I had this crazy, a bit of a near-death experience in Estonia. I had these visions of the future but I was in this state where I felt the past, the present, and the future were all happening at the same time.

If you repeat something enough it can literally physically change the air particles around you and it can infuse the air with this sacred sound vibration, or it can change your material body, like transform your flesh to spirit. These are all beliefs within the Hare Krishna philosophy we were brought up with.

The way that music is approached in the temple is very call and response; it breaks down that barrier between performer and audience.

I listen to pop music and it sounds like mantra to me, there's this power to it. There's also something to be said about how it reaches people on a mass level, there's some magic to that.

My parents both renounced their material lives and were living as monks at an ashram in L.A. when they met each other. So we were always raised in this environment and when we moved to the ashram in Florida it was just like, "Oh, wow, now all of a sudden there's more people like us," because we were growing up in the middle of Texas with our parents, always being the weirdos.

One of the reasons why I chose to live in New York was that there is this sense of your environment constantly changing.

There are a lot of unspoken things with me and Nimai [Larson]. We're very yin and yang, neither one of us really treads on each other's toes. She's this wizard of the rhythm world, and I know nothing about that, but I can dabble with melody and lyrics and that's something she doesn't really have any interest in. We complement each other in that way.