Spindle Magazine

Seven years after her last album, sound healer Doe Paorohas released her latest LP ‘Living Through Collapse’ – a body of work that is her most unbridled and expansive outlet to date. Over her prismatic career, Paoro has moulded her music into a vessel for transformation. She shares a sound with a deep-rooted soul of faith in music’s ability to heal, awaken and unify.

The Costa Rica-based singer-songwriter was inspired by her apprenticeship with Shipibo teachers of shamanic plant medicine to use her music to catalyse synergetic repair. Paoro used her learning and channelled it into sharing her healing power with listeners by leading sound baths and hosting in ceremonial spaces.

Her latest single from the album, ‘Teach Us of Endings’, is accompanied by a cinematic video filmed in Costa Rica. She collaborated on the soothing visuals with AnAkA to show their belief that music is crucial in both revolution and grief tending. Paoro is consumed by the idea that responsibility needs to be taken and for music to hold space in the current climate of the world.

We sat down with the music talent to discover all the details about her newest release, learn from her musical teachings and much more. Read our full interview below.

It’s been quite some time since your last album! Why was it so prevalent for you to make the choice to release one now?

During the pandemic, I had the first pause of my career – if I wasn’t forced to stop, I don’t know that I ever would have, because I had been so conditioned to productivity equating to self-worth because of capitalism. In that time-out of quarantine, I actually had the space to understand the mechanics of how capitalism works, how it is sustained by all these intersecting systems of oppression, and how it is putting us on a path to destruction with climate catastrophe. This record came from the urgency and grief of looking at the world we have inherited and the world we are passing on to future generations, and asking, “what is our responsibility in these times?”

Your music seems fuelled by atmosphere and spirituality. How have your practices in meditation and sound healing etc shaped the way you write and perform?

I remember years ago, I was doing my yoga teacher training in India and my teacher had a little stage where we would practice leading classes. He pointed to the stage and said, “Be careful of that, that’s where the ego comes out.” I think meditation and sound healing have helped me humble my ego, which allows me to share music more authentically. Sound healing, in particular, has helped me experience other formats for sharing music. One thing I love about it is that I’m often not on a stage with it, but am on the floor, with everyone else, in a circle. That’s how I try to share music now because it feels more honest to me. Everything I am trying to do now in the performance is actually about breaking down the idea of “performing” and intending to create a communal energy.

How has intertwining music and healing inspired you to conceive a performance space – is it a concert, a ritual, therapy, or something else? How does this affect the way in which you connect with your audience?

I definitely think of my concerts as ritual spaces, and set them up as such. Sometimes I’ll set up a little altar on stage to remind me that my intentions are that the music be of the highest service to all. This framing has helped me a lot because I used to have crippling stage fright and my live shows were very inconsistent in the past – but once I started understanding the concerts as a devotional space, a space of offering as opposed to performance, all the fear went away. This leaves room for spirit to move through, and that’s where the magic happens.

What are the biggest challenges you face when creating something that needs to feel authentic but also resonate broadly?

I really believe that if you create something authentic, it will naturally resonate because if you touch something tender in yourself and are willing to express that, it’s going to touch someone else because the human experience has some pieces that are very universal. I think the biggest challenge right now in terms of authenticity is censorship on social media platforms. My work is very political – the reasons I made a healing record is because the world is suffering, and we are suffering because of political choices that are made every day. Choices such as the ongoing theft of indigenous lands to genocide. I feel a responsibility as an artist to speak on these things, and yet every time I do, I am punished by censorship through social media. I’ve been shadowbanned, etc. It doesn’t stop me from doing it, but it makes it more challenging.

Following from this, how do you balance vulnerability with privacy in your words/lyrics – when is it important to share deeply vs holding back?

I really had to explore this question with the song “The Language of Past Lives.” It’s about a miscarriage that I had on my birthday, which inspired a lot of the music for this record. When I started to share the songs, I had to make the choice of whether to make the backstory explicit or let it live cryptically. It was such a painful and personal experience that some of the closest people in my life didn’t know about. I decided to be vulnerable and share because I know it’s an experience that a lot of women never talk about publicly, and I want to help change that. I am a private person, so it’s an edge for me to share the more personal details of where the music comes from.

Can you take us through the creative process of the new album – from theme ideas to writing, recording, and releasing?

This is one of those moments where I am wondering if I am going to give the easy answer or the true one, and I will risk it. The writing of this record was catalysed by my miscarriage, and then the grief of being postpartum once the genocide began in Palestine. I am both of Jewish and Ukrainian lineage, so I was sitting in that moment with one part of my ancestry being victimised, and the others being perpetrators, and wondering how we transcend these unbearable cycles of victim and victimiser violence. Wondering what it will take to shed the constraints of identity that block us from recognising ourselves in one another. I got really curious about ineffable forgiveness in this album- how do we forgive one another, and how will the earth ever forgive us? I wrote and recorded this record in Los Angeles, Costa Rica, and Peru.

Did you aim to create personal healing, collective healing (or both) when creating this body of work?

Both.

You mention healing a lot through your work, and healing isn’t often linear – did the process of making the album reflect that in any unexpected ways? How do you hope your audience will feel when listening to the album for the first time? What do you hope they will take from it in the long run?

Yes…the first song we wrote on this record was “22 Amens”, but I kept delaying finishing it. It was also the last song I finished the songwriting for. I think I needed to live out some more lessons before having the knowledge to finish it. I hope listeners feel safe enough to hold complexity when they listen to the record – the joy and grief of this time on the planet. I think we are being asked as a collective right now to learn how to hold complexity, to transcend duality, and to honour all that is, without exiling any part. This is what I have tried to do in these songs, and I hope it helps others get curious to do the same.

Looking forward, what role do you hope your music can play in a larger cultural conversation and self/group healing and transformation?

One hope is that it will encourage forgiveness and mending, somehow. I don’t know how, and I don’t have to, but that’s just one of my prayers. I also hope we start normalising talking about being in a collapse cycle, and creating more spaces to grieve a world that is changing very rapidly.

Only when we acknowledge what is happening can we begin to respond appropriately, and there are a lot of people who are unwilling to look at it or talk about it because it’s painful and will require courage and sacrifice in terms of what we are willing to give up in the fight for the world we want to see.

Seven years after her last album, sound healer Doe Paoro is set to release her latest LP ‘Living Through Colours’ – a body of work that is her most unbridled and expansive outlet to date. Over her prismatic career, Paoro has moulded her music into a vessel for transformation. She shares a sound with a deep-rooted soul of faith in music’s ability to heal, awaken and unify.