Written by: Paul Gleason

It’s hard to avoid using superlatives when writing about the music of Elephant Stone. So many adjectives come to mind – “transcendent,” “spiritual,” “groovy,” “innovative,” “earnest,” “uplifting,” “psychedelic” – that the computer keyboard seemingly calls for their use.

Of course, these adjectives signify a subjective response to Elephant Stone’s music. They’re not rational or critical. But that doesn’t matter.

Over the course of three albums – which now include the band’s magnum opus, The Three Poisons – Elephant Stone have proven Kierkegaard’s dictum that “subjectivity is truth.”

That is, by making music that speaks so clearly and passionately to your inner being, Elephant Stone’s music prompts introspection, with songs that challenge you to search for your higher self.

This challenge puts Elephant Stone in the camp of musicians like John Coltrane, Brian Wilson, The Beatles, Kevin Shields, Ravi Shankar, and Gustav Mahler – to name a few.

Songwriter-vocalist-bassist-sitarist Rishi Dhir, guitarist-vocalist Gab Lambert, and drummer-vocalist Miles Dupire, however, inject their philosophical and spiritual interests with FUN. Dhir writes catchy and powerful tunes that indicate the way in which his major influences – The Beatles, Teenage Fanclub, The Who, and Big Star, to name four – whirl around in his head and inspire him to create something new.

Dhir chatted with SEM about The Three Poisons.

SE: I think that The Three Poisons is the best thing you’ve ever done. What really strikes me is that it sounds more like a “band album” than the previous records. The other guys seem to have a lot more space to shine…

RD: Oh, for sure. Gab and Miles are phenomenal musicians, and we’ve toured together for the past year and a half or something, non-stop, and what they bring to the table is what makes Elephant Stone. I mean, I write the songs and have the vision, but they push it to the next level, especially Miles. You and I have talked about this before – just his drumming on this record is so phenomenal…

SE: Yes!

RD: Yeah, when we were mixing the record, it was like, “How could the drums not be in your face more?” We had to push them because they’re such a huge part of the sound of this record.

SE: Miles gives the whole thing a heavier and more solid sound throughout. Let’s talk about the title track. It was partially inspired by the drum pattern on “Tomorrow Never Knows,” right?

RD: Oh yeah, definitely.

SE: Take me through the song. What was the composition process like for that one?

RD: That was pretty much the first song I wrote for the record. We were on our first tour with this formation of the band. It was back in November 2012, I think. We were sound checking somewhere, and that bassline just came out. So I just kept messing around with it. It was in the back of my mind for a while. I thought it was a cool bassline, and I thought it was interesting. But I didn’t know where to take it from there. So it just germinated over a while, and I kept messing around with it. Then, right away, I heard the drumbeat for “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It’s basically the prototype for any cool song!

I mean, look at The Chemical Brothers’ song, “Setting Sun,” which has the “Tomorrow Never Knows” drum line, too. It’s so bombastic and so massive! And it sounds so tribal at the same time, so it was almost too easy for me (laughs). Should I use that? (laughs). I just asked Miles, “Do you want to try this and see what happens?” It works because it didn’t sound derivative, but it gave this sound of like when you’re lost in the mountains and this drum is echoing across. It sounds huge!

Once the drums came, I tried to keep the song really minimal. I didn’t want too many chord changes – or a chorus or a bridge or anything really. I just wanted to drive this groove and have these weird changes. I have what they call “The Devil’s Interval” in there. It’s funny because The Black Angels use it all the time. Clinic and Pink Floyd use it. It’s a B flat fifth, and it just brings out dissonance and evil in music. It’s just between the natural fifth and the flat fifth, and it makes you uneasy.

SE: So how many chord changes are in “The Three Poisons”?

RD: There are only three chords: an A, a B flat, and a D.

SE: So the changes are simple…

RD: Yeah. But the organ is droning and doing different inversions of A, which kind of suggests a chord change, too. When we warm up before a show – we always warm up in the green room on acoustic guitar – and I remember the first time we were doing that with “The Three Poisons.” I played it for the guys like a folk song, with chord changes to D and G in the verse, and they didn’t recognize the song! It’s interesting how arranging a song a certain way can change people’s perception of it.

SE: What’s Gab doing on that song? It’s so inventive…

RD: I was listening to a Turkish psych compilation, and there’s this one song that has an oud or something just vamping – just playing crazy, crazy stuff all the time. Gab and I were demoing, and I said, “Man, just play something crazy on the 12^th, non-stop,” so he put on his reverse pedal and basically just soloed for the whole song. So every night, it’s interesting for him because he gets to play something different. It’s a pretty open song – pretty out there – so it’s nice and free.

SE: Throughout the record, you repeat the phrase, “the three poisons.” For me, that phrase links all the songs as a thematic whole. Did you want The Three Poisons to be a concept album?

RD: Well, not initially. I tend to write the lyrics all at one go, once the music’s all done. I’m like, “Okay, what is this album? What are these songs?” I kind of have to do research within myself to see what I’m trying to say. When I started to do this, it started with the song, “The Three Poisons.”

Miles and I were rehearsing and working on the song. He hit this small flash cymbal, which sounded like a singing bowl. Then I asked myself, “What do singing bowls mean in Buddhism?” So I looked that up, and at the same time, I started getting ideas for songs and lyrics. Then, through that, I came upon the whole concept of “the three poisons,” which in Buddhism are the anger, ignorance, and attachment that bind you to this existence. From there, I started seeing the parallels to my songs. Also, my lyrics are really personal – they’re all a mass representation of my soul.

SE: The “you” in that song and on the record…it feels to me as if you’re singing to yourself. But you’re almost singing to the universal ego, if that makes sense?

RD: I know I’m not a perfect person. I have my own faults, and I am aware of them. And everyone is always trying to search for a way to better themselves and live a fuller existence and deal with all the issues, all the bullshit in life, and all the pain you go through. You’re trying to understand it all.

This album comes to terms with a lot of stuff I personally went through, so lyrically the Buddhist concept of the three poisons connected with me. Buddhism and how it evolved from Hinduism have always intrigued me. When my wife and I got married, we went to Dharamsala in India, where the Tibetan government are in exile. We stayed there for like 10 days and listened to some lectures, and then we went to monasteries. I started remembering that when I was working on the record, so I started reading up on Buddhism and the three poisons. Then I came to The Tibetan Book of the Dead and started thinking about “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Everything is connected somehow, so “Tomorrow Never Knows” came into play, as well as the intermediate state and the psychedelic sphere. So I went straight to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and I read the passage on the intermediate state, which is meant to be read to you by a monk as you are dying to help guide you through the intermediate state into the next life or to Nirvana.

SE: That’s bardo, right? The intermediate state?

RD: Yeah, that’s it exactly. So that started coming into play, and from there, I came to this talk that Siddhartha Gautama gave called The Fire Sermon or All Is Burning. He had to give a sermon to these monks and basically said, “All my senses are on fire, but how they’re awakened. Everything is awakened within me.” And it’s funny because I have a song called “All Is Burning.” That’s pretty much a direct reference to that. There’s something really powerful about that: that his senses were all on fire. Then, from that point, I took a more personal viewpoint and just like tried to apply it to my own ego and so on. That one is pretty loaded. It’s got a lot of things that I see, but it may not be so obvious to other people.

SE: Well, it really spoke to me. I mean, it sounds like you’re channeling George Harrison on a lot of the songs. The lyrics are so earnest and personal. “All Is Burning” leads into “Worlds Don’t Begin and End with You,” which is kind of a love song, isn’t it?

RD: Definitely. I remember that one was uncharted territory for us. I’ve always said I write pop songs and that’s pretty much as pop as it gets! And I do love love songs, but I don’t write them very often. But my love songs always have this kind of bittersweet thing to them or there’s always an extra bitterness or loss or wanderlust – I don’t know. That one came from a melody that I had thought about for a long time. I just figured that now was the time to throw it in there. I mean, there was no other song like that in our catalogue, and the guys were really into it.

SE: It sounds like you’re in the territory of U2 and Echo & The Bunnymen – the big music. That’s reflected in “Worlds” and “Echo & the Machine” in Gab’s guitar playing. He almost sounds like The Edge. What’s he doing?

RD: Yeah, we used a lot of delay.

SE: Okay, that’s the U2 vibe…

RD: Exactly. We used a lot of delay on this record, much more so than the last record, Elephant Stone. Guitar-wise, the last record sonically was pretty straight-up. Gab and I talked about that. When we finished the last record, we were like, “Wow, the guitars are pretty straight-up.” It’s just him playing. With this one, we were like, “With all the touring we’ve been doing”…it’s just like you try to change things up every night. So definitely we started listening to a lot more Krautrock and stuff like that.

SE: What bands?

RD: I was obsessing over Can. Basically Can and Neu!.

SE: Yeah, I hear a lot of Neu! That’s why I was asking. Is “Echo & the Machine” a reference to Echo & The Bunnymen?

RD: Yeah, totally. That song’s funny. I had the music for a long time, and it actually started off like an upbeat Tom Petty song. It was weird. I actually presented it to the band for the previous record, but I dropped it because it was like a Tom Petty song! As I started delving more into Krautrock, I was like, “Okay, I could put more of a Krautrock beat in it.”

SE: Let’s back up and talk about all the different styles on the record. The Three Poisons sounds like Elephant Stone’s “White Album” and Sign ‘O’ the Times because it varies so much stylistically. Did that just come out naturally or did you set out to explore new terrain on this one?

RD: I like all different types of music, and so I find that my records never just sound one way. Every song always has something different. When I wrote this album, I basically had rough sketches of 25 from which to choose. So I really weeded it down to the ones that the band and I thought were good. And when we were working on it, it was like I’d work on a song-by-song basis. I already had the ideas mapped out, and I guess the main thing for this record is that I wanted it to be groovy. I wanted it to have this cool, groovy vibe to it – and that comes from Miles. I knew he could pull a lot of it off – like the drumbeat on “Child of Nature.” It’s this break beat for which I had the idea, and I asked him if he could do it. And he just took it to this next level! Or “The Three Poisons.” Or “Knock You,” which is a four-on-the-floor dance song. All the songs have this dance vibe to them.

I mean, when we play a song like “Heavy Moon” live, I can see people really get into it – or a song like “Sally Go Round the Sun” or something else groovy. They would be way more in to it. And, for this record, I wanted to give that vibe, but at the same time, not just try to make this dance-y Madchester record, where its just like the same grooves and Mini Piano over and over. I wanted something more to it. That’s how I wrote “Motherless Child.” “Knock You” was based on a bassline that evolved from us jamming “Sally Go Round the Sun” on our European tour. But some songs were built as songs, like “Wayward Son,” which I labored over because I knew that would be the pop song on this record.

SE: That’s a beautiful song. That should be a single!

RD: Oh really? Cool. I love that song. So all these songs add something different. I guess I kind of saw what the songs were, and then I saw where we could take them. So, stylistically, “Living for Something” was the most different. That was a very different approach for me because it’s kind of like a soul song. I had to sing it like a soul singer would. Usually, I double track my vocals, but for that one, I left it a single track.

SE: Let’s end by talking about “Knock You” a bit more. How did you come up with that bassline? It’s just genius.

RD: Like I said, we were on tour in Europe. I remember we had a show in the Netherlands. I was very tired and had this crazy load in. We had to walk up like 10 flights of stairs! I was not in a good mood! We were sound checking, and I wasn’t happy during sound check. So we’re working on “Sally,” and I wasn’t paying attention. Then, all of a sudden, that bassline came out. I was like, “Ah, that’s pretty cool.” So we’d play “Sally” for the rest of the tour, and I started playing that bassline over it. When I came back home from that tour, I started thinking about the next record and figured, “Well that bassline was too good to just keep it for a live rendition of ‘Sally’.”

“Knock You” was pretty much written in 15 minutes. I mean once the bassline was there, I came up with the vocal idea and then that was it. And then the icing on the cake was bringing in Malika – because I knew in the middle part I wanted this “The Great Gig in the Sky” vibe, like this girl just vamping. Before she came in, I sent to her a YouTube clip of “The Great Gig in the Sky.” It was great! It’s a fun song! And I always have one or two social commentary songs on each record, and that’s one.

(Interview transcribed by Cameron Billon; photographs taken by Bowen Stead and Daniel Barkley.)