out?” Around this time I started to hear about Nutone, Terry and Nettwerk records. My first thought was, “Oh I don’t want to be on a label that has every other kirtan singer in the world on it.” I didn’t want to just be another part of the big soup pot. But I started thinking about it more and communicating with Terry and I saw that he’s a really beautiful guy with really good intentions, as well as a really solid [placement] in the marketplace. He’s very experienced and knows what he’s doing. He heard Thunder Love and really liked it and we said let’s do it – it sounds really fun! So far he seems very attentive, very respectful in a way that many people in the music business aren’t. As I’ve researched, I see this has always been his history, his M.O. – being really respectful of the artist.

RockOm: You’ve gone a fresh direction with this album – moving not away from kirtan, but delving more into Americana, roots, Brazilian, and electronic sounds. What inspired you to go this new direction on Thunder Love?

Jai: If I exclude the Sounds True recordings and look at all my Pagan Love Orchestra recordings, I feel like every album has been a pretty new direction but still rooted in the previous album. But on Thunder Love there are some really new elements for sure – one of them being the Brazilian. About nine years ago I met my wife Nubia and I feel like I married into another culture. She’s been drawing me so much into the Brazilian music and it’s been a great journey. Brazilian music is also so much more varied than most of us here in North America are aware. It’s not just bossa nova and samba and stuff. I have been so immersed in Indian music for so long that getting this fusion of this new world of music has been really inspiring to me musically. I started studying and listening, going on lots of trips to Brazil and I started taking Brazilian guitar lessons.

Then [regarding] the Americana side of Thunder Love… my first real, real musical love was old-timey banjo music when I was a teenager. All these years later I still play and love banjo. I don’t do it professionally, which is probably one of the reasons why I love it so much. It has popped up in a lot of my albums, but on Thunder Love I allowed it to come out more. One of the songs, “Down on My Knees,” is a mixture of an old-timey banjo tune with Brazilian rhythms and Tibetan chanting – how fun is that? And the rock, Indian and psychedelic aspects of my music have been there all along.

About five or six years ago, on one of the trips down to Brazil I was doing some shows with the guy who plays tabla and percussion with me. He was so happy and excited about how the Brazilian percussion can work with the Indian percussion. I tried to bring that out on Thunder Love and I think we can expect many more experiments in that realm from me in the future.

This album is also very different than the others in that there is so much [sung in] English. All of my Pagan Love Orchestra albums have one or two English songs, so certainly I continued over the years to be somewhat involved in that realm of songwriting but part of [doing a full album in English] was the feeling comfortable enough inside my own skin to go into a place that was scary – expressing myself with English words. It’s a whole different level of vulnerability and security that I finally felt able to explore. I pray in Sanskrit but the continual facilities of my mind think in English. I’m always writing stuff in English but have always felt a little too insecure to put it into a song. I negatively compare myself to Bob Dylan, John Lennon and everyone in the world – so I just wanted to take a chance. It was a big step; I don’t know if people are going to like it but I’m very happy with it.

RockOm: The album’s first track, “Bhavani Shankara,” uses a lot of these Brazilian sounds and lyrically it seems to speak of being lost in the divine and also the absence of the divine (“where have you gone?”). Can you share about your inspiration for this song?

Jai: My whole life I’ve had nightmares and very difficult sleeping experiences. I spent many years addicted to sleeping pills and thank goodness I’m not anymore. I used to bemoan it – "poor me, poor me, I can never sleep, I’m always having nightmares." Now I try to use this weird phenomena of strange dreams as a kind of self-exploration. It’s obviously my mind telling me something. I got into some dream therapy – and I don’t want to get into that too much right now – but that helped me explore what these dreams were for me. “Bhavani Shankara," and a couple other songs on the album, come out of that dream exploration and that feeling I’m so familiar with of waking up in the morning and feeling lost, alone, and afraid. But very quickly I look at my life and say, “Well, I’m not alone, there’s no reason to be afraid, everthing’s ok.” There’s a deep eternal dichotomy in life with such beauty, fulfillment and gratitude [alongside] this deep loneliness. I don’t know where it comes from – but I also know that in the tradition from India of bhakti or devotion, where all the chanting comes from, that the overlay of the feeling of separation and the feeling of oneness is very much is embraced. The times when you feel alone and stuck in longing are revered as much as the times you feel ecstatic. All of that goes into that song. I’m telling in English about what I’m feeling in my dreams and then offering it all to the Spirit in the Sanskrit prayer part. And also Shankara is called the Lord of Dreams.

RockOm: One of the other songs I wanted to ask you about, since so much of what you do is based on Indian spirituality, is the track “Adonai” (the Hebrew word for God). It sounds like something that could have come right out of the Christian and Jewish Psalms. Can you tell us what led you to write a song from that perspective?

Jai: I guess it was 14 years ago or so that I went on my first trip to Israel to perform. I am Jewish, my family was Jewish and I feel Jewish, although I don’t do many Jewish practices. [While in Israel,] I felt suddenly so connected to this ancient tribe and I composed this song “Shalom” and put it on the album Mondo Rama. I guess I’m a Hin-Jew [laughs]. I don’t feel that connection or participation in Jewish spiritual practices day to day, but I still feel part of it. So the song “Adonai” also came out of one of these dream therapy sessions where I was remembering some dreams based in Nazi Germany – that’s how this song started. But “Adonai,” it’s a beautiful word and [could be considered] just like a kirtan; all kirtan is is repeating the names of God.

By the way, one day before Hanukkah my three-year old boy was in the backseat of the car saying, “Adonai, Adonai, Adonai, Adonai…” It looked like he was in bliss and I asked him what he was doing. He said he was praying to Adonai and I said, “what are you praying for?” He said, “A police car!” [laughs] So that’s what we got him for Hanukkah and he said that Adonai had gotten it for him.

RockOm: Will you be hitting the road in support of the new album?

Jai: I hope so; I always seem to be hitting the road anyway. I want to figure out how to make a concert that is partially kirtan - because firstly I just love kirtan and secondly I love the way it brings the audience in, suddenly there’s no audience - but also present some of the songs from Thunder Love, which is more of an audience/performer type of thing. That’s the next challenge.

The kirtan thing is so amazing, going around the world, around the country. In doing kirtan the concert presentation is very simple – it’s usually just me and a tabla player. Just seeing how the group energy of the kirtan explodes – it’s so great and yet it’s not the only thing I do musically, of course. The album [now] gives me a chance to really explore some other musical sounds. So we’ll see how the gigs in the next few years evolve!

www.jaiuttal.com

http://www.myspace.com/jaiuttal

Tags: Indian, Jai Uttal, Kirtan, music, spirituality, Yoga

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