Dave Premal and Miten

Joseph Roberts How did the two of you meet?

Deva Premal We met twelve years ago in Poona in an ashram where I was learning shiatsu and massage. Miten introduced me to music and singing.

Miten It was amazing to find someone who was open and with a really beautiful voice. As well, she was classically taught, and had a good musical grounding.

J.R. How did you first start working together?

D.P. Miten's been a musician all his life. I loved the music, and one day I asked to sing with him. I was twenty years old, very innocent and it just sounded good to sing together. I was really shy, almost like his apprentice.

J.R. How did you come to sing mantras?

M. Her father is a German yogi. He's eighty something years old now, but he's been studying yoga from about the second world war. He was singing mantras to his family for bedtime stories and giving them exercises to keep them in the moment.

J.R. Miten, how did you start in music?

M. I lived in pubs when I was a kid in England, around the London area. My parents are Londoners. So, music was introduced to me way back then. It was before the days of juke boxes in the pubs, so they had pianos and people would sit around singing the hits on the piano. My mother did that, so I just had those early memories of hanging around with her singing those songs.

J.R. Do you remember any of the songs?

M. They were songs from England. London songs, very simple pub songs like "Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner," "Lambeth Walk" and "I Wonder Who Paints the Sky So Blue."

J.R. Then what happened?

M. So, first Elvis's records appeared in England. I was only a little kid at that time, but it got me my first plastic guitar. Then by the time I was a teenager the Beatles came through, and the rest just happened by itself. I was actually into soccer. My father wanted me to be a soccer player, which I was for many years of my youth. Then the Beatles came along and that was the end of the story.

J.R. When you sing how do you prepare yourself?

D.P. My whole life is a preparation. I don't do anything special just before a concert or just before singing. I feel my life is lived in gratitude and joy, and somehow that comes out of me when I sing.

J.R. What are your underlying intentions with your music?

D.P. I love sharing the love of music. That's really what our concerts and workshops are about, sharing these mantras and relatively simple chants with people. We all sing together and become one in that space. There's not a performer and an audience.
The most precious thing is to come to that silence when the mantra stops, which it does all by itself. Sharing that precious silence and joy of being one in song together with people is what makes it possible for me to live this life - which is actually intense when you realize that we travel ten months of the year.

M. I knew music was more than entertainment, but I had to leave it behind to understand that fully. Then coming back to music in the ashram led me to a way of expressing music that heals, because I was healed through music in the ashram.
Before then I knew music touched me, but I didn't know it could heal. Now I've seen it and know it's true. We receive e-mail messages from people who are healing through hearing Premal's voice.
People write and tell us they were, for example, close to suicide and it gave them a reason to live and look for the sacred. There are people who tell us they played it while their mother was leaving the body, where it just created the perfect space. Others play it when they're giving birth to their kids, or when they're making love.

J.R. I'm thinking about how sound resonates in the space between the notes and on different dimensions. Music is part of my life, too and it's a healing process for me. It helps balance my life in the media.

M. Well, there is an audience for alternate media just as there's an audience for our music. It's not mainstream but there are more and more people all over the planet for whom we are writing and making music. Our horizons may not be wide or big. We make music for our friends, but as the friendship expands it reaches more and more friends.

J.R. Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers?

D.P. I'd like to encourage anyone to find their own song. Our own song is often something we don't value or respect because it comes so easily and naturally and we didn't have to fight for it or strive for it. My whole life changed when I trusted my own song, which in my case literally was singing.
It's totally simple. It's just one line repeated over and over. When you look at it you think there's nothing much to it, but you have to trust it and share it. My whole life changed.

Deva Premal and Miten will perform a concert in Vancouver November 29 at 8 pm at St. Andrew’s Wesley Church, and host a devotional singing workshop December 1.

For information visit www.worldconcertsforpeace.com or call 604-261-7709.