By Dani Blum
Raveena wants you to imagine that you simply’re the one one who can heal your self. The kaleidoscopic R&B singer-songwriter is adamant about this, anchoring her chin on her hand on the opposite facet of the Zoom name, blinking on the vibrant pixels and saying, once more, that no one else can create your happiness. She is aware of. She’s tried.
Raveena went to the mountains each two or three days for the primary stretch of quarantine in Los Angeles in 2020 and communed with aliens, or God, or each (she views these as “two sides of the identical coin.”) She spends the primary a part of every day with 20 minutes of meditation, 20 minutes of yoga, and 5 minutes of writing down her affirmations and what she’s grateful for, a routine she developed when she bought COVID-19 in December. She’s been specializing in herself, connecting to her ancestors, feeling, she says, like her soul cracked open. For the final two years, the work she’s put into her second album, Asha’s Awakening, out February 11, paralleled the work she put into herself. She weaves therapeutic by way of every tingling observe; she additionally makes some extent of celebrating herself. “Our internal most self is bliss,” she says, “and bliss permits for this chaos and freedom and stream.”
The report glides by way of sugar-rush pop, trip-hop, Sade-inspired R&B, and spoken phrase intervals. The album even ends with a 15-minute lengthy guided meditation — a transfer Raveena knew was dangerous, however she wished the observe to be a device for her listeners. The meditations she’s discovered on-line typically aren’ well-recorded, she says, they usually use inventory sounds; she wished to make a top quality, well-mastered model, “high of the road produced.” Her talking voice is regular, tranquil. (“Her voice is the sort I might count on to listen to say ‘welcome to heaven’ as I hop down clouds of fluff,” reads the highest touch upon a video she posted of herself singing cross-legged in the grass during quarantine.) However the meditation additionally felt like a method to sign discovering peace, the completion of a journey for the album’s titular most important character.
Asha’s Awakening is an idea album that facilities on an area princess from historical Punjab, charting her revelations about love, restoration, and destruction over centuries. Raveena got here up with the idea after finishing six or seven songs and spending a yr doing analysis, as she and her crew studied and combed by way of Bollywood soundtracks. It was March 2020, and she or he was spiraling within the early weeks of quarantine, foraging for a method to be productive by way of each inner and exterior chaos. She had moved from New York to L.A. within the wake of a breakup, on the day the town introduced shutdowns. Raveena was watching a bunch of sci-fi motion pictures on the time, and within the span of an evening, she wrote down the whole structure for the album. Just a few months after, she requested an artist as an example Asha, so she may higher grasp the character she created. For Raveena, “All of the songs are private, after which I discover a method to join it again to the story. Not one of the songs are actually from a perspective of the character. It’s extra like I may relate to the character on the finish.”
Quarantine made Raveena decelerate. She danced, she wrote lyrics, she put the sonic components of songwriting on maintain largely for the primary six months. She would FaceTime her most important guitarist, crying, and improvise songs with him whereas he plucked at a number of chords; she referred to as him “every time the sobbing struck,” she says. Raveena had been working relentlessly within the years main as much as the pandemic. She began piecing collectively her 2017 breakout EP, Shanti, whereas nonetheless a pupil at New York College’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. In 2019, she launched “Lucid,” a comfortable, curatorial album that helped propel her following. The songs she recorded then have been delicate, velvety, churning by way of trauma with grieving and beauty.
Asha’s Awakening, against this, bursts with pleasure and shade, nearly frenetic in its tempo. That is deliberate. Therapeutic isn’t linear, Raveena says, and generally it could possibly seem like this sort of chaos, the hazy strategy of regaining confidence in your physique. “After that inner work occurs, there’s a sort of life and pleasure that erupts from you,” she says, waving her fingers within the air. “And that’s what this album actually was.”
That eruption is obvious in songs like “Secret,” which thumps and winds round a verse from rapper Vince Staples (she had his exact vocal tone and stream in thoughts for months earlier than she even reached out to him) and the shimmering opener “Rush.” Many of those songs are psychedelic, actually; she wrote a number of of them following transformative acid journeys. She primarily based “Rush” on a go to she made to the Rubin Museum in New York whereas tripping, the place she noticed a sound set up with Buddhist chanting and South Asian artwork on the partitions. “I spotted that that is the place I wanted the following album to go,” she says. “I needed to dive into my tradition and intersect it with all of the genres and all of the artwork I grew up loving as a child.”
These connections got here out of “a lot historic analysis.” She purchased eight or 9 devices from India, with no thought tips on how to use them, and requested her bassist to determine tips on how to play them. They have been all researching Bollywood data from the Nineteen Sixties by way of the ‘80s, parsing the preparations, and brushing by way of the methods Japanese sounds impressed Miles Coltrane and the Beatles, Timbaland and M.I.A. and Jai Paul. She wished to pay respect to the cross-cultural fusions of the previous. On “Circuitboard” and “Asha’s Kiss,” which options the legendary Indian singer Asha Puthli, Raveena felt like she built-in the Bollywood influences in a manner solely she may, in a fashion that left her mark.
Furmaan Ahmed Partway by way of the album, the spoken phrase observe “The Web Is Like Consuming Plastic” emerges from the twinkling soundscape. Over sinister, winking synths, Raveena murmurs like she’s dissociated or caught in a dream: “The web makes me really feel distant from my buddies… The web has me silly and sensible on the similar time.” As she was writing the album, Raveena traded her iPhone for a flip telephone for 3 months, counting on the radio and shopping for a GPS to assist steer her manner throughout L.A. She wished to flee “feeling like a robotic half the time,” however she additionally wished to cease placing strain on herself to place out the right second album. She’d been fixating on different artists’ sophomore data, and the insecurities that got here with infinite scroll appeared too unhealthy to adapt to. She’d lived within the New York space for almost her complete life, and shifting to L.A. left her gasping for nature and wanting to discover. Over these three, smartphone-less months, she felt her thoughts broaden, her capability to really feel develop. She walked and walked.
Lately, she’s again on-line, selling her album; she flashes her iPhone at her webcam, tethered to its charger. However she takes consolation in figuring out she’s able to disconnecting and the ego loss of life that comes with letting go. There’s a luxurious in feeling small generally, tracing your boundaries and boundaries. She laughs on the digital camera, dripping a curtain of hair in entrance of her face. “I’m only a tiny little bean on an area rock,” she says. “Attempting to get by way of.”
