Like any form of art, music has a profound way of putting forth thoughts and emotions. This creative catharsis can help a person deal with a situation, either with themselves or around them, and this can occur via both the artist and the listener. This can also bring people together in a positive manner, and this is exactly what singer-songwriter Meera Raphael is aiming to accomplish. Folks in South County can experience this for themselves when she performs at Pump House Music Works located on 1464 Kingstown Road in Wakefield tomorrow night at 7 p.m., with fellow singer-songwriter Olivia Charlotte performing as well.
Raphael and I had a talk about how music is her first memory, combining spirituality with artistry, and how she considers the Pump House to be a second home.
Rob Duguay: What initially made you want to get into music? Do you come from a musical family, or did you learn how to play music through a friend?
Meera Raphael: Music is like my first memory. I remember being a baby in a rocking chair while having my mother holding me while listening to James Taylor and there’s something so beautiful, intimate and deeply spiritual about somebody’s voice and the kind of stories and love it can carry. It’s always been my connection to the spirit, the divine, and also to people that are close to me. I’ve always been involved in music, I did Indian classical dance when I was growing up and I learned Indian classical music. I was in theater, I took piano, and it was all mother’s milk to me.
I was a born performer, I would sing on the changing tables while not letting my parents change me, but it really started to turn when I was a teenager. I was going through a really rough depression and it became my salvation, my comfort zone and my safe space. I got to understand what it really felt like to have your own relationship with your own personal muse, so since I was 14, it’s been how I make sense of my life, the world around me, and how I interact with the world around me. My brand of music sort of exists at the intersection of social and spiritual consciousness, so part of it is me trying to understand what it is to be a human and have these gifts. What are my responsibilities to others when I’m performing and when I’m walking in the world? What are my responsibilities to myself? How do I make sense of this world?
It’s kind of a roundabout answer, but it’s my everything. I feel like I was born to do this and I feel that everything along my journey has moved me into being this kind of archetype, I guess.
RD: That’s a great perspective to have on your creativity. Last month, you released a single called “The Double Helix,” so what was the experience like recording it? Was it just a standalone session for just this particular song or were you recording a bunch of songs in a studio?
MR: “The Double Helix” was a live acoustic version with the original being released around a year ago, and this latest version was a really, really, last-minute submission to National Public Radio’s “Tiny Desk Contest.” I had been wanting to do a live version of the song for such a long time because when I initially recorded it, I hadn’t been performing live yet. I had done everything in isolation until about a year ago, and as I performed out more and more, I realized how wonderful just doing acoustic performances can be and how intimate they can be. I reached out to my buddy Owen Tierney. I told him about this “Tiny Desk” thing and how I wanted to put something together, so we came up with some things.
I then reached out to my buddy Emma Newton at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, and within a week, we were in the studio. We did five takes, we set up a beautiful set with some of my altar pieces from home, and it was done. It was this magical group coming together and I’m so happy it’s out.
RD: You should be, I thought the video was really cool. You’ve mentioned how you like to combine spirituality with artistry, do you feel that this project is a culmination of that with the candles and everything?
MR: Definitely, yeah. That song in particular is a meditation on the “Divine Mother,” which would be this world. The world we come into, this Earth, everything here has birthed us and raised us, so what does she ask of us? It’s to take care of her and not take her for granted. When I got that song initially, it came out as a meditations on many different archetypes of divine femininity I’ve come to love through my exploration, including Mother Mary as well as Kali Ma, which is kind of like the scary apocalyptic version, you don’t want to get mom mad. We as God’s children have personal power and personal responsibility to care for his creation, and this was my awakening to that truth. I am currently going through a major transformation of faith and God is asking me to move away from my old ways of idol worship and ritual magic and towards scripture, so this is not what my prayer life looks like these days, no.
As a pure artistic experience, having all these spiritual symbols, the light of the candles, the peace signs, the Buddha, baby Jesus and the mother in her calm and fierce forms are reminders that all these teachings and archetypal images that we have at our disposal as human beings point us to one truth: Love. I feel it gives people a good understanding of my cultural background, spiritual upbringing and perspective. I was able to create this before my transformation, and though I’m still grappling with how I feel about the video, for now I’m allowing the art to just speak for itself as a window into my psychology. How I have gone to God up to this point to figure out what I’m supposed to do while I’m here, and what convictions and calling he has given me.
