‘Divine Surrendering’ new EP by Doe Paoro at Peaceful Radio Internet Station
11 June 2022 Artists
Click on photo for Doe’s website.
Nothing stays still forever, the spirit of nature growing upward towards something greater. Fueled by that understanding, Doe Paoro has spent much of the last year deep in the Costa Rican jungle, exploring ways that music could activate deeper consciousness. Like Leonard Cohen’s pilgrimage to the isolated Buddhist monastery at the top of Mount Baldy, the musician born Sonia Kreitzer has opted for a life of spirituality and healing, infusing that strength into her latest release, Divine Surrendering (due June 10th), a healing ceremony in EP form. “The pandemic felt like a collective spiritual and existential initiation in many ways,” she says. “What felt inspiring to me was to make songs that held space for that.” By deepening her connection with rituals like sound baths and the healing power of music, Paoro’s latest work allowed her to entrust in music’s potential to be a wellspring of uplift in the midst of gossamer beauty.
Returning to California at the end of the tour for 2018’s heart-rending Soft Power, Paoro found herself more afflicted by the experience of sharing her art than ever before. She had sunk into something beyond burnout, a state of complete desolation. “I came to the realization that this model and mode of creating art was unsustainable for me and I needed to start from scratch and create something new,” Paoro explains. “What was central in that moment was this question of how music could help, how it could serve.”
While her music had always incorporated an ethereal, transcendental quality, Divine Surrendering owns up to its title, pushing past the personal and into an immeasurable depth. The opening track “All My Life’s a Ceremony” explores that profundity, building from softly fingerpicked acoustic guitar and harmonium chords to a waltzing sweetness. “I’m still learning, I’m still learning/ All my life’s a ceremony,” Paoro avows. By resonantly repeating “the one,” the mantra cleverly burrows and blurs the concept of an individual self with something greater. “Building community has been really important to me in the last few years,” Paoro says. “In many ways this EP is devoted to the sacred and the ceremonial, music that could be used in collective group spaces to connect us.”
Once she realized she’d need to invent a new shape for her art, Paoro began splitting time between Los Angeles and Costa Rica, escaping the paradoxically congested and isolated existence of life in a big city. She continues her studies of plant medicine, and ritual music. “I knew there had to be a way to get inspired by something other than the sorrows of this life, to not have to be a black mirror reflecting that over and over at myself,” she says. “This album is the first time I was able to shed that and not be dependent on that mindstate. I wasn’t inspired to write songs or to tour like I used to. I just wanted to play healing music and not be in bars.” Over the last years, that intention rippled out as she began to be invited to perform her music for psilocybin ceremonies internationally.
Rather than be trapped in bars—or stuck inside of them—Divine Surrendering allows Paoro and the listener to explore healing worlds beyond. The title track explores that exact worldshift in purple piano spirals, Paoro’s seraphic vocals leading the way. “Feeling in the dark, crawling til I walk, each time that I fall/ Divine surrendering,” she sings, that feeling of exploration and mystery ringing desperately true. In fact, Paoro’s expansive musical questing dates as far back as signing on for her first record, 2012’s Slow to Love, when she traveled alone through the Himalayas. There she studied lhamo, a Tibetan tradition of music and dance, incorporating some of its spirit in her own art-making. “I don’t want to have to compartmentalize my life,” Paoro explains. “And living in the jungle has been a deep remembering of how everything is interconnected and interdependent. Seeing how nature has done it gives me courage to do the same.”
Elsewhere, “La Luna” taps more directly into ritualistic music. Written by Stella Maillot, the track borrows from a melody the woman had sung during an ayahuasca ceremony Paoro had attended ten years prior. On Divine Surrendering, the channeled melody gains added authenticity via a field recording of the jungle surrounding Paoro’s immaculately layered harmonies. The gleaming “Phases” calls out nature head on, speaking to the moon as if it were a nurturing parent, continuing the quest for growth and acceptance. “If I were like you/ I would trust that I would be/ New again,” she sings, radiating synth and softly shifting rhythm backing her cries.
Like the rebirth Paoro experienced in her own journey, the EP finds comfort in a constant sense of newness, growth, and transformation. Throughout Divine Surrendering, Paoro returns to grand humility, harnessing her strength by losing the self, tapping into something immense and drawing the listener to that same place. “It’s all about learning to trust life, to trust the medicine of life, to remember that we really don’t know anything!” she says. “I find myself challenged by accepting the flow, but all I know is that I keep changing.”
Benno Veugen Divine Surrendering, Doe Paoro, Peaceful Radio, Peaceful Radio Internet Station