(Excerpts from an Interview with Jai-Jagdeesh)
“‘Hold Your Hand’ is probably the quietest but also deepest track on this album. It’s a song I wrote while reading a very beautiful book called “Love Poems from God” that was gifted to me by a dear friend. I had struggled with the word ‘God’ for a really long time because so many awful things have been done in the name of God, so I’ve always referred to the Divine as ‘the Divine’ or ‘the Cosmos’ or ‘the Universe’…
“But this book was gifted to me, and my back straightened up seeing the name “God.” I wasn’t sure I was going to read it, but then I started flipping through the poems. Oh my God, they are just so luscious and beautiful and full of longing and aching for an experience with the Divine, a connection with the Divine. Poems from Kabir, Rumi, Hafiz, St. Thomas… a collection of voices from the East and West, who so beautifully articulated the relationship between the human and the Divine. That longing they encapsulated gorgeously, and one day I sat down to my harmonium and started to write a song that was basically the Divine speaking to the human saying: ‘No matter what you do, no matter how you do it, whether you believe in me or you don’t, I will hold you.’
“It softened something in me to have this dialogue. I was writing it from the perspective of an entity that I am not, but also I am, and I was writing it in a place of recognizing how many of us want to hear those words spoken to us: ‘I will hold you.’
“There is a section at the end that goes into this beautiful breakdown of the lyrics: ‘Go on your way, go on your way, go on’ and underneath it: ‘I will hold you, I will hold you…’ I just watched that become this bubble of all the support that I have always wanted to feel around me. I hope that it will offer everyone out there the same support. I feel it when I hear those words, and maybe it will heal your heart a little bit too, when it comes to that entity, the Divine.”
Listen to Down Come the Walls now.