Exegesis: Five Albums to Meditate To

In Exegesis posts, I project my own ideas onto popular art—mainly fiction, music, and film—with little regard for the artist’s intentions. Past subjects include Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” and Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain”. Future subjects will include Octavia Butler’s Earthseed Series, the music of Dan Deacon, and TV’s Adventure Time.

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One of my favorite things to do is put on a good pair of over-the-ear headphones and listen to a full album, end-to-end, no distractions.

Is this meditation? I don’t know! But for a skillful practitioner, anything can be an opportunity for contemplative practice. And there are a few albums which—thanks to their lyrical content, musical form, or both—make particularly good meditation companions.

Laurie Anderson, Tenzin Choegyal, and Jesse Paris Smith

There’s something magical about the harsh whisper of Laurie Anderson’s voice breaking through an ambient silence with the words: Awakened One!

Awakened One! Do not let your thoughts wander.

Now the bardo of the moment before death is dawning. Abandon all grasping, yearning, and attachment. Enter undistracted into clear awareness.

Release your consciousness into the space of the unborn mind, leaving this body of flesh and blood. Know it to be a transitory illusion.

I’ve been a Laurie Anderson fan ever since the video for O Superman changed my definition of the word “music”. So I was immensely excited to see her collaborate with Tibetan Buddhist and world-famous musician Tenzin Choegyal1.

Songs from the Bardo draws from the ancient Bardo Thodol, popularly known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The book itself is delightful and disorienting. It takes the reader—or more traditionally, the listener—on a journey through the liminal, dreamlike space that allegedly separates lifetimes. The text is meant to serve as a guide for the recently deceased, as they navigate the bardo seeking liberation (or at least a promising rebirth).

On the album, Anderson recites passages from the text, accompanied by singing bowls, violin, cellos, piano, and traditional Tibetan instruments. Occasionally Choegyal joins in, singing in a throaty, resonant Sanskrit.

Much like the book, Songs from the Bardo balances light and dark, harmony and dissonance, awe and terror. There are beautiful rainbow lights, deities dancing with knives, holding cups full of blood, angry and smiling. The instrumentation follows along, sometimes beautifully consonant, and sometimes holding a horrific tension.

The album has the same ritualistic feel as a ceremonial reading of the Bardo Thodol might. It feels disrespectful to put it on casually, without giving it your full attention.

And if you do start to get lost in thought, every few minutes Anderson will pull you back in with a jarring: Awakened One!

Tame Impala

It should come as no surprise that I’ve listed an album that dedicates an entire song to the effects of nitrous oxide.

My first play-through of this album took place on a summer day, as I laid in the sun with my eyes closed, on a half tab of acid. The opening song, Let it Happen, is in many ways perfect for a psychedelic come-up—the name alone is a wonderful mantra for the psychonaut.

It's always around me, all this noise
But not nearly as loud as the voice saying
"Let it happen, let it happen (It's gonna feel so good)
Just let it happen, let it happen"

But the album isn’t just a Beatles-esque feel-good anthem. It contends with the suspenseful terror of immanent transcendence, with the duality of doubt and faith.

New Person, Same Old Mistakes perfectly articulates the inner tension here—a tension I’ve frequently felt when on the verge of ego death. Two voices (both belonging to Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker) argue, presumably in an inner dialogue:

Feel like a brand-new person
(But you'll make the same old mistakes)
Well, I don't care, I'm in love
(Stop before it's too late)…
I finally know what it's like
(You don't have what it takes)
(Stop before it's too late)
(I know there's too much at stake)

The whole album is a never-ending crescendo. Epiphany, catharsis, resolution always feel like they’re one beat away.

This, to me, is precisely the issue with drug-centric spirituality. It’s always slightly dissatisfying, and never fully resolves—unless you do the work to enter and navigate those spaces without the crutch of a chemical.

Finally taking flight
I know you don't think it's right
I know that you think it's fake
Maybe fake's what I like
The point is, I have the right
Not thinking in black and white

Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion

I think a lot of my stuff is weirdly joyful about mortality, and this [album] is no exception.

—Caroline Shaw

I’ve been enjoying the collaboration between Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion since their 2021 album Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, but this year’s Rectangles and Circumstance is one my favorite contemporary classical compositions.

The album moves through a vast array of emotions, and expertly carries the listener along its currents. It opens up with an angsty description of contemporary techno-culture:

What’s the solitary game you play?
What are you content to say?
What’s your slot machine ballet?
Have your fears refreshed today?

…bitter gods look down at ants
scrolling through the avalanche
of politics and quick romance,
navigating the expanse
of rectangles and circumstance.

But it balances that intensity with soothing, lullaby-esque meditations. Shaw’s voice is perfect here, pleasant and mesmerizing.

Two books
Two songs
Wet air
Deep breath

One kiss
One hug
Hold time
Deep breath

Other times it takes on a haunting tone, self-harmonizing, with Reichian vocal snippets repeating percussively in the background.

Walking the line
Everything’s fine
Internal rhyme
Of a lie

I’m searching the streets
Finding beats of deceit
And skin on clean sheets

Throughout the album, Sō Percussion’s instrumentation is wildly innovative, with strange time signatures and sounds I can't quite identify. They complement Shaw’s voice perfectly.

And, true to the Shaw quote above, the tone of the album is entirely hopeful, despite candidly grappling with the pre-apocalyptic modernity we find ourselves in.

When all the seas rise high my dear
and the rocks melt with the sun
will the memory of us still rhyme with anyone?

Will we still tune our violins?
Will we still sing of roses?
Will we exist at all my love?
Or will fade to stanzas of the dust?

Leo Svirsky

This is the only instrumental album on the list. But it’s been a wonderful meditation companion for me, so I feel the need to include it here, despite not really knowing how to properly articulate its beauty.

The title itself does a wonderful job: river without banks a mantra I’ve returned to repeatedly in my meditation practice. The phrase comes from musicologist Henry Orlov (whose wife, not coincidentally, was Svirsky’s piano teacher). Orlov viewed music as a bridge to a “higher reality”, as a way to transcend the merely physical (the banks) by entering a stream of the spiritual (the river).

The album primarily consists of two pianos, echoing and supporting each other. The effect is ethereal, and distorts the listener’s sense of time. Whenever the composition reaches a climax, the voices are so full that it becomes difficult to focus your attention on any one sound or motif, and your attentional muscle inevitably collapses into a wide passivity.

The poetic notes accompanying the album, written by composer Antoine Beuger, convey the wonder of Svirsky’s work better than my prose ever could:

how to begin?

no beginning: in-ing, being with-in, be(come)ing, coming to be, to be(g)in, to enter a world of

infinitives, of infinite, never ending reverberation: verb-ing again, ever dissolving what might seem to

be(come) an object to be observed; not finding: being found, finding oneself implied in a deeply

moving transparency of layer upon layer, fold upon fold, nothing happening without immediately

multiplying itself, in a trembling, highly spirited undulation, ululation sometimes, a shivering,

surfacing upon the face of this river without banks.

Dan Deacon

Close your eyes
Float away
Feel so fine
A new day
Starts any moment you'd like

You may have expected this list to be full of spa-friendly, pan-flute-filled muzak. If the inclusion of Tame Impala didn’t disabuse you of that notion, Dan Deacon’s Become a Mountain sure will.

Deacon is, if nothing else, a maximalist. His work has the manic feel of Beethoven on amphetamines set loose in a room full of synthesizers.2 Every track is filled with layer upon layer of sound.

And yet somehow it all coheres together into a beautiful gestalt. With a good pair of headphones, you can hear each individual part, and feel its contribution to the whole. It’s never noise for the sake of noise—everything feels meticulously balanced. Become a Mountain is no exception.

Lyrically, the album reads like a guided meditation. Deacon’s work has always had a mystical bent (see, for example, this delightful animation of his song When I Was Done Dying—a song that deserves its own Exegesis post). But Mystic Familiar takes it to a new extreme, repeatedly exhorting the listener to “close your eyes” and focus on feelings of metta and equanimity:

Close your eyes
And become a mountain
Become all around you
Become the skies, become the seas

Open your eyes
And remain the mountain
Breathing in deeply
Feeling the day change with the breeze

Like in Songs for the Bardo, most of the lyrics are in the imperative, constantly calling the listener to attention.

Dig deep (The water deep down is safe enough to drink)
Burn bright (The fire inside is brighter than you think)
Stay sharp (Time will want it smooth around the end)
Feel free (First you must relax before transcend)

When I follow Deacon’s music not just with my attention, but with my whole emotional being, every climax creates an internal, tactile explosion; every cut to silence leaves an echoing, resonant stillness, like ripples on a pond slowly returning to the surface.

When it comes to meditation, I’m generally a fan of just sitting, free of distractions—even traditional guided meditation can be a bit of a crutch.

But sometimes you need a little extra stimulation, a little extra motivation to keep your butt on the cushion. On those days, music can be a wonderful addition to your practice.