I never considered myself a songwriter. Growing up with an older brother four years ahead of me, I got used to things being passed down. Music, records, attitudes. I was always a few steps behind, absorbing what he’d already figured out. I didn’t say much. I just watched and listened.

I picked up the bass guitar at fifteen. My brother had already started playing guitar by that point, so naturally I followed, just a few steps behind as always. The bass suited me. Bass players are sidemen.. that's just the nature of the instrument. There are exceptions, of course, but historically the bassist is the support system, not the front person. That suited me fine. I was also the sickly one in the family. Asthma kept me out of school for weeks at a time, in and out of hospital. I grew up seeing myself as background. Not the main event.

When I joined my first band, that identity got reinforced. The Sea Beggars (which evolved through personnel shakeups into The Datsons, The Datsons Four—I have a funny anecdote about that name—and then, finally The High Dials) had songwriters with strong personalities. They were a little older than me, believed in themselves, and wanted the spotlight. I just accepted my role. I was the bass player. That was enough.

But then I picked up the sitar.

As I mentioned in previous essays, I came back from India in February 1997 with a student model sitar in a cardboard box and no idea what I was doing. I was teaching myself, slowly chipping away at it with a cassette and a “sitar for dummies” book. Somewhere along the way, something started to happen. The sitar is a melodic instrument. There’s no harmony, just melody after melody. I started storing these melodic ideas in my head, little phrases and motifs I’d pick up from listening and playing along.

Around that time I discovered Ananda Shankar. He was Ravi Shankar’s nephew, and in the seventies he was doing something nobody else was doing: groovy (and at times bombastic) psychedelic sitar music layered with synthesizers. It was wild and strange and completely original. It opened my mind to what the sitar could be outside of classical music. And those melodic ideas in my head started taking shape.

Around 2001, I wrote my first song. It was called 'Things Are Getting Better.' I wrote it completely self-taught, just chipping away on the sitar, listening to cassettes, no formal training whatsoever. The influences were worn firmly on my sleeve: the Nazz's 'Open My Eyes,' a riff I probably nicked from the Ravi Shankar cassette my aunt gave me, and Ananda Shankar's 'Streets of Calcutta.' I had no idea how to approach lyrics, so it remained an instrumental. Even coming up with a title felt like a leap—I ended up nicking it from the Small Faces' 'Things Are Going to Get Better.' I believed in it enough to record it, but not enough to bring it to Trevor, The Datsons' principal songwriter. That felt like too big a leap for someone who still saw himself as the bass player. Robbie, who happens to be one of my oldest and dearest friends, offered to help me record a demo on his 4-track cassette. I have no idea where that demo is now. I remember the thrill of hearing all these ideas I had swimming in my head come to life. Even then, even as someone who'd never seen himself as a songwriter, I believed in that song.

After “Things Are Getting Better,” I hit a wall. I’d maxed out what I could do with the sitar on my own. No teacher, no formal training, just three years of self-teaching and and poor technique. I felt genuinely limited. Like I’d gone as far as I could go without someone showing me the way forward.

Then, sometime around 2001, I was working at a call center. Just another day, just another shift. I noticed a guy across the room. I didn’t know him. But he had a sitar case. I couldn’t believe it. In all the years I’d been playing, I had never met another person who played sitar. Not one. And here was this guy, at a call center in Montreal, with a sitar case sitting next to his desk.

I had to talk to him. His name was Stephen Venkatarangam (AKA The Venk/Black Smoke). He was also Indian, and like me had just started playing sitar. Two Indian guys working at a call center with sitars. You couldn’t make it up. We started talking and he mentioned he’d just started taking lessons from a German guy named Uwe Neumann. Stephen had recently moved to Montreal from Saint John, New Brunswick and would eventually go on to become one of the original members of Elephant Stone.

A German sitar teacher in Montreal? I didn’t even know such a thing existed. Apparently, Uwe had just moved here after completing his master’s in music in India.

That conversation changed everything. I knew immediately that I needed to find this teacher. I needed to go deeper. The wall I’d hit wasn’t the end. It was just the beginning…

After that night at the Jailhouse being witness to BJM, I went all in on mod. Through Phil, Sophie, and Mimi, I got pulled into the Montreal garage scene. I met the Kingpins, the Planet Smashers, all the players hanging around Stomp Records. But more than the bands, it was the culture that grabbed me. I discovered Quadrophenia and this film became my world (much like Dazed and Confused did during my adolescence). The clothes, the attitude, the searching.

Around the same time, I started going to DJ nights. The Montreal Mirror’s Rupert Bottenberg started a semi-regular night called “Snap!” at Petit Campus on Prince Arthur. Everyone danced to northern soul, rare groove, and all things mod.

There were many people on scene but no one could match the enthusiasm and eccentricity of The Kingpins’ Bobby Beaton. After a show one night, I went back to his place. Bobby was in garage legends The Gruesomes and a total music encyclopedia. He gave me a crash course that night. We talked about the 60s, garage rock, freakbeat… And then he started handing me books. A book on the The Jam. A book on The Kinks. A book on The Who. He was showing me the roots, the history, the DNA of what we were all trying to do.

And that knowledge, that context, that's what I carried with me into everything that came after. Including the night we finally brought the sitar on stage.

It was at the Jailhouse Rock Cafe again. The Datsons were playing, and we decided this was the moment I was going to bring the sitar on stage. I was in my three-piece suit, fully committed to all things mod, and I had this instrument I’d been teaching myself for three years. It felt like the moment to bring those two worlds together.

If memory serves, the song had a long droney outro. I figured the sitar could create this trippy, hypnotic thing. So I put down my bass, opened the case, and sat down cross-legged on the plywood stage in my suit. A hush fell across the crowd. The sitar had arrived.

I plugged it in. We’d tested it at rehearsal using an acoustic guitar pickup, and it worked (relatively) fine. But here, going through the PA system, I started strumming and nothing happened. Dead silence. It was the strings… sitar strings were not made for acoustic guitar pickups. So there I am, sitting on stage in my suit, strumming away and slowly panicking.

I’m looking around, not knowing what to do. Bobby Beaton shushes everyone, grabs a microphone and holds it up to the sitar and a faint twang was heard through the PA. Everyone cheered. And just like that, I became the sitar guy.

After coming back from India, my musical taste started evolving. I’d always loved the Kinks, but working in Future Shop’s music department, I started looking backwards more deliberately. That’s when I discovered the Jam through their cover of “David Watts.” Something about that song cracked me open. I got deep into the Jam, which reignited my love for the Who, and from there I started discovering the Small Faces. I was becoming fascinated by mod subculture, the clothes, the attitude, the music. It felt like another world I wanted to be part of.

That's when I found it. In the new releases section sat a CD I didn't recognize. The artwork stopped me: a black and white photo of a guy holding a gun. Nice packaging. I picked it up. It was “Strung Out in Heaven” by the Brian Jonestown Massacre. I flipped it over and looked at the liner notes. It said: “Anton Alfred Newcombe. 1967 - 1997.” I remember thinking, wait, the main guy in this band is dead and they’re still going? I was fascinated. I put it on and I was immediately drawn in.

As it turned out, the Brian Jonestown Massacre were playing Montreal. October 7th, 1998. The Jailhouse Rock Cafe, $7 at the door.

My band, the Datsons, got on the bill that night, first of three. We were pretty new, still finding our legs. We'd put out our debut in January '98, a fairly straight up mid-nineties indie pop record, but we were already shifting. The sixties influence was creeping in, the Motown records were piling up, and we'd started wearing (ill-fitting) suits. We were a three piece pseudo-mod band still trying to figure out who we were. But something was starting to take shape.

There were seventeen people at that show. We played our set, another band played, and then the Brian Jonestown Massacre took the stage. I had never seen anything like it. There was a guy centre stage with huge mutton chops playing tambourine. Two other people wearing sunglasses. And the singer (Anton, I learned, was not dead) had his back to the crowd, facing the back wall of the venue, while the spotlight was on the tambourine player. I remember standing there thinking, this is the weirdest and the most rock and roll thing I have ever seen in my life.

After the show, one of the guys, who I later found out was Dean, came up and asked where he could score some cocaine. I was a twenty year old Indian kid from the suburbs. I had absolutely no idea. So that conversation ended pretty quickly. I remember feeling pretty intimidated by the whole thing.

But something special happened that night that had nothing to do with the band itself. There were three people in that room of seventeen who would end up changing the course of my life. Flipped Out Phil, Sophie Francoise Faithfull, and Mimi le Twisteuse. They were plugged into the mod/freakbeat/garage scene in Montreal. Flipped Out Phil and Mimi had their own radio shows. They were excited to discover these young kids who were into mod, and because of that chance encounter, everything shifted.

From that night forward, I went deep. Over the next three or four years, I became a full on mod. DJ nights, mod soul nights, northern soul. Phil and crew would make us mixtapes and bring us out to loft parties that were straight out of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. We threw multiple Mod all nighters in Montreal (or MODtreal). I even bought a 1976 Lambretta/Servetta Li150. I never really got it running, but that wasn’t really the point. It was a totemic move, a declaration of intent.

Kirsty, to put it mildly, was thrown. I was never really one to peacock or strut around, and suddenly here I was in suits and badges and a series of increasingly questionable haircuts. She still references my Spock haircut to this day. I can’t say she was wrong.

I started feeling, for the first time, like I genuinely belonged somewhere. After years of floating between worlds, never quite Indian enough, never quite Canadian enough, here was a tribe that claimed me. Though if I’m being honest, even then I never fully felt like one of them. Chronic imposter syndrome. Some things never change.

I couldn’t have known it then, standing in that room of seventeen people, slightly intimidated and unable to score cocaine for anyone, but that night set everything in motion. The next time I would cross paths with the Brian Jonestown Massacre would be five years later at the Wilderbeat Weekender in August, 2003. By then, my band had become the High Dials and the situation would be very, very different.

I came back from my family trip to India in February 1997 carrying a student model sitar in a cardboard box, a Ravi Shankar cassette my aunt gave to me, and a “Teach Yourself Sitar” instruction booklet. I also carried something less tangible: a feeling that part of me had finally woken up. But being back in Canada, that feeling didn’t have anywhere to go.

As I mentioned in my last article, I’ve had a hard time feeling like I belong anywhere. Not Indian enough, not Canadian enough, not Quebecois enough. It’s a chronic thing, I think, being the son of immigrants. You float between worlds and none of them fully claim you. India had started to fill a void I didn’t know I had, but now I was home, and I had this instrument I barely knew how to hold and no one to teach me how to play it.

This was 1997. There was no YouTube and a nascent internet. I didn’t know a single person who could play sitar. I had the cassette and the sitar for dummies booklet. It gave me names of the strings and what to tune them to, and that was about it. So I turned to Pt. Ravi Shankar for guidance. His Sa (main key) was in D (or close to that) and I just started to listen and play along picking up out motifs here and there. I developed my own (poor) technique, doing only downstrokes, resting the sitar on the floor instead of on my foot. I felt like an island, slowly chipping away at this thing with no map and no guide.

Growing up, I never saw myself in the bands I loved. It was mostly all white guys. That was just the reality of rock music as I knew it. The first time that changed was Soundgarden. Kim Thayil was Indian and a badass. Something shifted in me. It was like, oh, someone who looks like me can do this too and not just be an engineer/lawyer/doctor.

That September, Cornershop released “When I Was Born for the 7th Time,” and it changed everything. I remember putting it on and being floored by the opening track. The harmonium intro of “Sleep on the Left Side” made sense. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Here was a rock album that opened with something so specifically tied to the world I come from.

And it just kept going. “Brimful of Asha” was Velvet Underground-y pop, infectious and joyful. But deeper into the record, it started going somwhere else entirely. “When the Light Appears Boy” featured Allen Ginsberg reading a poem over field recordings from Punjab. And then the album closes with a cover of the Beatles “Norwegian Wood,” sung entirely in Punjabi. I remember hearing that and thinking, what is this? It was like pop colonialism folding back on itself.

I played the album for my parents. Up until that point, the music I’d been listening to was the Pixies, Teenage Fanclub, Nirvana, Urge Overkill (hello 90s!). Nothing they could really connect with or stand. But when they heard this, something shifted. I think they were proud. Maybe they saw some hope in me, in who I might become.

And then there was “We’re in Yr Corner,” which featured Tjinder singing in Punjabi over sitar and tanpura. That sitar part buried itself in my brain. Years later, it would eventually find its way, subconsciously, into the ending of Elephant Stone’s “Don’t You Know.” But at the time, I didn’t know any of that was coming. I was just a kid sitting alone with a sitar and cassette, and this album was telling me something I desperately needed to hear.

In November 1996, Kirsty (my then girlfriend, now wife) and I started dating. I was completely smitten. By any reasonable measure, I was a 19-year old in the grip of new love, and the world felt smaller and more urgent because of it.

My parents had other plans. They’d been organizing a trip to India for February. My cousin Dipple was getting married in Jalandhar, Punjab, and my whole maternal side of the family would be there. I was supposed to go. I was in my second year at CEGEP (college in Quebec), and the plan was to take the entire Winter semester off. In retrospect, it was bold of my parents to let me do that. But at that time, all I could think about was Kirsty. I didn’t want to leave.

I remember talking to my brother Anurag about it. He’s four years old than me, and he kept pushing back on my hesitation.

“You have to go,” he insisted. “This is going to be a life changing experience.”

I didn’t believe him. I was too lost in love to see what he saw.

But he was right.

When I arrived in India, I felt the weight of a culture I’d only ever heard about through my parents’ stories or saw in Bollywood films. Growing up in Canada, I’d never been quite sure who I was. Was I Indian? Canadian? Quebecois? The question has always hung there, unresolved… I never felt like I really belonged anywhere.

Stepping off that plane in Delhi, I knew I definitely was not Indian. They called me a “farangi.” A foreigner. It was disorienting. But then something shifted. As I spent time with my family, meeting cousins and aunts and uncles I’d only known as distant (and heavily delayed) voices on the phone, something inside me began to settle. There was a void I didn’t even know I had, and slowly, it was being filled. Being around them, immersed in the language and the warmth of my family and heritage, I started to feel complete in a way I never had before. Part of me that had always been missing was finally coming home.

Before the trip, I’d decided I wanted to buy an instrument. I played bass in a band back in Montreal, but something about India made me want to explore beyond that. The sitar felt right… an instrument that belonged to this part of my identity I was just beginning to reclaim. My brother wanted to pick up a pair of tablas. So, one afternoon, my cousin Poppy (real name Sargam, but everyone has “pet” names in India) and I headed to a music shop we found in the Yellow Pages, Bhatia Musicals. My memory’s kind of fuzzy, but I recall walking in and Poppy immediately taking charge. She was about a year older than me, twenty to my nineteen, and she had a confidence I didn’t possess. She leaned into it with the shopkeeper, putting on this superior attitude like she knew exactly what we were doing.

“No, no, no,” she’d say as we looked around. “We should get this. Pundit Ji said we shouldn’t pay more than that.”

Not sure what Pundit Ji she was speaking of and I’m pretty sure the shopkeeper wasn’t buying it. But in the end, I walked out with a student model sitar in a cardboard box. It wasn’t fancy, but it was mine.

Back at my cousin’s place that afternoon, I remember the moment my aunt Rekha saw the sitar. She was my mom’s younger sister, with a masters degree in Hindustani classical vocal, and when she looked at what I’d bought, her whole face lit up. She’d known me my whole life; she and my uncle and cousins Poppy and Puneet had lived in Cuba for years before , visiting us often in Canada. We were close. But this moment felt different. There was something in the way she looked at me, something encouraging and almost reverential. She saw something in me, I think. Maybe she saw the same hunger I was beginning to feel. She handed me a cassette.

“Listen to this,” she said.

It was Ravi Shankar.

I remember how that moment felt: heavy, significant, like she was passing something down to me. Like maybe she was my guardian angel, showing me the way forward. I took the cassette back to Canada with me, and it would become the soundtrack to everything that followed.

I bought my first sitar on a family trip to India in 1997. I didn't plan it, I just did it. I had no idea then that this instrument would eventually cost me a band, define another one, and become the thing I'd spend years trying to escape.

After almost 10 years playing in The High Dials (through all our many monikers) I began to grow tired of being the sideman and started to crave something more. What that "more" was, I couldn't fully articulate at the time. I was young, and while I had a reputation as the nice guy, I also carried a lot of bravado and ego beneath the surface.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, and it's a bit of a cliché, but I saw myself as the George Harrison of the band. We never came close to that level of success, but artistically and philosophically I was searching for something. I had begun taking sitar lessons in 2000 with Uwe Neumann, a brilliant German sitarist who had studied in India for 10 years before settling in Montreal with the Québécoise wife he'd met there. I learned enormously from those weekly lessons. I think that new knowledge made me hunger for something beyond the ultimately unsatisfying life of a struggling indie rock musician. I recall having a bit of an identity crisis around 2006. All the touring had made me feel numb. I didn't believe I was truly following my purpose.

So, long story short, I left the band in September 2006 convinced that I was done with rock'n'roll for good. My plan was to focus solely on the sitar, creating psychedelic instrumentals somewhere in the spirit of Ananda Shankar. No band, no sideman role, no compromise. Just me and the instrument I'd been getting to know. Needless to say, that's not exactly how it went. That idea slowly evolved into songs, the songs needed a band, and the band became Elephant Stone.

The first Elephant Stone album was, in many ways, an experiment in contradiction. The sitar was deeply present, woven into certain songs with real intention…. but sitting right alongside it were straight-up pop songs in the vein of Teenage Fanclub that had nothing to do with India, or psychedelia, or anything I'd left The High Dials to pursue. I was still learning to be a songwriter, still figuring out what Elephant Stone actually was. I was incorporating the sitar as much as I could, but the truth is the two sides of the record didn't fully reconcile with each other… and, honestly, neither had I.

Looking back, I think that tension was real but also generative. I wasn't a novice (I'd spent a decade in a band) but I was starting over in a different way, trying to find the place where the sitar and the song could coexist naturally rather than just share space. That synthesis would take years to arrive. In the meantime, the audience started forming their own opinions about what we were.

People would come up to me afterward, eyes lit up, and the first thing out of their mouths was almost always about the sitar. “The sitar was amazing.” “I’ve never seen a sitar live before.” “You’re the sitar guy.” At first, I loved it. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, it started to chafe.

Because, in my mind, Elephant Stone was so much more than that. I saw myself as a songwriter with something to say, and saying it meant digging into the dark corners of my own life, mining sorrow and sadness in a way I never had before. Writing songs, real songs, meant getting honest with myself in ways that felt uncomfortable and necessary at the same time.

None of that seemed to register. To a certain kind of listener, we were simply the sitar band. I started to resent that. Not the audience… but the reduction.

It didn’t happen all at once. The resentment built gradually, show by show, comment by comment. So I did something that, looking back, seems almost absurd: I started pulling back. Playing less sitar live. Downplaying it in interviews. As if by hiding the thing that made us distinctive, I could force people to hear the rest. I wanted the songs to stand on their own merits, without the “exotic” shimmer of the sitar doing the heavy lifting. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was essentially punishing the audience for paying attention. Ultimately, punishing myself in the process.

By 2017, I was burned out and restless in a way that felt familiar. Another identity crisis, a decade on. The band felt stalled. My relationship with the music felt stalled. I channeled that energy into two side projects that couldn’t have been more different from each other, or from Elephant Stone. Acid House Ragas was a sitar-driven acid house experiment, a way of exploring the instrument in a completely different context. MIEN was something else entirely: electronic, krautrock-influenced, about as far from Elephant Stone (at the time) as I could get. Both were detours, but necessary ones. (I’ll write more about each in future posts.)

The funny thing about MIEN was that it put me back in a role I hadn't occupied in years; a piece of the puzzle rather than the whole thing. After years of being the sole engine behind Elephant Stone, I was a support musician again. Strangely, that was exactly what I needed. The pressure of being everything to one project had been quietly crushing me. Sharing the load reminded me that collaboration has its own kind of freedom.

What those detours gave me, unexpectedly, was clarity. Stepping away from Elephant Stone forced me to see it from the outside for the first time. I began to understand what the band actually was, what our strengths were, and what made us distinct. And somewhere in that process, stripped of the band context, playing sitar again just for the pleasure of it, I started to remember why I’d picked it up in the first place. Not to be different. Not to stand out. But because something in that sound — the sustain, the resonance, the way a single note can bend toward something that feels ancient and immediate at the same time, had spoken to me since the moment I first brought it home from India.

The reconciliation didn’t happen overnight. Gradually, I stopped thinking of the sitar as a burden or a brand and started hearing it again as a voice. My voice. The irony, of course, is that I left a band in 2006 specifically to follow that voice… and then spent the better part of a decade trying to silence it.

As I mentioned in my first post, I’m always a bit lost after I finish recording an album. I just finished our new album ASHA and right on cue, here we are. I’ve been doing this with Elephant Stone for the past seventeen years or so, and I just know it’s coming every time. Doesn’t matter. Hits anyway.

Here’s the thing: you spend basically a year (sometimes longer, if you count all the writing that happens before you even hit record) with this thing living in the back of your mind at all hours. Every waking moment, some part of your brain is turning it over. A melody you haven’t quite cracked. A lyric that isn’t there yet. The mix on the second verse. And then one day it’s done. And that part of your brain that’s been quietly running in the background for twelve months just... goes quiet. There’s nothing there to fill the void.

It’s different every album. It’s also exactly the same.

Some years I finish a record convinced it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever made. I’m on top of the world for about two weeks. Then one morning I wake up and I’m absolutely certain it’s horrible. That particular swing is its own special kind of hell.

Other times I just throw myself straight into release prep; all the organizing, the logistics, the hundred little things that need to happen before an album can actually exist in the world. That helps. It’s something to do with my hands, at least. But those things take time, and there’s a lot of waiting involved, and waiting is not my strong suit.

I’m lucky that I have a day job. It keeps me occupied. Keeps me off the ledge, more or less.

Sometimes, I do something completely left-field. During COVID, I built a fence. I mean that literally. I went outside and I built a fence. Sometimes you just need something physical and finite. Something with a clear beginning and end, unlike a record, which never really feels finished so much as abandoned.

The most interesting version of this happened after Back Into The Dream. I was already in that restless in-between place, and my business manager Oko mentioned that one of his artists named Goldie was looking for collaborators. So I started working with her remotely; demoed a song, got really into it as a producer. The song turned out well. But I had my day job, my family, the release to plan; I couldn’t give the project what it needed. It fizzled. She’s actually huge now, and it’s very much not because of me.

But that’s kind of the point. In that post-album window, I was searching for something. Anything to redirect the energy, fill the silence, keep the engine running. Sometimes it’s a song. Sometimes it’s a fence. Sometimes it’s a collaboration that goes nowhere and a career you watch from a distance. Right now I’ve been focusing on sitar, tabla, and learning Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song.”

I guess that’s what I’ve learned: the slump is coming whether you’re ready for it or not. You can name it, you can see it arriving from a mile away, and it still hits. Every time. Album after album.

Album postpartum. That’s really the only way to put it.

There’s a certain kind of education you only get from touring in your twenties. Not the kind that comes with a degree or a career path, but the kind that comes from sleeping on strangers’ floors, spliting $17.13 at the door five ways, and figuring out how to keep a van moving across a continent on pure stubbornness and youthful optimism.

For almost ten years, I toured across Canada and the US in The High Dials. We’d load up our blue Dodge Ram Bell Canada van (christened Bernadette, after the Four Tops song) and just go. Every time we’d pile in, someone (usually, me) would start singing “Bernadette!” It became a ritual.

One particular tour from 2005 stands out. The plan was ambitious even by our standards: a full cross-Canada run to Vancouver, then down the coast to Los Angeles, where our drummer Robb Surridge would fly home to Montreal for his wedding The rest of us woud dead-head home from LA to Montreal. Somehow, in our minds, this made complete sense.

We broke down in Thunder Bay then hours later in Sault Ste. Marie before we’d even made it out of Ontario.

It was a long weekend. The garages were all closed. We were stranded for three days at a hotel near a smokestack that reminded me of Sauron’s eye. It quite literally felt like Mordor. We had to cancel a bunch of shows and watched our tour calendar shrink. When Bernadette was finally fixed, we looked at the map and decided we could still make it. So, we kept going.

We almost made it to Calgary before the muffler started giving out. Seven in the morning, driving through the night, we pulled into a place called Mr. Muffler, which felt cosmically appropriate, given that we’d already visited a Mr. Transmission in both Tbay and the Sault. We parked and waited for it to open.

I was starving. There was nothing around… just empty parking lots, and across the street, a Holiday Inn with a sign on the window: Free Breakfast.

I turned to Robb. “Come with me. Just follow my lead.”

We walked in, said good morning to the receptionist, and proceeded straight to the dining room. We ate. Went back to the van. I remember thinking: I can’t believe that worked! We had no money. There was nowhere else to eat. And it had just…. worked. I felt like I’d discovered some fundamental law of the universe.

We made it to our show in Vancouver and then toured our way down to LA where Robb flew home. It was just 4 of us left with a van and about 4000km between us and Montreal. We left on a Monday afternoon. We’d make it home Thursday. Two drivers rotating, no stops, just road.

I learned many things on this long trip home about myself and survival. One of them was that if you paid for gas at the pump, they didn’t check your credit card limit. My card was maxed out. The tank kept getting filled. We had the fuel situation handled.

By Denver, I’d conviced myself we were almost home. It felt like we’d been going uphill the whole way and Denver was the peak. It was all downhill to Montreal from there. This is the kind of math your brain does when you haven’t slept in two days and have no other options.

We were somewhere in the middle of the country one early morning when the hunger hit again. I spotted a Ramada Inn just off the highway with a sign: Free Breakfast.

“I got an idea,” I told the guys. “Just follow me.”

The parking lot was nearly empty… two cars, maybe three. Before we went in, I looked at the room numbers. “If anyone asks,” I said, “we’re in room 113.”

Nobody was at the desk. We made a beeline for the dining room, sat down, and started eating.

Then Eric Dougherty, our keyboard player, said he had to use the bathroom. I stopped him. “Room 113. If anyone asks for your key card, you forgot it in the room .” He nodded and went.

He came back looking rattled. He’d run into the receptionist. He recited the script perfectly and the guy just said okay.

Just then the bearded, burly, spectacled receptionist came into the dining room.

“Good morning, gentlemen.” He looked us over. We looked pretty rough… two, maybe three days without real sleep. “Which room are y’all in?” Not sure if he had a drawl… but I remember it that way.

“One thirteen,” we all said in unison.

“Great. Could I just see your room keys?”

“Forgot mine in the room.”

“Mine too.”

“Same here.”

“Uh…. Same?”

He looked at us for a moment. Then: “Okay. Thank you.” And left.

We kept eating… perhaps a little faster than before.

He came back a minute later.

“I’ve done called the police. They’re gonna be here in two minutes. You better not be.”

With that, we got up and headed for the exit. Robbie was still eating his cereal on the way out. We piled into Bernadette in silence. Trevor, our singer, stared out the window for a long moment. "I feel dirty," he said. Nobody disagreed.

Fool me once.

When subscriber Jim McDonald commented on one of my recent posts, he called “A Silent Moment” a masterpiece of psychedelic rock. It meant a lot to hear that, especially because writing and recording the song was genuinely a watershed moment for me as a musician.

The origin story starts with discovering Taken By Trees, a solo project by Victoria Bergman. She was the lead singer of The Concretes, and she’s the voice on Peter Bjorn and John’s huge hit “Young Folks.”

I came across her album “East of Eden,” where she traveled to Pakistan to record, working with local musicians as she was deeply inspired by the qawwali legend Nusrate Fateh Ali Khan; she created something that beautifully fused Eastern and Western music.

I was completely enamored by what she’d done, and when I started writing “A Silent Moment” around 2011, I knew that fusion was exactly what I wanted to explore with this song and with Elephant Stone’s direction moving forward.

My home demo (below), titled "My Silent Days," already had a pretty clear sonic vision: harmonium, my recently purchased dilruba, tabla, and sitar, with Kirsty on the higher harmony. It has a very Brian Jonestown Massacre vibe to it… which, honestly, felt like exactly the right starting point.

But then I thought maybe a santoor (an Indian hammered dulcimer) would work better rather than the sitar during the break.

I brought the idea to Shawn Mativetsky, a frequent collaborator on tabla, and asked if he knew of a vocalist who could handle that section. After having some doubts, I decided a female vocalist would work better. We talked about the range and feel, and Shawn suggested that actually a male voice would work better. When I asked him who he considered the best male vocalist he knew, he said without hesitation: Pundit Vinay Bhide, a Hindustani classical vocalist from Ottawa.

I sent Pundit ji an email with the song and told him what is was about: those quiet moments when you’re meditating or reflecting, when you’re thinking about your past, your present, your future, trying to understand who you are and why you’re here. He agreed to come in and vocalize it using shuddha — wordless melodic singing — in the raga we’d chosen. He came to Brealglass Studios in Montreal with his son, and honestly, he brought this wisdom about music and life that I’ll never forget (I think one of his quotes were “you’ll never make a living off of music!” but I digress). When he performed it, I think he did it in one take. And I remember sitting there at the end of it, just knowing this was something very, very special. Something I couldn’t have imagined on my own.

Years later, we played in Brno, Czech Republic, our first time in Czechia. Some fans drove all the way from Prague to see us. We didn’t end up playing “A Silent Moment” that night— we were opening and didn't have time — and I remember the husband coming up to me after, saying his wife was disappointed because it was her favorite song. She didn't speak English, so she couldn't tell me the title, but when I asked her to describe it, she just started singing the melody.

After the show, I sat with her at the merch table and we sang “A Silent Moment” together. And she just started to cry. In that moment, I realized something I think every musician hopes for: this song had become something meaningful to people. It wasn’t just mine anymore. And that’s really all you can ask for— that your music actually means something to someone.

om shanti om. rishi.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been remixing Elephant Stone’s third LP, The Three Poisons. I was never fully satisfied with the original. It always felt muddy, lacking low-end, and I could never figure out if the problem was in the recording, the mix, or the mastering.

When I pulled up the original sessions at Sacred Sounds, I was blown away at how clear and powerful everything sounded. My theory is that the SSL we mixed on wasn’t patched properly, but who knows.

Either way, remixing this record has been a labour of love. I’ve been in talks with Little Cloud Records about releasing the new mix on vinyl. Until then, here’s a brand new mix of Between The Lines, with an extended outro that sounded too good to cut. Full download of the new mix below.

om shanti om. rishi.

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At Christian’s funeral in Bromont, Quebec, I stood on the small stage with my acoustic guitar, a music stand, and three songs. Every time I tried to say something about him or to offer some kind of tribute, I’d get choked up. So I just sang.

The first song was “Between The Lines.” It was Christian’s favorite of ours. He’d ask us to play it at shows, and somehowe we never did… I still don’t know why. But on one of his birthdays, when my family and I spent the weekend at his and Geneviève’s place in Bromont, I gave him what I could: an acoustic performance around the campire that evening. He was giddy like a little kid. It was sweet. There was a lot of love there.

The second was a new song “Parallel and Contrary Motion” I hadn’t planned to perfom. I mentioned it to Geneviève while we were discussing the set; I told her Christian had been on my mind the whole time I was writing it. She asked me to play it. So I did. Sometimes you work on a song thinking it means one thing, and only once it’s finished do you realize what you were actually writing about.

The third was Julee Cruise’s “Falling.” Christian and I shared a deep love for Twin Peaks and David Lynch (his bordered on obsessive). When I started singing, I could feel the room; everyone knew the song. We were all there for him. We all knew what he loved. It hit hard and still does.

What follows is a tribute I wrote shortly after learning of his passing.

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Do I ever feel the way I should?
Content to be loved/misunderstood

This is the opening line from “Between The Lines,” which, coincidentally or not, was Christian’s (or Xian, as he was known online) favorite song of ours. I never knew if it was the lyrics or the fact that I wrote it while listening to Spacemen 3’s 𝘙𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 (one of his favorite albums; how could he have known?). But I always had the sense that this line spoke to him.

We met ten years ago, around the time we were releasing Three Poisons. He came down to our show at Quai des Brumes with a bunch of friends, full of excitement. A huge BJM fan (he had discovered them when they opened for Sonic Boom at the Troubadour in L.A. back in ‘96) he was thrilled to find a Montreal band carrying the torch. We became fast friends, bonded by music, Star Wars, and Twin Peaks (he quite literally wore all of this on his sleeve).

Xian was an amazing artist, deeply immersed in the pop-art world. He generously donated one of his paintings for our 𝘚𝘩𝘪𝘱 𝘰𝘧 𝘍𝘰𝘰𝘭𝘴 release (originally titled 𝘓𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘏𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘸𝘢𝘺). His talent was matched only by his kindness.

He and his life-partner Geneviève had a house by a creek in Bromont, and my family and I spent a few weekends there. We’d sit around the campfire, drinks in hand, while the kids ran wild. My kids adored him; probably because he was a bit like a kid himself. There was a wide-eyed wonder about him, an unshakable excitement for the things he loved.

And he 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘥 music. I remember how overjoyed he was when Rachel from Slowdive—his lifelong crush—received one of his pieces. And the time Brian Jonestown Massacre played Montreal in 2016… The whole band (minus Anton) came by for dinner post-soundcheck. I made sure Xian was there. He showed up with bottles of wine and a huge grin—pure happiness. Later that night, I got him backstage to meet Anton. He ended up talking to Anton’s partner, Katy, and, in typical Xian fashion, was a bit overenthusiastic. Anton, never one to mince words, said something like, “I don’t know who you are, so why should I care!” Xian loved it. He worshipped Anton, and to be told off by him was, in his mind, a badge of honor. He recounted that night for years, grinning ear to ear every time.

There are so many memories—so many happy ones, and some sad ones, too. I wish I had been there more in the hard times. I tried, but he didn’t want me to see him like that. Maybe I should have tried harder. He never wanted to be an inconvenience.

But no one is an inconvenience.

Life is a gift. And knowing Xian was a gift.

It’s hard to imagine a world where he won’t be messaging me after a new song or tour is announced. But I know he’s always with me. He always will be. My deepest condolences to Genevieve and his family.

I take some comfort in these words from his guru, David Lynch:

𝘐 𝘥𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘰𝘧 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩 𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘥. 𝘐 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘯 𝘰𝘯𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘴 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘢 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴.

om shanti om. rishi.

It was early morning in Brisbane. We were flying home later that day, and I got up before anyone else and walked outside into air that felt completely foreign… warm, unfamiliar, southern hemisphere strange. There were mangrove trees everywhere. I just stood there and let the past year wash over me.

The night before, I had played sitar on stage with Beck.

Not because I was invited. Not because anyone set it up for me. Because I had looked at Beck from the side of the stage, watched him play “Loser” without a sitar, thought that’s a shame and then thought: I believe I can make that happen.

That distinction matters more than it might seem.

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Let me back up to the beginning of 2012. My wife Kirsty and I had just had our second child, Ishaan, in December 2011. In Canada, parental leave gives you real time away from work, and rather than spend that time at home being a supporting father/husband (my self-centeredness and mixed priorities will be discussed in a future article), I ended up taking a call from the Black Angels.

I’d known them since the mid-2000s, before they were even the Black Angels; back when we were all just figuring it out. Earlier in 2011, I’d joined them on stage at Austin Psych Fest, playing sitar at the Seaholm Power Plant.

So when they reached out again and asked if I’d want to come play bass and sitar with them at Coachella — Nate had left the band — I said yes without hesitation.

I spent my parental leave essentially moving back and forth between Montreal and Austin. Kirsty and the kids would come down when they could. I toured with the Black Angels through Coachella, Lollapalooza, and shows across North America with the Horrors. I’d already been touring for about ten years by that point, but something shifted for me that year. Seeing how a band operates at that scale — from the outside, as a collaborator rather than a member — gave me a new kind of clarity. I saw what was possible. I saw how powerful it could be.

By the end of 2012, the Black Angels were invited to play the Harvest Festival in Australia, and I went out with them. Elephant Stone had recorded our self-titled album throughout that year, and I remember feeling a quiet kind of dread starting to settle in. My parental leave was almost over. I knew the Black Angels would eventually need a more local musician; someone they could call on short notice, not someone flying in from Montreal. My time with them was winding down.

I had this record that I wasn’t sure anyone would care about. A whole run of great experiences behind me. And I found myself thinking: is this it? Was this my last hurrah?

That’s when I saw Beck play at the first show in Melbourne.

He was playing “Loser,” and there was no sitar. I mentioned to Brett Orrison, my friend and the Black Angels FOH (front of house), that I thought I should get up there and play with him at the Syndey show. Brett said: “Yeah, brah. You have to do that.” So I reached out to my friend Wally Kempton, an Australian who runs Cheersquad Records, who happened to be tour managing one of the other bands on the bill — a band that was doing some off-venue shows with Beck. I just asked: do you know who’s tour managing Beck?

About a week later, in Sydney, I got a text from Wally. A few minutes after that, someone found me backstage and brought me to a trailer. Beck was there. Roger Manning JR was there. Joey Waronker (who I would meet again on the Oasis reunion tour… but that’s a story for another time). Justin Meldal-Johnsen. I pulled out my sitar, Beck pulled out his guitar, and we ran through about thirty seconds of “Loser.” I smiled sheepishly and suggested he should tune his guitar; we played through it once more. He said: “I’ll see you on stage.”

During the set, he walked over and gave me the nod for a sitar solo. I took it. Christian Bland (The Black Angels guitarist) was hiding behind a guitar amp taking photos. It went great. Afterward, Beck asked if I wanted to do it again in Brisbane the next night. I played on “Loser” and “Soldier Jane”.

So there I was, the next morning, walking through the mangroves before the flight home. Thinking about the year. Thinking about how all of it — the Black Angels, Coachella, Australia, Beck — had started with a belief. Not certainty. Not a plan. Just a belief that it was possible.

I’m not trying to sound like a motivational speaker here. But I genuinely think that’s the first step. If you don’t believe something is possible, you won’t reach out. You won’t ask. You won’t put yourself in the room. And if you do believe — really believe — then at the very least you’ve given yourself a chance.

That morning in Brisbane changed something in me. I stopped thinking of the Elephant Stone record as something nobody would care about. I stopped thinking my best years were behind me. I came home and I kept going. I believed things would get better. And they did.

I, believe.

Elephant Stone released a new single, Everything Evil, on March 25th. From looking through my voice memos, the seed of this song goes back to Sunday, September 22, 2024. This most likely happend after my morning espresso when I popped into my home studio for 15 minutes or so. That’s pretty much my daily ritual: a glass of lemon water, espresso, then head down to the home studio to see what the moment brings.

Pretty basic rock riff but with a nice descending chromatic intro. Also, I almost always start with gibberish lyrics (Wikipedia calls them “non-lexicable vocals”). I think Adriano Celentano - ‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’ is the gold standard for this.

I returned the next day and recorded the following.

As you can hear, I picked up the tempo, changed the key (I reckon to hit my vocal sweet spot) and found a chorus. A week later, on September 30th, I recorded an updated version with the middle eight, including me vocalizing a guitar solo. Still no lyrics.

From there, I let my subconscious do the heavy lifting and spent a lot of time with 70s punk. I think The Saints’s “(I’m) Stranded” ended being a pretty heavy influence on the direction of the tune.

Around that time, MIEN announced our second album MIIEN, which kept me fairly occupied and pulled me away from the demo. But as has become routine over the last few years, I used the Christmas break to write new music and finally nail down all the lyrics, family time included, of course.

The working title was “All I See Is Evil,” but my wife Kirsty suggested “Everything Evil” would hit harder. She was right.

I’ve written a lot of protest songs over the years. Bombs Bomb Away, Masters of War, Knock You From Yr Mountain, the list goes on. As I mentioned in my last post, songwriters are empaths. We process everything around us, and sadly, there’s a lot of evil to process right now. Writing this song was therapy, pure and simple. I have to believe we can fight it and overcome.

With the lyrics finally done, I bashed out a punchy, punk-rock version of the tune, mandatory noise guitar solo included, all played by yours truly.

And that’s pretty much how it went. Thanks for making it all the way to the end.

Until the next Song Origins.

om shanti om. rishi.

I’ve been making albums for almost 30 years now and every album cycle brings along the same ups and downs. The thrill of the seed of an idea… the trance-like state of fleshing it out… the suffering over lyrics… the self-doubt after demoing the track… the inflating sense of confidence… the excitement and focus of recording with the band… the hours upon hours of refining… the thrill of completing the album… and then the emptiness of realizing you’re done.

Now what?

Now, it’s all the stuff I put off while making the album. What’s the story? What does each song mean? You don’t realize a theme until you have some distance.

I’ve heard someone say that a songwriter’s job is to be an empath. I look around and try to feel what others feel. The world is a pretty dark place right now… so it only made sense that this album would touch on sadness… but there’s also hope.

I lost my dear friend Christian Dorey at the beginning of writing this album. And I lost my mother, Asha, at the end. The album is named after her. Asha means hope in Sanskrit. I didn’t plan it that way. It just became what it was.

Each album is a time capsule. This one more than most.

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the music is only part of it. There’s the making of it, which is its own world. There’s the living that happens around it... and then there’s the part where you send it out into the world.

That last part is why I’m here.

I’m going to write about all of it : the thirty years, tales from the road, the new album, what it actually looks like to run an independent band in 2026, the stories behind the songs, the people I’ve made music with along the way. Honest, unfiltered, probably a bit meandering. I’ll also throw in demos and outtakes.

If any of that sounds worth your time, stick around.

— Rishi