Dhani Harrison Re-Learns England

The number of different paths that Dhani Harrison could have taken in his 45 years on this planet are seemingly infinite. That’s the beauty of growing up as the only child of one of the world’s most famous rock musicians. When you don’t want for anything, you can do pretty much anything you want. Luckily for us, Harrison has opted to continue down a path his father initially carved out in a perpetual search for musical and spiritual enlightenment. Since helping put the finishing touches on the posthumous George Harrison album Brainwashed, Dhani has started a few bands, worked on various film and TV scores (among them Beautiful Creatures and Good Girls Revolt) and found himself collaborating with everyone from Ben Harper to Wu-Tang Clan.

Harrison’s solo output may look slim in comparison — just two albums, so far — but that seems to be only because he crafts them with such care. 2017’s IN///PARALLEL was a thoughtful collection of heady, and sometimes heavy, electronic pop, colored with dark shades and, on the haunting closing track, “Admiral of Upside Down,” bright psychedelic afterburn. The recently released INNERSTANDING follows a similar sonic path, but with shafts of bright light breaking through the mossy overgrowth of programmed beats, fuzzed out bass and Harrison’s righteously paranoiac lyrics of a planet and its populace on the brink. As he insisted when we spoke recently over Zoom, the record isn’t all “doom and gloom.” There are breaths of calm and feelings of optimism represented by the leavening vocals of regular collaborator Mereki and the meditative instrumental “La Sirena.”

Speaking from his home outside of London, Harrison took a leisurely stroll away from and back to my questions as we discussed healing, collaborating and “re-learning” his home country. The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Paste: In a previous interview, you talked about returning to England after a number of years living in L.A. and how disconnected you felt from your home country at first. Has that gotten better?

Dhani Harrison: I’ve lived in England, on and off, for my whole life. It’s just a different pace. It was funny, in L.A., there was a moment where all of the people from London who we moved to L.A. to avoid turned up in L.A. Shortly after that, the world went into lockdown and it seemed like everyone went home. I was looking after my grandmother as well. She was very old. After she passed away, I didn’t have any family living in L.A. anymore. I always knew I was coming back to England, and I have to say, it’s been a really great place to be over the last three years. I’ve got a really great community here and reconnected with all the old friends. And I’ve been working on new musical projects. The stuff I’ve been working on here is very high end. England has some extremely fine quality of artists and they’re more hidden away, so it’s naturally going to be a tougher nut to crack. So cracking that and finding the people who can meet me on my energetic level, that’s been the mission.

You seem to be someone who really thrives when you’re working with other people. What do you think makes for a good collaborator?

Just the willingness to learn. I like to learn new things, and I like to expose myself to different styles of music or design or film. I have friends that I like to do woodwork with, and I have friends that I like to cook with. And I have friends that I like to make music with. I’ve grown up in a house that’s been very pro collaboration. I grew up with the Wilburys. That was the benchmark. Getting all of your favorite people together so you can have fun and do great work at the same time.

With that, do you give yourself alone time to decompress and center yourself? You do engage in a lot of spiritual practices so I imagine it’s important to have that balance in your life as well.

Definitely. I really enjoy living back here because I live in the countryside and it just agrees with me a lot better. There was a while when I was living in Santa Monica and it got too claustrophobic. I used to live in Venice Beach, which was even more crazy. I do a lot better in the countryside. I find it’s easier to still the mind when you’re around trees and nature. Ultimately, we are a product of exactly what we spend the most time around. If we’re hectic on a freeway, it’s going to have an impact on our lives. Saying that, we’re only an hour away from London, so I go in every week. I’m currently working on a different record in the city. I’m working on a record out here, and working with some friends from Prague who are collaborating with me. I was just in Prague last week.

It’s like a new phase of life. You have to be able to be self-reliant if you live in the middle of the countryside. You have to either grow your own food or know how to cook everything, how to build and fix things. It’s not just the moving to the countryside. With that comes a lot of education about nature that requires a lot of effort. You’ve got to chop the wood and get it inside. Get it dry before it gets too cold in the winter. There’s a time to plant the seeds in the spring. It’s the same with your body. You grow your chi throughout the year and then in autumn, you harvest. That’s got to see you through the winter. Things go more dormant. Like this time, it’s slowing down a little bit. We just launched the record and played some shows. That was the crescendo. Now I’m doing all the diligent work, getting ready to go into winter. Recording, getting new projects lined up. Letting the season turn out the way it’s supposed to and not trying to fight it. That was a very different thing living in Los Angeles where it’s 75 degrees and sunny every day. You don’t have to make seasonal decisions.

Listening to INNERSTANDING and the other material you’ve done either under your own name or with different groups, it all sounds like the product of someone who listens to a lot of different styles of music. Has that always been the case for you?

Yeah, I love music. But I mean I don’t listen to anything popular. I don’t like mainstream music and I never have. I think it’s funny because what I hated back in the ’80s, I look back on it now and think, “That was brilliant.” Way better than what’s going on now. The ’90s were great for me. I got to listen to Portishead, Tricky, Primus. Rage Against The Machine. Obviously Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Soundgarden. I listen to a lot of electronic music. I grew up listening to Indian classical music and everything from Mozart to Hoagy Carmichael.

Something else that comes across really strongly in the new album is this tone of despair as you consider what’s going on with the environment and conflicts that are happening across the globe. But there’s a wonderful sense of hopefulness that comes through the music as well. That’s such a great balance that you bring to your music.

It can’t be all doom and gloom, you know? No one wants to go and play music that just brings about more doom and gloom. It has to have a message. You have to believe the message of things getting better. I genuinely think that if people spent as much time focusing on themselves and their own healing as they do obsessing over politics or whatever the current thing is, the world would change, literally, in days. You’ve got to do the work on yourself. If you want to have good friends, you’ve got to be a good friend. If you want to be loved, you have to learn to love yourself. That’s why the world seems to be very anti-healing. Very reasonable people who live in a state of love and are well healed within their own trauma are very hard to manipulate. The world wants us to live in a state of fear. That way they can sell us products. That’s why nature is so important. Nature doesn’t judge. It’s just perfect. It’s brutal as well. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

Healing is something that you’ve talked about in terms of your friendship with Graham Coxon. You’ve said that when you first got to know one another, you engaged in some healing together. What did that look like?

What we’ve been through in our lives… we both had difficult things happen to us. Graham’s one of the loveliest people you’ll ever meet. He has a very silly sense of humor, like me. It’s very self-deprecating. He’s really good at making fun of himself. We all need more of that. A lot of it just starts off with sitting around a table and eating some food and laughing at a time when the rest of the world’s not laughing. We started hanging out in the middle of the lockdowns. He wanted to get out of the city and we were using music as a way of interacting. We did that version of, “Let’s do this every week and just play music.” I played some stuff on his music; he played some stuff on my music. Little did I know he was also doing The Waeve and Ballad of Darren at the same time. He’s a mysterious one, old Graham.

It was fun having someone to bounce off of as most of this record I made by myself. Another person who came down — who we tried to get each other out of our lonely astronaut vibe — was Nigel Godrich. Nigel took me out to play on a record that Jonny Greenwood was recording with his Indian orchestra. Things like that, after months of sitting around and rebuilding this community with some of the people that I’ve been the biggest fan of… That’s why I was saying, it’s a very high quality of people out here. It’s just getting to find them because they’re all in their own magical places.

Another aspect of INNERSTANDING that I loved was how, on a number of songs, you manipulate your voice with electronics and really mess with the tone and timbre. Can you tell me a bit about that decision? Do you not like the sound of your own voice?

I always hear different things that are like jumbled up bits of news stories in my mind and things that people have said and lies that you hear and stuff that’s been propagandized against you. But the world seems to decide that it’s absolutely true for the moment, until a year later or a week later, when the world changes its perspective and suddenly that’s completely normal now. It’s that manipulation of crazy. So I always have lots of different characters that I write for. You’ve got a newsreader who’s saying, “It’s a dangerous lie,” which was played by one of my dear friends, Rupert Friend, the actor who lived with me during the first six months of lockdown. He and his wife were part of this new living in England thing because they were living in New York and they came out to do some projects and ended up spending six months at our house. The actress Aimee Mullins, his wife, she’s on the record as a female voice. There’s Tom Hollander who’s another person I came to know living through the countryside. He’s a fantastically terrifying actor so his voice had to go in there. It’s all just a way of delivering the information. So having different robot voices seemed fitting for the record.

The artwork for the physical release of the album that comes out next year is a lot of photographs of you at these sacred sites around the U.K. What can you tell me about the places you chose and the significance of them?

I really wanted to re-learn England. There were forests that I’d never been to, that I couldn’t believe I’ve never seen before. We hiked miles and miles and miles to get out to one place, which is called Black-a-Tor Copse. It’s one of the only Celtic rainforests in the world — a rainforest in a cold climate. I was all over Ireland as well. Before I took these pictures, we went on a pilgrimage and ended up choosing a lot of different sites. The place that eventually became the album cover is the cave of Merlin the Magician. It’s Camelot, essentially. There’s a carving of his face in the cave. A giant, ancient stone carving. It fills with water so you can swim all the way through. I spent a few days going back and forth in there. There’s a place called Tintagel, which is beautiful. It was the seat of King Arthur. We spent a week going around different places. I must have driven 1,000 miles just to try and connect with that energy of the record. I don’t want to explain too much. There is a visual story, which you’ll see when the vinyl comes out. If you follow the order of the photographs, it’s an allegory as well. I tried to capture that pilgrimage, that transformation that happened to me.

From what I understand, you essentially made two albums as you were recording INNERSTANDING and it sounds like you’ve got a lot of other projects on the horizon. Can you talk about any of that?

Well, I won’t tell you who or what they’re with, these other albums, because I will have that for when I announce them. They’re both collaborations. I got to write on both of them, not just produce or do it all myself. They’re very, very different. There’s two. One’s being finished right now. One’s in the can. I think it comes out in May. One of them sounds like maybe a score for a movie. One of them is like a whole new band. We really don’t know what it is yet, but the record happened very organically. I’ve just been trying to work with people who really inspire and I can learn from. I’m very excited.