Music Videos / Devotional Music
The origin of “Devotion” is not a conventional writing session. Ananda Xenia Shakti traces the song to a silent meditation retreat in the mountains of Andhra Pradesh, India, where illness made formal practice feel impossible. In the middle of that physical limitation, she began quietly chanting the names of Radha and Krishna. The song that followed treats surrender not as passivity, but as a change in how attention is directed.
Released with Love Power the Band, “Devotion” is built around the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra and the belief that contraction can become an opening. The story matters because it refuses the familiar mythology of total creative control. Ananda did not describe overcoming the difficult night by forcing herself back into the retreat’s schedule; she changed the form of the practice, listened to what the moment allowed, and found music inside that adjustment.
A spiritual teacher at the retreat, whose presence Ananda associates with Saraswati—the Hindu figure connected to wisdom, music and the sacred arts—provided another frame for that experience. The lesson carried into the recording: a challenge did not have to be removed before something meaningful could happen. It could become the threshold through which the work arrived.
“It felt less like creating music and more like receiving a blessing. A transmission. A prayer.”
After the retreat, Ananda returned to a studio in India and recorded the song with her engineer in a single inspired take. That detail is easy to romanticize, but its real significance is alignment. The performance did not need to be made more complicated than the idea behind it. The mantra, the memory of the retreat and the act of listening were already the structure.
The release also connects two distant chapters of Ananda’s life. As Xenia Holliday, she was a founding member of the all-female punk band The B-Girls, toured with The Clash, performed at CBGB and contributed background vocals to Blondie’s AutoAmerican. Her later path through yoga, meditation and sacred music may appear to be a departure from punk, yet both periods are organized around transformation, direct experience and a refusal to accept a prescribed role.
“Devotion” arrives with a clear invitation rather than a demand for belief. Its purpose is to offer peace, comfort and a reminder of connection when uncertainty closes in. That makes the official video more than a promotional extension: it is another entry point into the atmosphere of the song. For listeners encountering devotional music from outside its traditions, the most useful approach may be the one that created the track in the first place—listen before trying to control what the experience is supposed to mean.
Featured image by Vivek V via Unsplash.
