Interview:

I’d like to answer the question “In what way has music made you a better human being?” The enlightened Mystic Osho my spiritual master, has talked about how music originates from meditation. It was a way for people who have gone deep into meditation, to bring back to the world a glimpse of what they had experienced. Music is closest to silence, it contains silence and it has the ability to make silence into a meaningful experience for the listener, to turn a dead silence into a living silence. The silence that is encoded into music is not the silence of the graveyard, it is the silence of watching a sunset, of a child’s first steps, of the wind waving through the tall grasses.

Osho emphasizes to pay attention to the gaps between the notes, it’s these silences that are poignant with meaning, that’s where I experience a blissful, meditative stillness, as a listener and as a player. I don’t know if I would call this “spiritually significant”, I’d rather say it is beautiful and deliciously nourishing. And a nourished human being is a better human being. Music has taught me a lot about living with awareness, in very practical ways. For instance, in order to play my fingerpicking guitar style of music, I need to be careful with my nails, so that they don’t break. I’m also a gardener and love cooking, chopping wood for our wood stove, and generally being active around the house. It’s very easy to break my nails. Indirectly music has taught me to do everything I do with great awareness, because if I break a nail, I can’t practice for several weeks. Writing and recording music is a journey in discovering what works and what doesn’t. As a composer you get very close to a piece when you are creating it, your vision can be impaired. But after some weeks, with the benefit of distance, you can be more objective. When you listen with this objectivity your piece can sometimes be great and sometimes not so great. That uncertainty is not always a comfortable place to be. But I bow down to the goddess of music because she places me in a situation that surrounds this uncertainty with so much beauty and sensitivity.

Music is a deeply mysterious enigma for me, particularly the writing of it, after being involved with music for more than thirty years I have more questions than answers.

“Music is a deeply mysterious enigma for me… after being involved with music for more than thirty years I have more questions than answers.” – Sambodhi Prem, composer and guitarist