Appropriately enough for a Valentine’s Day post, I initially heard of singer/songwriter Raveena during my first ever queer romance, when the girl I had just started dating made me a playlist (lol, gay). I remember being immediately struck by Raveena’s music, which is queer and sexy and undeniably magical, and texting the aforementioned Girl about how much I loved it. I have since bitterly unsubscribed from that playlist, but I simply could not unsubscribe from Raveena.
Raveena’s latest, Asha’s Awakening, is a concept album centered around the titular Asha, a Punjabi space princess from ancient times. In an instagram post promoting the music video for the album’s first single, “Rush,” Raveena writes of Asha: “[She] is trained by peaceful aliens in highly advanced spiritual magic. When she comes back down to Earth after her 2000 years of training in space, she attracts an obsessive cult following around her, which leads to her eventual demise.” The album weaves together a number of musical influences, from Bollywood scores to R&B of the early 2000s, and the result is a joyful and sensuous experience that demands repeated listening.
There is a lot to love about this album, but I think I’ll start with how sexy it is. In an interview with NPR, Raveena said part of Asha’s return to earth is because she misses human love and sensuality. The lyrics throughout Asha’s Awakening are not explicitly about Asha’s identity or her adventures, and rather than presenting a straightforward narrative, the album functions more as a mood piece exploring the inner life of a character, but if one thing comes through clearly, it’s this: Asha is down to fuck.
Raveena has not been shy in recent years about expressing her sexuality through her music, and she imbues Asha with the same sense of self-love through sexual discovery found in some of her older tracks. But Asha has the benefit of being a several-thousand-year-old space princess, and in embodying her, Raveena herself becomes the confident temptress she sang to in 2018’s “Temptation.” Throughout the album, Asha tempts men and women alike, and in several songs doesn’t bother to identify any gender for the object of her desire, because who needs gender in space? Of course, I’m reading into this with the knowledge that Raveena is openly pansexual, but with lyrics like “Taking all our tops off / Come into the water / God I love my women / Let’s all become farmers” (“Kismet”), I don’t think I am reaching in my assumption that Asha is, much like Raveena, a queer icon.
Something else really special about the emphasis on sexuality here is that there is an equal focus on spirituality, and that these forces do not oppose each other but work together to create a sense of harmony and balance: an acknowledgement that an incredibly evolved being like Asha would understand that sex can be a wholly positive and even religious experience. In one of the album’s more personal songs (perhaps Asha is astral projecting for this part?), Raveena sings about an abortion she had in her early twenties. She grants herself grace and compassion when it comes to her experiences as a younger woman, reflecting on her growth since that time and the growth she has yet to do, and this, too, feels notable when paired with spirituality and the implied existence of enlightened beings — this emphasis on acceptance and understanding.
The album is split into two fairly distinctive halves with a spoken interlude. The first half is upbeat and dancey with an emphasis on Raveena’s Bollywood and disco influences, and the second half is softer, more personal, and leans more towards R&B. I am not going to pretend that I know how to write about music itself with any level of sophistication, but I learned a lot about the album’s South Asian influences and instrumentation in Vrinda Jagota’s excellent review of the album for NPR. There are so many things from this piece I want to quote, but at a certain point I’ll just be copying and pasting the entire article so I’m going to encourage you to go ahead and read it. Among other things, Jagota goes into detail about the album’s most “overarching influence”: Indian jazz and disco legend and self-described “space cadet” Asha Puthli (who is also featured on the song “Asha’s Kiss”). Jagota writes,
“Raveena and Puthli [...] treat outer space as a realm of escape and fantasy. It's no coincidence that two women of Indian descent in America's music industry, who likely found themselves fighting to belong in murky spaces between culture and continent, may be drawn to space's frontier, an endless expanse not dissimilar from the open land that Mitski and Solange recently explored as cowboys—it's a place where they can try on whatever personas they want.”
The album ends with a thirteen minute long guided meditation entitled “Let Your Breath Become a Flower,” which I did participate in and which did make me feel like I was pulsating with light from a distant universe. Raveena meditates daily, and speaking to NPR about the track, she says, “I think that a lot of times, people don't even know how to sit still and meditate. But we all know how to listen to music. So putting it on an album feels like a way to invite people who don't even know how to do it yet.” This album has so many different influences and in many ways is a total passion project, but the choice to end it on a guided meditation feels like a gift to the listener from Asha and Raveena both, an invitation to share in this space which is simultaneously fictional and deeply personal.
Needless to say, go listen to the album, and then please send me your positive manifestations so that I can snag a ticket to see Raveena on tour in May.