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