Journey to The Mountain

[*Damascus plays*]

A journey like this isn't really working, unless there's some geniune absorption on an atomic level. If you can't accept that we are all one great atomic suit designed in our imaginations, then you shouldn't be really hanging out by the Ganges. You're missing the [?] point.

You kind of have to get into a different rythmn when you're in India. It's full on. It's incredibly exciting. It's really hot and it's really crazy and noisy chaos. And you, you kind of have to– to leave your western version behind. Sort of melt into it.

The idea of going to India started because my wife was there with her mother, [*Delirium plays*] and the day they were flying home, my mother-in-law had a stroke. So I flew out to Jaipur and spent five or six weeks with my wife. And what was a pretty traumatic experience and should've been a reason to never go back to India ended up being me falling in love with Jaipur. And when I came back, I said, "Damon, we need to go to India and do something."

That is the… the point where this record starts. Yeah, the world– the world changed after that. [*The Hardest Thing plays*] After a while, the death of my father and then his father ten days later.

We hadn't really decided on what– what the theme of the album was, but just to be in India, and to have that experience, and especially to work with Indian musicians, and to travel, and to try imbibe as much of the culture as possible. Both of our fathers have been unwell for some time, so it was kind of going in that direction the theme of the album was presenting itself to us. So by the second trip, after our fathers had passed, we kind of– we knew what it was about. But how to tell it?

[*The Shadowy Light plays*]

We can't as a musician and going on a journey really not carry The Beatles with you a bit, y'know, because they were there first. In Rishikesh, there's a bridge, and if you turn right and you walked over it, you go to The Beatles, uhh.

Street. Market place.

Yeah, everything. Or you take left, you just find your own version. And we found our own version.

We took a left.

Don't go right, right? Kids, don't go right. Just go left.

My first, uhm, experiments musically were quite out there, and I've made some really bad things. I mean, not bad things, just not—

We had to evolve a little bit.

We did yeah.

And not, y'know, kind of take ourselves somewhere else.