Pride for my culture has always manifested itself in the music to which I am drawn. From a young age, I immersed myself in music spanning from Negro spirituals to traditional West African music. And, as a musician, I identify these influences in my own original music. For instance, I fell in love with the complex rhythms found in West African music and experiment with them in my guitar playing.

I have also always been enamored with traditional music of Black America. I am particularly fascinated with the persistence of these traditions and how the same spirituals and folk songs have helped to tell the stories of peoples removed from each other by generations. These songs have traveled through time and space to give voice to people who have been forgotten and ignored. I feel that it is not only appropriate but necessary to adapt these songs, in order to tell my own story of being a young, black person in America today. However, this music carries another element essential to this narrative.

In my life, it has held true that disenfranchised, oppressed, and struggling peoples turn to faith for refuge from the ills of the world. As a result, religion becomes a recurring theme in the music that represents their culture. As a child, I was introduced to the tenets of Christianity through Gospel, Blues, and Negro Spirituals. However, I believe that at its core, music such as this reaches beyond the confines of a specific religion. It does not merely reiterate Christian dogma. It uses the hope of salvation and happiness, in the next life, to temper the emotions people have towards the suffering of this life. Using hope for the next life as a means for putting the pain of reality into perspective is not a uniquely Christian idea. I was also raised around the spiritual organization Ananda Marga and similar ideas of salvation manifest themselves there as well. While these are merely two examples, among various others, they are the ones with which I am most familiar. Thus, I will use them to explore the implications of ideas related to salvation and heaven on oppressed peoples in the here and now.

This album explores the religious underpinnings of Black diasporic musical traditions and juxtaposes them with concepts from Ananda Marga philosophy. In so doing, I have attempted to creatively use the unique perspective of my religious upbringing to explore the question: How can ideas of salvation and heaven be applied without veering into apathy regarding injustice in the here and now?