The goal and function of the sound vibrations I’m looking for are to create a vibrational tool able to manifest in my own spirit this kind of love and this quality of forgiveness. If I feel real love while listening to or playing my music, then I know the listeners will feel the same. The goal is not to compose a series of clever harmonic progressions, as we do in jazz. The goal is not to excite the physical body, as we do in rock, or to impress the emotional mind, as we do in pop.

The goal is beyond. Music is a means to elevate the human soul. Somehow music opens the sacred heart. By doing so, music brings solace, inner peace, and, above all, a profound sense of spiritual joy. It is sometimes a thankless task for the musician, because he or she must transcend creating elaborate compositions. Music is simple. Sophisticated music touches only the mind but does not change the heart. Therefore the musician becomes a physician. Music heals the energetic knots and obstructions created by ancient negative memories and toxic emotions. Music gives an inner shower to the chakra system, clearing the dust of resentment, fear, anxiety, wrath, guilt, shame, doubt, and illusion. Listening to the music I want to make, the listener awakens to their true self. Otherwise, making music is just a cool waste of time.

My music says to the world “We are one, we are loved, we are divine life force, holographic part and parcel of the supreme life force. We will live in an abundant and peaceful civilization when we stop wanting to lord it over material nature. If you want to be a master of harmony, first you have to be a servant of harmony. If you want to be the master of the universe, the universe will destroy you. Live in harmony with the laws of nature. Don’t exploit nature; cooperate with nature. Forget your old ways of fanatic religiosity and feel in your inner awareness that all beings are from the same source.” The function of art, and music in particular, is to unite.

At the end of the 1960s, I did some folk countercultural music. During the 1970s, I was fascinated by progressive rock music. In the beginning of the 1980s, I produced several LPs promoting philosophical compositions inspired by the timeless wisdom of ancient books like the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible. At the mid-1980s, I put myself through local pop-rock radio success with new wave songs. Yet I wasn’t satisfied.

My guide and spiritual masters, Bhaktivedanta Swami and Sridhar Deva Goswami, from the Vaïsnava Vedic School, advised me to follow the middle path of dedication, between the two extremes of exploitation and renunciation. To renounce music or anything else would be artificial. Music does not belong to us, so how could we renounce it? On the other hand, to make music in the spirit of exploitation would bring success eventually together with troubles and sufferings. Dedication means you make music in order to please the big designer of the universal harmony, following the flow and current of the big design. One of the best and easiest ways to do that is to chant the holy names of Godhead in any spiritual tradition. Follow your bliss. Chant and be happy. Simple living but high thinking. The effect is a complete transformation. What transformation? A change of heart. An ascension of consciousness.