From the time Deva Premal was still in her mother’s womb, Deva’s father chanted the Gayatri Mantra each night as a lullaby for his daughter in their native Germany. Self-taught in Sanskrit, he even created a handwritten Sanskrit-German dictionary.
Hearing the chant again in England at a music festival in the ’90s for the first time since her childhood, Deva overcame shyness and stepped out from the shadows, transitioning from early background vocal work to emerging as one of the world’s most enduring and beloved devotional singers, with sales of nearly two million albums over her 20-year career.
Her signature track on her 1996 debut The Essence, the Gayatri Mantra, once again ushers Deva Premal into the light on DEVA — this time as a composer as well as a solo artist, with the ancient chant framed like a gem by Deva’s original composition.
In Sanskrit, deva means “divine,” and this transcendent collection of healing, therapeutic mantras reveals the sublime dimensions of Deva Premal’s distinctive, entrancing voice and matured musical expression, two decades on from the beginning of her remarkable career.
DEVA marks an auspicious, beautiful milestone on the path of an artist whose time for recognition has arrived.
