This collaborative effort by the creators of "Innergy", a cable channel devoted to mind, body and spirit, begins with a lot of promise, certainly if one is looking for some respite from the fast-paced rigours of modern life. The music and spoken lyrics, for the most part, flow smoothly enough together and certainly complement each other's recitative and instrumental talents. A better balance in volume between the spoken words and the instrumentation would have helped the listener to actually hear all the words, which sometimes got muffled in the programmed drum beats. On one track, 'Falling in Love with God', which I rather liked for its particular melody, as well as the beautiful guitar solo, was at times annoying because it seemed to me that the background "beat" was out of synch.
While there is a good diversity of rhythm from one track to the next and even within each track, and the basic lyrical concepts are quite interesting, on a couple of tracks ('The Land of Bliss' and 'My Heart Beats in Waves') they were simply repetitive and without any real substance.
At least one exception to that is 'Where Children Meet', which was composed and recorded directly from a telephone conversation between the two performers, inspired by Tagore, a favourite poet of Deepak's father, which contained the lyrics, "Every child that is born is proof that God has not yet given up on human beings."
A track which I particularly liked, apart from the first three, was the second-last one, 'This Time of Parting', which fully demonstrated both the musical brilliance of Dave Stewart and Deepak Chopra's perfectly executed narration. Although it's the shortest track on the CD, it's very emotionally sweet in its subdued melancholy. The listener is then jolted out of that reverie by a somewhat campy-sounding, but catchy reggae version of the title theme to close off the CD, just for the fun of it! |
