Today we’d like to introduce you to Dave Stringer.
Hi Dave, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
How I Became a Kirtan Artist: The first compositional act I remember occurred when, at age nine, I taped “Within You, Without You” backward on my family’s old reel-to-reel, cut it into pieces of random length, and spliced it back together in a different order. Soprano led to tenor and curiosity to a conundrum. In pursuit of some longing, I plotted sonic art installations in public spaces, studied jazz, sang in choirs, and created experimental films. Eventually, I got an internship at Columbia Pictures and moved to Hollywood to work in the movie industry.
I didn’t seek the path of yoga and kirtan. It found me. My work as a video editor took me to Gurudev Siddha Peeth, an ashram in the town of Ganeshpuri in the Indian state of Maharashtra. The only thing I was seeking was a paycheck in an exotic setting. My previous experience with Eastern spiritual traditions was minimal. I had been invited to meet different spiritual teachers who were visiting Los Angeles on a number of occasions but had always declined.
I’d had a brief professional involvement with someone who had once lived in the Ganeshpuri ashram, and one day I received a phone call from her asking if I would be interested in a project that would take me to India. Her contacts had asked her if she knew anyone who would be right for this job, so she sat down to meditate on it. She said that she knew this would sound strange to me, but I had appeared in her meditation as being the person who was meant to go.
Although I was skeptical, at the time I was also quite broke because a number of other potential jobs had recently fallen through. An all-expense paid trip to India seemed far preferable to spinning in the void of Hollywood unemployment.
At the ashram, I didn’t understand the Sanskrit they were chanting, but the sound of it had a powerful effect on me. Because I was an employee and not a devotee, at first, I didn’t participate directly in the chants. I would sit and listen to people chant from across the road. I would then figure out the tunes on a dulcimer and an accordion I had brought with me to keep myself entertained.
After a while, I started to absorb the sounds of the mantras. They were easy for me to learn as if they had been in me all along. In my spare time, I wrote songs that were informed by the ragas and thekas I was hearing, and my sonic vocabulary expanded to include tabla, harmonium, and tamboura.
For many years, in my own music, I had been singing sounds that were like mantras, sounds that evoked a state that common words couldn’t really convey. The sounds didn’t have any meaning in an intellectual sense, but they spoke very clearly on an emotional level. I found that the opposite was also true, that I could convey my thoughts clearly, but this would have the effect of obscuring the emotional truth. I was forced to choose one plane or another, much like a photographer uses aperture, focus, and depth of field to create meaning within the frame. As a singer, I was using my voice as a tool to gain freedom from my mind. In India, I found that there was a long tradition of singers like me.
My job involved distilling lengthy talks by the guru into fifteen-minute short subjects suitable for viewing by newcomers to Eastern philosophy. There was a certain logic in hiring me for this work, since I myself was a beginner. So I sat and listened and watched myself turning inward.
I spent every day immersed in the teachings of yoga. The people overseeing my work were knowledgeable and open to discourse. Swami Chidvilasananda was warm and witty and very accessible to me, and I had some experiences so astonishing and transformative that it shifted the course of my life.
I chose to stay on in India when the film editing work was done, and since I had already been volunteering my time at the local grade school, the ashram sent me to assist and eventually teach there. There were traditional Indian instruments there for me to practice on, and we would chant every day. Although I did receive formal instruction in the traditions of Indian music from teachers at the ashram, I really learned more about the heart and soul of chanting by singing with the kids. Basically, a bunch of schoolchildren taught me to chant!
After I returned to Los Angeles, I began leading chants privately at meetings of different spiritual organizations. I started recording a CD of songs I had written while I was in India and continued supporting myself as an editor. I became involved in a volunteer organization that taught meditation, chanting, and yoga to prison inmates, and for a number of years, I conducted weekly programs at different correctional institutions. The inmates taught me to speak about spiritual subjects in a manner that was humorous, direct, and practical. I continued to practice yoga, but I had no intention or idea that chanting would ever be more than an avocation.
Then I received an invitation from Yoga Works studio in Santa Monica, California, asking me If I’d be interested in leading regular call-and-response kirtan nights that would be open to the public. I got a little band together and put out a flyer. At first, not many people came, but eventually word spread, and I started chanting at yoga centers all over Los Angeles.
Eventually, an invitation came to chant at Jivamukti, a major yoga studio in New York City, and I started traveling with yoga teacher friends to sing for their workshops at yoga conferences in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Phoenix, and other large American cities. Within a few years, performing and recording became a full-time way of life, and my regular concert tour expanded to also include Canada, Europe, China, and Australia, along with yoga retreats in Bali, Mexico, Thailand, and Crete.
The challenge for me now is to experience the entire process of my life and work as a yoga. India blasted me into billions of spinning particles and then slowly reshaped me, a process that was somehow simultaneously both excruciating and ecstatic. I can’t begin to claim complete knowledge about all of the layers of history, philosophy and theology represented by the mantras I learned to chant while I was there, but I can attest to their power. I have never lost my sense of wonder, and while I am deeply committed to the process of inquiry that the practice of yoga suggests, I am also deeply aware of the limitations of my senses and my experience.
I do know that my sustained encounter with mantra chanting has acquainted me with a state of expansive stillness and conscious repose, and that this encounter has irrevocably shifted the course of my art. I once read that Thomas Jefferson took a copy of the Bible and cut out the parts that most resonated with him, then reassembled his selections into a work that reflected his own way of saying his prayers. I suppose it is fair to say that as an artist, I am engaged in something of a similar process with yoga. I don’t know exactly where I’m going. I’m just trying to report honestly from where I am. The road extends out before me, seemingly without end. And I am forever finding myself at the beginning.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Looking back, I recognize that I have been presented with some easy opportunities, but inevitably have chosen more challenging paths. This has certainly expanded my skill sets, widened my range of experiences, and produced deeper knowledge in many areas. But it also has left me with a feeling of unrealized potential and a sense that I could be much better known and more successful if I’d made other choices. That said, I’ve also learned how to turn obstacles into opportunities. I’ve developed great patience and a mostly steady equanimity in the face of challenges and circumstances I cannot control.
Many of the struggles have involved trying to manage a music career, a marriage, and longstanding friendships while being continuously on the road for twenty years. I’m also a spiritual singer who is an agnostic, moving through a world of true believers, trying to make art out of my doubts and process of self-inquiry. I often feel like an imposter, but am trying to be honest, putting my messy process in front of a crowd, and transmuting my pain into joy through music.
Somehow, despite a nagging sense of being overwhelmed and inadequate to the tasks at hand, I’ve still managed to be a happy and generous person. I feel gratitude for my life and an enduring sense of wonder pretty much every day.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I’m best known as a Kirtan singer who leads crowds in call-and-response chanting of Sanskrit mantras. My audience is concentrated in the Yoga community, which is a kind of small town spread out all over the world. The music that I make involves the crowd singing along with a band that has a highly improvisational component to it. It’s quite rhythmic and ecstatic, but it brings people ultimately to a place of joyful unity and meditative stillness.
I’m quite interested and knowledgeable about the neuro-scientific aspects of what I do, and talk about it frequently. I have a research and art project that the neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and I are currently developing called The Effect of Group Ritual on Brain Function. This interest and approach certainly set me apart from the rest of the Bhakti / Yoga scene.
My musical partner Madi Das and I have been nominated for a Grammy twice now for our collaborations, most recently for Mantra Americana, which we released in 2022. The second album in the series (we are projecting five total installments) was just released to all of the streaming services August 25, 2023 and we hope to be back at the Grammys again this coming February.
Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
I’m only as good as my band and my musical collaborators. I also couldn’t do this without the support of my wife, my old friends and literally hundreds of people who own and manage yoga studios all over the world.
It’s said that you should always try to play tennis with players better than you if you want to improve your game. Same with musicians. I’ve surrounded myself with people that challenge me and are continually instructing and informing me.
My wife, Dearbhla Kelly, is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy, and she has educated me rigorously in the principles, theories, and methods of philosophy.
Of the people who have supported my concerts, workshops, and retreats, I hardly know where to start, there are so many people to thank.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://davestringer.com
- Instagram: https://bit.ly/davestringerIG
- Facebook: https://bit.ly/davestringerFB
- Youtube: https://bit.ly/davestringerYT
- SoundCloud: https://bit.ly/StringerSC
- Other: https://linktr.ee/davestringer
