Before I get to The Zombies and Little Steven, I have to back up to Cavestomp.

It was the fall of 2000, and the Datsons' drummer at the time, John Malinos, had quit mid-tour. We were three 20-somethings crammed together on the road, not exactly equipped with the empathy to understand each other's plight, tensions running the way they tend to when you're young, broke, tired, and living out of a van. John had had enough and walked. With our first ever New York show just a week away, Cavestomp 2000, The Garage Rock Festacular, at the Westbeth Theatre, we needed someone to fill in fast. Stomp Records, our label at the time, suggested we ask Dave Hamelin to step in. He’d been playing with our friend Tim Fletcher in a band called the Undercovers, which was winding down around that same time. We drove down to New York together, Trevor (the Datsons' singer/songwriter), Dave, Tim, and me. The whole drive, Dave and Tim kept talking about wanting to make something with more depth to it, major 7th chords (which I knew nothing about at the time) and all. They kept bringing up Radiohead. While in NYC, they connected with Gus Van Go (ex-Me, Mom, and Morgentaler,) who they already knew from Montreal. That was the beginning of the Stills. Their debut album is great, still holds up.

That Cavestomp connection ended up mattering more than I realized at the time, because it’s how we first appeared on Little Steven’s radar.

A year later, with a new drummer, Robb Surridge, the Datsons got invited to open for a reunited Zombies at the Village Underground in New York, part of a series Little Steven was putting on / Cavestomp. Three nights, and we were filling in for a band that had cancelled. We were thrilled.

Night one went well. Rod Argent and the rest of the band were warm, gracious, genuinely kind to us. Partway through their set, Rod stopped and told the crowd:

“One of the wonderful things about being a musician this long is you get to explore so many different kinds of music, and one thing I’ve explored a lot is classical. Here’s a piece I wrote called… Fiesta!”

Rod Argent playing a neo-classical composition. To a room full of garage rock kids. For ten minutes.

I remember the whole room just going quiet. Not the good kind of quiet.

Odessey and Oracle is one of my favorite albums of all time, right up there with Sgt. Pepper's. So getting the chance to support the Zombies at all felt surreal. Before the show, I picked up a vinyl copy of it at a record shop in Greenwich Village and got the whole band to sign it, including Chris White, the original Zombies bassist, who happened to be there that night. The bassist actually playing with them at the time was Jim Rodford (RIP), formerly of the Kinks.

Standing there that night, my friend Pete Hayes, from the band The Figgs, nudged me: "Hey, who's the guy who looks like Little Steven?" I genuinely didn't know who Little Steven was. I hadn't watched the Sopranos, wasn't especially into Springsteen at the time. Looking back, that's a little embarrassing to admit. Steven Van Zandt's legacy in rock and roll is enormous, guitarist for the E Street Band, a career that spans decades, and at the time I had no real sense of who I was standing next to. But I remember the impression he left. The paisley shirt, the bandana, that smile, the enthusiasm, the unmistakable New Jersey accent. Even without knowing the history behind him yet, something about him just radiated rock and roll.

Also somewhere in that room: Max Weinberg and Paul Shaffer. I remember yelling something at Paul Shaffer (Canadian? Ex-Canadian?) as he walked by, something like, “I’m from Canada!” and getting a gruff “bah!” in return. Max Weinberg gave me a once over, I was in my three piece suit, and said something like, “You remind me of me when I was younger.”

Night two, we weren’t on the bill. The Mooney Suzuki was instead. I had complicated feelings about The Mooney Suzuki. We’d crossed paths with them before, at a mod night in Boston, a packed bill with a bunch of bands, and we were nervous wrecks. Then The Mooney Suzuki took the stage and just took over the room completely. I remember tables getting overturned. They were a phenomenal live band, dripping with a kind of Detroit, New York City attitude we could never quite pull off, polite Montreal kids that we were. I resented them a little for being so cool.

We drove back to Montreal after our night. Then we got a call. Turned out the Zombies weren’t feeling The Mooney Suzuki and wanted us (the polite—or nasty?—Canadians we are) back for night three. We turned the van around and drove straight back to New York.

Before we went on that third night, I found myself talking to Rod. I asked if they were doing the same set as before. He told me they’d decided to cut “Fiesta.” Said it was a bit of a downer. I told him that was actually my favorite part of the whole set. I watched his eyes light up. I had to bite my tongue.

There were a few other moments from that last night worth mentioning. Backstage, we were sharing a small room with the Zombies, our suits hanging up on a rack. At one point Colin Blunstone turned to Rod and said, “Rod, I found my hangers!” Rod sighed. “That’s nice, Colin,” he replied. Without another word, Colin took every single one of our suits off their hangers, dumped them in a pile, and walked off with the hangers.

He just took them. Never explained why. I still think about it to this day.

Later, a cooler of beers got knocked over, and Colin meticulously lined every bottle back up inside it, one by one. Order restored.

At the end of the night, we went back into the dressing room to grab something we’d forgotten, a guitar stand, I think, and I walked in on Rod sitting there in his tighty whities sipping a glass of red wine. He looked up, said something like, “Oh dear!” clearly caught off guard. I said thanks again for everything and got out of there as fast as I could, doing my best not to think too hard about what I’d just seen.

Little Steven loomed large over the Datsons after that residency, and for years afterward. Whenever things got complicated with Rainbow Quartz Records, he was there. He was launching his SiriusXM radio station around that same time, and having someone like that championing our music was huge for us, more than I probably understood in the moment. He’s the one who put us on Rainbow Quartz’s radar in the first place. He’s the one who helped us settle on the name the High Dials. Down the line, we’d go on to play his Underground Garage Festival on Randall’s Island, a whole story in itself. For the better part of six years, he was a real presence in our lives, and I’m forever grateful for the impact he had on mine.

Years later, when I finally quit the High Dials, Little Steven reached out directly, just to ask why. I told him I wasn't feeling it anymore. I was touched that he even cared enough to ask. What I didn't know at the time was that he'd left the E Street Band himself years earlier, going through his own version of walking away from something that had defined him for so long. I only found that out much later.

In 2013, Elephant Stone would end up supporting the Zombies again, and reconnecting with Little Steven along the way. Different band, same road.

In December 2005, I quit the High Dials. Ten years into the band, and I was done. Burnt out, feeling like I'd hit a wall physically and spirtually; tired of the grind without much to show for it. I meant it at the time. I’ll go into more detail about this another time.

Then we got offered a US support tour with Neko Case for April 2006. I figured, why not, let's see how this goes. Just before that run we headed to SXSW, where we played something called the North Loop block party, which has since become a bit of a legendary show among the psychedelic community. That, also, is a story for another time.

In the months leading up to all of this, I was on tour constantly. Which meant Kirsty planned our entire wedding herself. God bless her.

We got married on May 14, 2006. The next day, we were on a plane to the UK. Not for a honeymoon in the traditional sense, but to support the Brian Jonestown Massacre on a two week tour across the country. Brand new newlyweds, and I was about to subject my wife to two weeks in a small, dingy, deathtrap van with a bunch of stinky guys.

We started the tour in Manchester, at the O2 Academy, opening for the Earlies with Midlake also on the bill. I’d discovered the Earlies the year before, at SXSW 2005. My friend Ted Heagle had sent me a few tracks off their first record, and I went to see them live, a short set, maybe fifteen minutes, but it completely floored me. Something like early Mercury Rev or the Flaming Lips, but stranger, more out there. I fell hard for that band on the spot. When I found out they were coming through Montreal and New York, I reached out and got the High Dials on those bills too. We became close with them, especially with Christian (Madden) and Brandon, the good old Texan of the group. So when this UK tour came together and the Earlies were putting on the Manchester show, they offered us the support slot.

Midlake was also on the bill that night, a band I didn't know much about at the time, though I'd come to love them after hearing the brilliant "The Trials of Van Occupanther." There were too many bands on the bill that night, four in total, so Midlake got squeezed into a short twenty minute set and seemed pretty annoyed about it. Christian shrugged it off, though. He mentioned they were about to head out on a support tour with the Flaming Lips. "They'll be just fine," he said.

From Manchester we made our way to Liverpool to link up with the Brian Jonestown Massacre and start the tour proper. This was one of the first tours with Joel back in the band after his return, and Joel had this aura about him, almost like royalty, at least to me, having only known him through DIG! up to that point. The lineup at the time was Joel, Dan Allaire on drums, Collin Hegna on bass, Frankie Teardrop and Ricky Maymi on guitars, Anton, and Rob Campanella. The classic lineup. Rob’s brother was also on the road with them, filming what I believe was meant to be a documentary. I have no idea what became of that footage.

BJM at the time didn’t really have their operation fully buttoned up. They had a manager, Travis, but no merch person. Kirsty offered to sell merch for them.

It was also the first time Kirsty met Anton. He was shy at first, which surprised me a little given everything I’d told her about him.

The whole trip had a bigger shape to it beyond just the tour. The plan was two weeks of rock and roll, then Kirsty and I would head up to visit her family on the Isle of Skye, travel around the UK together for a bit, and eventually meet up with her sister and her boyfriend at the time, Bowen, now her husband, to travel on to Indonesia.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, in Glasgow, I ran into a bit of trouble. There was a big backstage room with a toilet sitting right in the middle of it, and I went in to use it. I noticed a button on the side, pressed it out of curiosity, and discovered it was a bidet. Water started cleaning me out mid-use. Wild, but harmless enough, or so I thought. I mentioned it to one of the venue staff afterward, and he said he didn’t think anyone had used that thing in years. Turned out that was a problem. I picked up some kind of bacteria from it, and it wrecked my stomach for months afterward.

By the time we got to London to open for Neko Case at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, I was in real pain. Eric Dougherty suggested smoking a bit of weed might help take the edge off. I wasn’t sure, but I was desperate enough to try it. After weeks of loud, rowdy BJM crowds, this Neko Case audience was dead silent, the kind of quiet where you can hear a pin drop. Between that and whatever the weed was doing to me, I got deeply paranoid up there. It was an awkward, strange show. Not my finest hour on stage, but a fitting kind of chaos for how the whole tour had gone.

The last show of the tour was in Carlisle, at the Brickyard, a headlining show of our own. By that point, I was ready to be done. Not with the band exactly, though I would end up finally quitting for good after we got back, but ready to break away and finally start my actual honeymoon with Kirsty.

As we pulled into town, the van's drum brakes gave out completely. After the show, we all went our separate ways. Kirsty and I peeled off to start our honeymoon. Trevor headed off on his own backpacking trip through Ireland. That left Robbie, Eric, Max (drummer), and Lewis, our driver, to somehow get the van and all the gear back to London. From what I heard, it was a rough ride, multiple tow trucks involved. Robbie has his own version of that story, probably a better one than mine.

The first time I met Alex and Christian, they didn’t even have a name for their band yet.

We'd officially met Anton and BJM the previous summer, and by that November he'd already had us out supporting them on a run of Ontario dates. So by the time SXSW 2004 rolled around, we were somewhat in his orbit already. This one was an unofficial day party at the Bayou Lounge on Sixth Street. The High Dials were supporting the Brian Jonestown Massacre, with a band called Vietnam also on the bill. We went on first. The venue was packed, no room left anywhere, so when we got to "Things Are Getting Better" as our closer, I ended up playing sitar sitting in the doorway, spilling out onto Sixth Street. It was a vibey show. I remember singing the "Who!!!" (or is it "Wooo!?") part of, you guessed it, "Who?" alongside BJM and Jason "Plucky" Anchondo, who was the tambourine man for this tour. Joel, if I recall, rejoined in 2006 for what I called "The Honeymoon" tour. I'll tell you all about that in a future post.

After the set I was at the back of the bar when two guys came up to me. They said they’d never seen a sitar before and thought it was great. We started talking. They seemed genuine, sincere, easy to talk to. At some point the conversation drifted to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Then they mentioned they were starting a band of their own. No name yet. They introduced themselves as Alex and Christian. I wished them luck and that was that.

That summer, the High Dials were back on tour through the US, and we ended up in Austin again. We were staying at the Embassy Suites hotel on South Congress courtesy of our label, Rainbow Quartz, who’d put us up there for SXSW. They had a manager’s happy hour, an all you can drink situation with vodka and cranberry juice, and we were taking full advantage of it now. As far as we knew, we had the night off. Our Austin show wasn’t until the next day.

The hotel was close to the Congress Avenue Bridge, where the bats take off every evening. Robbie and I had a few drinks and went and laid in the grass to watch them go. It’s a pretty spectacular thing to see if you’ve never witnessed it, this huge cloud of bats pouring out from under the bridge at dusk.

While we were lying there, I got a call on the band’s emergency cell phone. It was my dad.

“Hey Dad.”

“How’s the tour going?”

“Good.”

“I see you have a show tonight.”

“What? Nah, we don’t,” I replied with a slight drunken slur.

“Yeah, you’re playing Austin tonight.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I went back, checked the schedule, and sure enough, we had a show that night. I don’t know how I missed it. We piled into the van, I wasn’t sober, but I got us there. It turned out the opening band that night was the same guys I’d met at the Bayou Lounge, now christened The Black Angels. Alex, the singer, wasn’t able to make it that night, so Christian, the guitar player, sang instead. We missed their entire set. I felt terrible about it. We caught up with them a little afterward. Nice guys, I remembered. Too bad I’d missed it.

We’d cross paths with them again the following year, at SXSW 2005. This time, we actually stayed at their house at 1300 McKinley. It was arranged through a guy named Adam Dimitri, who was putting together something called Austin Psych Fest (no association with the eventual APF/Levitation). We played a handful of shows that week. I remember Christian constantly strumming The Verve’s “The Drugs Don’t Work” during our stay.

Around this time, the Black Angels were working on their first EP, playing more shows outside of Austin. When we made it back down to Texas, we stayed with them again and played a run of shows together, Denton, Dallas, a few others.

Then we had a Montreal show coming up, November 1st, 2005, at Petit Campus, and the Black Angels were touring at the time in support of said EP, so we asked them to open. Their manager, whose name happened to be Brian Jones (I kid you not) sent word that they were stuck at the border. There was a curfew at the venue, so we made a call: we’d just keep playing until they showed up.

So we played. And we kept playing. And then we got word they were close. When the Black Angels finally arrived, I told them to just come straight on stage, plug into our gear, and play. They did. About twenty minutes, no setup, no soundcheck, nothing. And the entire room went silent. They sounded unbelievable. Christian was wearing a poncho. It was raw and powerful in a way I hadn’t fully understood until that moment.

That was the first time I really saw what The Black Angels were capable of. And it was just the beginning. My story with them continued from there…

On July 25, 2003, the High Dials played David Bash’s International Pop Overthrow festival in Los Angeles. We arrived late. I think we’d been driving for hours. We barely got paid for the set, if at all. We played it thinking it didn’t really matter much either way, just another show on a long summer run. I think it’s called paying your dues… but I digress.

What we didn’t know was that Nelson Bragg was in the crowd. At the time, Nelson was the drummer in Rob Campanella’s band, The Quarter After. He’d later go on to play with Brian Wilson, but that was still ahead of him. Nelson was/is a serious power pop fan, familiar with our label, Rainbow Quartz Records. He was there with Rob, who would also later become a member of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. At some point Rob wanted to leave not really feeling the power-pop vibes of the bands. Nelson talked him into staying for one more band. Us.

They watched the set. Afterward, they bought a CD. That CD made its way through Rob Campanella and eventually ended up in the hands of Anton Newcombe.

Three weeks later, on August 16, 2003, we were playing Davy Love’s Wilderbeat Weekender in Port Hope, Ontario, the final show of our 5-week self-booked North American tour in support of our album A New Devotion. We knew Anton and the Brian Jonestown Massacre were on the bill that day too. I remembered the last time I’d seen him, five years earlier, at the Jailhouse Rock Cafe in Montreal. I’d been an intimidated twenty year old who couldn’t even manage a conversation with one of his bandmates.

This time would be very, very different.

We just got off stage when this shirtless guy came barreling out of another van, making a beeline straight for us. It took me a second to register who I was looking at. It was Anton.

He was talking a mile a minute, this wild excitement in his eyes. “You guys are the High Dials,” he said. “I love you guys. I’ve been listening to you the whole drive out here.”

I didn't know it yet, standing there in that parking lot, but that was just the beginning of a friendship that's now spanned more than two decades.

By November of that same year, we found ourselves supporting BJM on a run of Ontario and Montreal dates. This was before the documentary Dig! came out, so they were still very much a cult band, travelling in a van, hauling and plugging in their own gear. Nothing glamorous about it. Just the work.

BJM were notorious at the time for missing soundcheck, always arriving just in time for the show, if that. The Montreal date was small, maybe thirty people at the Jupiter Room. We played London, ON after that at Call the Office. Then came Toronto, at Dan Burke’s Silver Dollar on Spadina, and that one turned into something else entirely.

The bill was stacked. Us, the High Dials, going on first. Then 20 Miles, playing bluesy rock and roll. Judah Bauer from the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. BJM headlining. Around 200-250 showed up, which felt massive for us at the time. Before we went on, I remember Anton introducing us to the room as the best band in Canada. We looked at each other like, oh boy. We went on nervous, playing too fast, rushing through everything. Anton sat on the edge of the stage the whole time, watching us, coaching us along without saying a word, just his presence keeping us steady. It went well.

20 Miles played after us. Then BJM took the stage, and Anton opened with something like a genuine “Thank you to the High Dials!” followed immediately by a pointed “Fuck you!” aimed at 20 Miles. I remember Judah Bauer was playing pool nearby, close enough that I could hear him mutter something like, “Why does he have to be such an asshole?” He seemed genuinely hurt. I felt for him. But that was Anton as master of ceremonies. At one point during the set he just stopped playing altogether, sat down on the edge of the stage, and said, “Alright, let’s talk about sex.” The entire room hung on every word. He was, and is, one of the most genuinely charismatic people I have ever been around. Here’s a review of the show: https://www.inmusicwetrust.com/articles/64h13.html

Word started spreading about a documentary being made about BJM, and by 2004, Anton invited us to open for them at all their SXSW shows that year. Every night, we’d open, and every night felt like another step deeper into Anton’s orbit. We also got invited to the premiere of DiG! at the festival.

By that point I’d only known Anton for less than a year, but I understood something about him: he talked at you, not with you. It was less conversation, more transmission. That’s changed some as he’s gotten older, but at the time, being around him meant being swept into whatever current he was generating in that moment.

I remember sitting in that theater watching Dig! for the first time, thinking, this is kind of wild. Here was a documentary capturing exactly the chaos and charisma I’d witnessed firsthand, except now the whole world was about to see it too.

And that same SXSW run, on a random evening at a 6th Street venue, I’d meet two people who would open up an entirely different chapter of my musical life. But that’s a story for another time.

By the time I met Uwe, I’d been teaching myself sitar for three years. Just me, a cassette, a “sitar for dummies” book, and a lot of intuition. I’d developed my own way of playing, my own workarounds, my own sense of what felt right. What I didn’t know yet was how many bad habits I’d quietly built into that foundation.

Uwe was like no one I’d ever met. When Stephen (AKA The Venk/Black Smoke) first told me about him, I remember thinking: a German guy teaching an Indian guy how to play sitar? Let’s see about that. He’d spent ten years in India, in Shantiniketan, studying sitar and Indian classical music, and had earned his master’s degree there. A German guy who’d gone deeper into the tradition than most people born into it ever would. That fact alone should have told me everything I needed to know before I even walked in the door. But I still walked in with my skepticism intact.

His apartment was a top floor walk-up in Mile End. Many stairs. I was living in NDG at the time, the west end of Montreal, so it took a while to make it out his way on the metro. I remember him answering the door with his standard greeting: “Yesss...” A yes that acknowledged you, coloured by his Indo-German accent. He was a bit shorter than me, with a mischievous smile and piercing, searching eyes.

When I get nervous, I tend to talk too much. I was nervous. He just smiled and nodded. I felt foolish. We sat on his Persian rug in his music room, sitars lining the walls, tablas, guitars, even a hammock strung up somewhere in the corner. He asked me to play for him so he could understand what he was working with. I did my pseudo-sitar schtick. This was followed by his long “Yesss...”

I felt very exposed and vulnerable. I never do well in those situations. I had enough false ego at the time that his quiet acknowledgment of my poor skills stung. He told me, gently but plainly, that I’d developed a lot of bad habits. Before we even began, he wanted to inspect my instrument. I mentioned it wasn’t the best. He tuned it up and started playing. I had never heard it sound so beautiful. Turns out the sitar wasn’t the problem.

Then he started with posture. I was sitting cross-legged, but not properly, one leg tucked in sukhasana, the other crossing over the knee, back straight, shoulders relaxed. I’d been slouching over the sitar just to see the frets. Wrong. Back straight, always. The gourd needed to rest in the arch of my bare left foot, not sitting on the floor beside me.

Then he moved to my hands. My right hand thumb was supposed to be anchored on the neck, just before the gourd, not floating free like I’d been doing. From that anchor point, the hand should move like a fan across the strings, alternating up and down strokes, what’s called “da” and “ra” (and “diri” for fast strokes). I’d only ever done downstrokes. I didn’t even know there was another way. The mizrab, the wire plectrum, wasn't even sitting correctly on my finger. It needed to anchor on the first knuckle of my index finger, not wherever I'd been jamming it. My left hand thumb belonged on the center of the back of the neck, and that was wrong too. And you only fret with your index and middle fingers. I'd been using whatever felt right, no method to it at all.

I’d been doing none of it correctly. Three years of self-teaching, and I’d built an entire technique on a foundation that needed to be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch.

And silently, in my head, I couldn’t help but think: you must unlearn all that you have learned.

By the end of that first lesson, I had mentally accepted I was starting over completely. Learning to walk all over again before I could run.

He gave me my first raga: Yaman. A standard major scale with a sharp fourth, a good entry point for a beginner. I’d been tuning to D this whole time, but Uwe tuned to a specific frequency somewhere between C and C sharp. He handed me a CD, a tanpura drone recording of that exact note, and told me to tune to it going forward.

For that first lesson, we didn’t go further than the scale itself, slowly played in da and ra strokes, up and down, over and over until the motion started to feel less awkward. He also told me to get a small pill box, fill it with cotton, soak it in olive oil, and use it to keep my left hand fingers lubricated for playing.

I left that first lesson with a new tuning, a new raga, a new right hand technique, a new left hand technique, and an oil-soaked pill box. Everything I thought I knew about playing the sitar had been quietly, patiently dismantled in about an hour.

Looking back, that first lesson taught me more than technique. Never judge a book by its cover, a German guy turned out to be exactly the teacher I needed. And never let a false ego rule you. It’s a hard lesson when you’re young and still trying to find your way, when every correction feels like a small wound to a fragile sense of self. But humility is where the real learning starts. Uwe knew that. I imagine he’d seen it in students (or himself) before me, probably would see it in students after me too.

I studied with him weekly for over fifteen years after that first afternoon in his Mile End apartment. Fifteen years of “Yesss,” fifteen years of unlearning and relearning, fifteen years of a teacher who never once let me get comfortable with less than my best. That first lesson was just the beginning. I didn’t know it yet, sitting there with my newly rebuilt technique and my little pill box of oiled cotton, but I’d just found the person who would shape the rest of my musical life.

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