Raveena Cracked Open Her Soul For Asha's Awakening

By Dani Blum


Raveena needs you to believe that you’re the only one who can heal yourself. The kaleidoscopic R&B singer-songwriter is adamant about this, anchoring her chin on her hand on the other side of the Zoom call, blinking at the bright pixels and saying, again, that nobody else can create your happiness. She is aware. She’s tried.


Raveena went to the mountains every two or three days for the initial stretch of quarantine in Los Angeles in 2020 and communed with aliens, or God, or both (she views these as “two sides of the same coin.”) She spends the opening segment of daily with 20 minutes of meditation, 20 minutes of yoga, and 5 minutes of writing down her affirmations and what she’s grateful for, a routine she developed whenever she got COVID-19 in December. She’s been focusing on herself, connecting to her ancestors, feeling, she says, like her soul cracked open. For the last two years, the work she’s put into her second album, Asha’s Awakening, out February 11, paralleled the work she put into herself. She weaves healing through each tingling track; she also makes a point of celebrating herself. “Our inner most self is bliss,” she says, “and bliss permits for this chaos and freedom and flow.”


The record glides through sugar-rush pop, trip-hop, Sade-inspired R&B, and spoken word intervals. The album even ends with a 15-minute long guided meditation — a move Raveena knew was risky, yet she wanted the track to be a tool for her listeners. The meditations she’s noticed online often aren’ well-recorded, she says, and so they use stock sounds; she wanted to prepare an excellent, well-mastered version, “top of the line produced.” Her speaking voice is steady, tranquil. (“Her voice is the type I'd expect to hear mention ‘welcome to heaven’ as I hop down clouds of fluff,” reads the best comment on a video she posted of herself singing cross-legged in the grass while in quarantine.) Nevertheless the meditation also felt like a way to signal finding peace, the finalization of a journey for the album’s titular main character.


Asha’s Awakening is a concept album that centers on a space princess from ancient Punjab, charting her revelations about love, restoration, and destruction over centuries. Raveena came up with the concept immediately after completing six or seven songs and spending each year doing statistics, as she and her team studied and combed through Bollywood soundtracks. It was March 2020, and she was spiraling in the early weeks of quarantine, foraging for a way to be efficient through both internal and external chaos. She had moved from New York to L.A. In the wake of a breakup, on the day the city reported shutdowns. Raveena was watching a bunch of sci-fi movies at the time, and in the length of a night, she wrote down the full architecture for the album. A couple of months immediately after, she asked an artist to illustrate Asha, so she may better grasp the character she created. For Raveena, “All the songs are personalized, and then I find a way to connect it back to the story. None of the songs are really from a perspective of the character. It’s more like I may relate to the character at the end.”


Quarantine made Raveena slow down. She danced, she wrote lyrics, she put the sonic elements of songwriting on hold largely for the opening six months. She would FaceTime her main guitarist, crying, and improvise songs with him as soon as he plucked at several chords; she called him “whenever the sobbing struck,” she says. Raveena had been working relentlessly in the years leading up to the pandemic. She began piecing with each other her 2017 breakout EP, Shanti, while still a student at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. In 2019, she released “Lucid,” a cozy, curatorial album that helped propel her following. The songs she recorded then were soft, velvety, churning through trauma with grieving and grace.


Asha’s Awakening, by contrast, bursts with joy and color, almost frenetic in its tempo. This is deliberate. Healing isn’t linear, Raveena says, and some days it may look like this sort of chaos, the hazy method of regaining confidence in your body. “After that internal work happens, there’s a sort of life and joy that erupts from you,” she says, waving her hands airborne. “And that’s what this album really was.”


That eruption is evident in songs like “Secret,” which thumps and winds around a verse from rapper Vince Staples (she had his precise vocal tone and flow in mind for months before she even reached out to him) and the shimmering opener “Rush.” Several of those songs are psychedelic, literally; she wrote a number of those following transformative acid trips. She based “Rush” on a visit she made to the Rubin Museum in New York while tripping, where she seen a sound installation with Buddhist chanting and South Asian art on the walls. “I realized that this is where I required the next album to go,” she says. “I had to dive into my culture and intersect it with all of genres and all of the art I grew up loving as a kid.”


Those connections came out of “so much historical research.” She purchased eight or nine instruments from India, without idea how to use them, and asked her bassist to identify how to play them. They were all researching Bollywood records from the 1960s via ‘80s, parsing arrangements, and combing by way of the ways Eastern sounds inspired Miles Coltrane and the Beatles, Timbaland and M.I.A. And Jai Paul. She wanted to pay respect to the cross-cultural fusions of the past. On “Circuitboard” and “Asha’s Kiss,” which features the legendary Indian singer Asha Puthli, Raveena felt like she integrated the Bollywood influences in a way only she might, in a manner that abandoned her mark.


Partway via album, the spoken word track “The Internet Is Like Consuming food Plastic” emerges from the twinkling soundscape. Over sinister, winking synths, Raveena murmurs like she’s dissociated or caught in a dream: “The internet makes me feel far away from my friends… the world wide web has me silly and smart at the same time.” As she was writing the album, Raveena traded her iPhone for a flip phone for three months, relying on the radio and purchasing a GPS to help steer her way across L.A. She wanted to escape “feeling like a robot half the time,” nevertheless she also wanted to stop putting pressure on herself to put out the best second album. She’d been fixating on other artists’ sophomore records, and the insecurities that came with infinite scroll seemed also unhealthy to adapt to. She’d lived in the New York area for nearly her entire life, and moving to L.A. Abandoned her gasping for nature and eager to explore. Over those three, smartphone-less months, she felt her mind expand, her capacity to feel grow. She walked and walked.


These days, she’s back online, promoting her album; she flashes her iPhone at her webcam, tethered to its charger. Nevertheless she takes comfort in knowing she’s capable of disconnecting and the ego death that comes with letting go. There’s a magnificent in feeling small some days, tracing your boundaries and barriers. She laughs at the camera, dripping a curtain of hair in front of her face. “I’m just a little little bean on a space rock,” she says. “Trying to get through.”