As the fusion band Olio came to a close in 1999, long-time friends Chris Hale and Pete Hicks began to play “South Asian devotional songs called bhajans,” for the British Asian community in London. In 2000, Chris and Pete recorded their first project as Aradhna, which means “adoration” in Hindi. Travis McAfee was added on bass and since then, Chris, Pete and Travis have all married and continued to mature their sound, resulting in their fourth album, Amrit Vani (”Immortal Word“). I recently spoke with Peter Hicks about the new album, Hinduism and living a life of worship.

• You were born in Delhi, is that right?

Yes, I was.

• Were you raised in a Christian home?

Yes, I was.

• How do you think that’s affected your outlook?

I actually didn’t grow up in Delhi. I was born in Delhi and after about a year my parents returned to the States, so I don’t have any memories of growing up in India. I’m the youngest of four kids. My two oldest siblings were born in Calcutta and so they all had their own memories of growing up in India but I was born and my parents left right afterwards.

Even growing up in the States, my family was so in love with India because of their time living there, they lived there for about six years and had visited many times for long periods. Because it was so deeply entrenched in my family, the love of India and the Indian culture, we had Indians coming through our home on a regular basis, I kind of feel like I did grow up in India, though it was all second-hand.

• At what point did you return to India?

I went back for the first time when I was 18 years old. I went up India to join up with Chris Hale, he had a rock band out in India named Olio. I had met him a couple of years before. I was in High School and just learning to play music and he had invited me to come out when I finished high school to join up with his band. You know, it felt like a bit of a tongue in cheek invitation, but a few years later I came out and took him up on it! The desire to go to India had been really strong in me and music had been the thing that really carried me through high school so I just jumped at the chance. I sent a letter and surprisingly enough, he said “Yeah, come on out.” So that was when I really go to know Chris, in that rock band in India and we traveled all over, North to South and all sorts of various music festivals around India.

• So you actually met Chris in the States?

Yes, I met him when I was 14 years old. Through some connections he knew my father and my father really wanted me to meet him because of his Indian connection as well as the music connection. So my dad orchestrated our meeting. I owe a lot to my father in many ways.

• How did you become involved in music?

It was almost on a whim. We were in a church and my brother and I had a youth leader who was always talking about forming a band and we got really excited about it. I think I picked up a guitar originally when I was about 11 years old and took two lessons but just wasn’t ready to put the work in at that point. But then with the high school ideas of having a rock band, we really got excited and we both picked up the guitar and I think within two weeks I was writing songs and simply fell in love with music. They were really bad songs, but that’s not the point. The point was just doing it.

• How would you describe Olio?

That band consisted of people from all over India and other areas of the world. There were people like me who came in for six months to a year to play with the group and they would come from South America, the States, Papua New Guniea, different places all around the world. And then there was the core of Olio which was Chris Hale and several others and they were the ones who were long-term and they opened the doors to others to help keep things fresh.

• How did that band come to an end?

Chris is ten years older than I am and grew up in Nepal and in north India at a boarding school for his high school years. He came to the States to go to Berkeley College of Music in Boston and then returned to India and started this band. I think, for him, since he had spent the majority of his life in south Asia, he wanted to investigate his Western, American roots. So even when I was out there in ’97, he was considering moving to the States, just to live here and fill in a lot of blank spaces in his own history.

Also, when I was out there, I lived with Chris in an apartment. We would go home after a day in the studio or practicing for these rock concerts and he would bring out his sitar and I would play the acoustic guitar and we would just play for hours and hours and I think there was a great connection between Chris and I musically and as friends at that point. We met up again a couple of years later and that was when Chris introduced me to bhajans, the type of music that we play now. Out of that came a type of a flip-flop, he was in India doing Western music and moved back to the States and began doing Indian music. That was a bit confused, but aren’t we all?

• Can you share a bit about your salvation experience?

I grew up in a pretty traditional Evangelical home. More than anything about my upbringing, I really appreciate that I saw in my parents’ lives that they lived lives devoted to Christ. It wasn’t just about church on Sunday, it wasn’t about rules, it wasn’t about having to look a certain way, or that you had to be like this in order to be a follower of Christ. It was truly about change and the heart and becoming more Christ-like. For all of my experience with church, I don’t know if I would be a follower of Christ right now if it wasn’t for my parents displaying that for me day in and day out in their commitment to follow Christ and also the humility in their lives.

I remember my family telling me that I had accepted Christ when I was 4 years old but I have no recollection of that at all. That made me a little bit nervous when I became around 10 or 11 years old. So, when I was 11, I had been thinking a lot about it and at that point I prayed with my mom and was baptized.

But after that, I lived like most teen-aged kids. I took it for granted and ran with it and did what I wanted to all through high school and got myself into some trouble here and there. It just wasn’t very real. But then when I was 17 years old, my mom called me one day while I was at school and told me that there was a guy at a church praying for people and she asked me if I wanted to come. I would have done anything to get out of school, so I went. So I went to the meeting and I was sitting there in this Pentecostal church while this man prayed for people. I just thought “OK, that’s cool.” But I was just trying to squeeze out as much time as I could because I knew that when it was over I had to go back to school. I just sat there and didn’t participate. The only thing that really kept me there and not wanting to walk out was that my mom was really into what was going on and I trusted her.

After a while she asked me if I wanted to go up and get prayed for. It was near the end of the meeting and sort of my last chance. So I went up and I was prayed for and it was kind of nice. And as teenager, someone who had made a choice at 11, I had made a choice to be a “Christian,” which is maybe a bit different than “follower of Christ,” this was one of those times when I thought I should really take it seriously. When that meeting ended, someone came up to me and asked me, “What is your faith about?” That put me in the corner! It just kind of came out of me, “Nothing.” They asked if I minded if they prayed for me again, so they all gathered around me, there were probably 5 or 6 people around me, the pastor of the church, this guy who was a kind of itinerate minister, and they all started praying around me and I just felt really uncomfortable. Someone suggested that I tell God what I wanted to tell Him and I just thought “Oh, OK,” but when I opened my mouth, I just started weeping. I felt this kind of excavation of my soul taking place and then I just felt arms around me. I’m giving you the long version, but from that point on, I knew; I understood that not only was God real but that God wanted me to know Him and allow Him to know me. That is really when I would say I began my journey of following Christ more than anything else. When I had that experience, I believed for the first time.

• How long was that before you went to India to join Olio?

About a year-and-a-half.

• And how long were you with Olio?

I was only out there for six months with the band. I came back to the States at the beginning of 1998. Chris remained in India and did another year of touring with Olio. It was the summer of 1999 that I reconnected with Chris in the States and then in England and that was the unrecognizable birth of Aradhna. We didn’t know what we were doing, we were just kind of moving forward. We actually say that the birth of Aradhna happened when we recorded our first album Deep Jale which wasn’t supposed to be an album at all. It was just for the South Asian church to use, for worship leaders to use but it turned into an album. That was the birth of Aradhna and that was in April of 2000.

• How did you go from being a rock band to playing Bhajans?

Bhajans are the type of song that will be sung in temples all over India, that’s the genre of music. They are written by Indians all over the world who want to express their devotion and their faith in Christ in a culturally Indian way. Instead of writing something like “Father I adore you,” they write these songs because they resonate at a deeper level with where they come from.

• How would you describe the progression of the band?

It’s so funny to analyze it. In 1999, Chris invited me to come to England. It was a gesture of friendship because we had become very good friends and there was musical compatibility between us. It wasn’t necessarily to play this type of music, it was more “Hey, if you’re not doing anything, why don’t you come to England and maybe we’ll go on to mainland Europe or whatever.” He was taking a break from Olio at that time.

I arrived in England and met him in South London and he said “Hey, tomorrow I’m playing at a South Asian fellowship, do you want to play the guitar and I’ll play the sitar?” So he introduced me to this music that way. It turned out that we played 6 or 7 different places in England, South Asian fellowships, little house concerts. It was very unofficial, it was very organic in the sense that we would just sit down and play. During that time, God just reached down and exploded into my heart through this music, this worship and drew me close to Him. It was such a different approach because at that time, my Hindi was horrible. Now it’s just bad. I spoke maybe 20 words at that time!

So when Chris would sing, I would play the guitar and I would have a time of meditation. I understood the word Yeshu, I understood the word Prebu which is “Lord,” Yeshu being Jesus. It was just like meditating on the name of Jesus. God reignited my soul for worship and my will to follow Him. Chris had a very similar experience in a different way. God really used this music in our lives to open closed channels. So it was a very selfish thing.

At that point we decided to return to India and then to England and do more of the same type of thing. But it was completely about our own journey of following Christ and worshiping so we wanted to invite as many people as wanted to join us. It wasn’t so much about a band, it was about us! That’s why we did Aradhna, because we ourselves were so impacted by it.

• How have you been received by English-speaking audiences?

I’m always incredibly confident; maybe too confident when we go into churches or universities where the audience is primarily Western, or white. Because of my own experience of being that person; God knew that I needed a completely different approach for Him to reach me in a new way and expand my image of God and my journey of following Him. The response has been very similar, we get so many people sending us e-mails saying “I don’t even know what hit me! I was at your concert or I was listening to your CD and it just happened. All of the sudden I was in the presence of God.” God often uses the unexpected avenue to reach us as in Christ coming down to earth. That was just not what anyone expected the Messiah to be like: humble, the One who was killed for us. I think it’s like that for us as Westerners, it just takes you off your guard and when we’re not analyzing and having a battle of minds with what’s happening, the Spirit of God can actually move.

• One of the things that comments many people have about your music is that it’s so “genuine” and that they don’t find that in some other “Christian” music. What are your thoughts about that?

That’s tricky! It is a bit of a loaded question and I think you have to make the distinction between the people who are doing that music, CCM maybe, that sometimes what’s said is not about their hearts. I think that what happens sometimes is that, and we are in danger of it ourselves everyday, but what starts off as a beautiful expression of devotion and love for God can easily be captured and dumbed down a business. We get the benefit of the doubt because it’s hitting people in a new place. Because our music is so foreign and yet somehow not so foreign, everyone confuses that and says “Oh, that sounds real, it sounds true, it sounds deep and meaningful.” But the truth is that it’s a struggle to keep the reality of worship alive in our hearts.

It’s our biggest prayer as we go into concerts or when we’re on the road or working on an album, “God we’ve played these songs so many times, thousands of times and Lord, please make it real, don’t let it be a show.” I catch myself on a regular basis thinking it’s just rote, I could do this in my sleep: “This is how I’m supposed to look, this is how I’m supposed to play,” and you go through the list and you check it but when I do that sort of thing and when I don’t ask for help, I leave those concerts just feeling empty and thinking I can’t do this anymore.

I think this is a big struggle for all Christian artists. I believe there are those people out there who just see the Christian market as wide open for their type of music and if they just say this, they don’t have to necessarily mean it but can make a lot of money. That exists everywhere, but I like to believe because I don’t want to slander people from CCM, I like to believe they’re on the same journey we are and yet they’re caught in a bigger machine. Most of the Christian music labels are not run by followers of Christ, they’re run by Sony and people who want money. So you get trapped and yet you still believe that you want to get this music out because you believe your own heart and you just pray “God, even in this system, may this touch somebody’s life for real and may it also touch my own life.” Sometimes that gets missed. Sometimes it gets squeezed out by production, or, I just don’t know, it’s hard because it’s such a big issue.

• Who would you say is your primary audience?

I would say that it’s a tossup between Indians, both Christians, people who would call themselves followers of Christ and Hindus and Western college-age to 40 or 45 maybe. We’ve got quite a large following in the West too which has been kind of amazing.

• What has driven you to release your albums independently?

That ties into the question before as well. We want to have the option to say “God, what do you want now” instead of saying “Oh, we’ve got three more albums to do on this label.” We also want to be in charge of where we go for tours. We do all of our own booking. We do basically everything ourselves. We just recently started bringing some people on because I’m overwhelmed. We want to keep our hands open around Aradhna. We want to have visions and dreams of how many places it can go. At the same time, we want to say “God, this has always been Yours” and in the same way this just sort of fell into our laps and He blessed us miraculously allowing us to do it for 10 years; if tomorrow it goes away, then OK. We don’t want to have to go through a label to follow what God wants us to do. And it’s worked. It might not have worked as well as if someone had been distributing the albums, it might have spread faster, but from the very beginning we’ve spent most of our time responding to people rather than promoting our own music so we haven’t really needed that.

• What are your visions for the group?

I can speak for myself at this point. Chris and I are talking about it a lot. We talk about it on tour, so it’s usually cut up by sound-checking and manning the CD table, but with the release of this last album Amrit Vani, I’m excited, to me, it’s a culmination of 10 years of hard work and it feels “right” to me in a way that maybe some of our other albums didn’t quite. I’ve done all the mixing on the albums that we’ve released and usually when I’ve finished I’ve just haven’t been able to listen to it again for at least six months or even a year. With this album, when I was done, I sent it to the mastering studio and they sent it back and I had to listen. As I listened, my heart was at peace. Even though I wasn’t enjoying myself, my heart was at peace and there’s an excitement in that. I understand how hard that is to get after being so close to a project.

• Why do you think it’s different with this album?

I think this one incorporates so many different elements. I think the choir adds so much of the “we’re together in this.” It’s not a bunch of musicians just playing but people singing along. There’s a communal aspect and that was the concept from the very beginning of this record while still trying to keep professional musicians involved, having the refined and the non-professional choir involved. People really gathered around us. We had so many people donate finances for the album. We had people pre-order so many copies. There was a sense of doing this as a team, a global team helping us move forward. There were enough people out there who believed in what we’re doing. We’re together in this. There’s a vitality in that and encouragement that we are on the right road.

This album was supposed to be done about a year earlier but things just fell apart and we couldn’t do it. So we just decided to wait on the album and a week after Chris and I had that conversation, we were in Portland and I talked to a guy in San Francisco who had contacted us for some concerts and as I was talking to him he started asking me all these questions about a new album. I told him we were trying to figure that out and a week later he sent a card with $1,000 in it! And that to us said “Go forward” and from that point what happened over the next six months was just unbelievable. I want to take that and run with it and make the community larger. I really feel that God is with us. He’s telling us to rest in this but in another sense He’s telling us to work at it.

So in terms of where we’re going with this, who knows! It could stay the same we’ll keep doing what we’ve been doing which is a lot of house concerts and university shows, Hindu temples and Christian churches, which I would be completely happy for. But then, I also hope that more people get into it. I just got an e-mail from Mac Powell of Third Day who said that they’re using one of our songs as their introduction. When you have stuff like that, who knows what God’s going to do with it.

• How has marriage changed your perspective on music as a career?

When Fiona and I were getting married three and a half years ago, Chris had just gotten married in India and we were getting married in England. I looked over my tax returns and I just thought there was no way we could make it work. Financially it just wasn’t feasible. The travel was no longer feasible. I really thought Aradhna was ending and there was a certain sadness with that. But we had had a few tours that we had already booked before Chris or I was engaged that we had to do and it was crazy: everything doubled! The CD sales doubled, everything doubled! I saw that as another encouragement.

Fiona’s a violinist, so it’s been a really interesting journey for us; to marry another musician and then have her now in the band. I was definitely not going to be the one to say “Hey Chris, how about having Fiona in the band,” I just felt really weird about that. Of course I hoped for it, but it was Chris who came along and suggested it. There’s a lot of momentum in our family, both with Fiona and I towards what Aradhna is doing. Our hearts are in it. It’s the same with Chris and Miranda as well.

Marriage has definitely changed how we go about it. Before, Chris and I would get an invitation to South Africa and just ask how long they wanted us to stay and we’d go and do three concerts a day for a month and, we were tired but it was OK, we didn’t have to check with anybody and now of course that has changed. It makes it a bit tricky and as we move closer and closer to our families expanding, there’s always s sense of “OK, well I guess this is it,” but at the same time, I’m just trusting and if it is, that’s OK, and if not, that’s great.

• You’re in a position to have more of a global perspective on following Christ. Does the South Asian approach differ from the Western approach?

The music that we play is called bhajans and is from a tradition called bhakti, which means “devotion.” I can’t speak for all of India or even a tiny little piece of India because it varies so much. bhakti is probably one of the most popular forms of following your god in India and Hinduism. You choose one god and devote yourself to that god. Krishna is a very popular god. Within this approach there are people who call themselves followers of Christ. He is their only God and they devote themselves to Him in the same we would say we devote ourselves to Christ and yet they want to remain within their culture.

What a meeting of Yeshu bhaktas, or Christ Followers might look like is that if it were summer in India, they would sit on a roof just to try and get a bit of shade and be a bit cooler. They would put out mats and sit on the ground. There would be someone with a dholak which is a kind of village drum and they would be a call and response type of song. The focus would be on devotion. It’s a very Pentecostal feeling with a lot of intimacy. A lot of focus on being known and knowing. Another key thing is the communal aspect; there’s always lots of food and caring for their community.

It’s probably good to explain that when I talk about Hinduism, I’m talking about Hinduism as a civilization rather than as a religion. It’s really difficult to nail it down as a religion as we think about religion in the West because there are so many different belief structures that are piled into Hinduism. A key point is community. It’s almost like Hinduism exists so that people can be held together. So what you believe really doesn’t matter so much as long as you love your parents and respect them. So that all ties into community being a major focal point.

• Since the focus is not on the content of belief, do you find that to be an obstacle to presenting the exclusive claims of Jesus to Hindus?

We often hear “This is really great, but do you sing any songs to Ram or to Krishna?” Then we get to say that “Christ is our teacher, He has touched our lives, how could we sing to another?” That is a very understood thing in that context. What we’ve seen over the last 10 years is that Christ becomes one of many. He goes from being the god of America or Hollywood to people praying to Jesus and then to Ganesh or one of the other Hindu gods. For many it’s a journey of the Holy Spirit making Himself known. The nature of Christ and His teachings takes time to move in people’s hearts and even in mine. I’m constantly tearing down my idols and then setting them back up! So whenever I talk to people in the West, I always want to talk about my own “Hinduism,” my own journey of really taking Christ for who He is and not for who I want Him to be; letting Him be out of that box and He’s dangerous when He’s out of the box!

So is it an obstacle? It might almost be less of an obstacle. There are of course fundamentalists who hate you. It’s not just that they hate Christianity, they hate Jesus. But on the whole, most say “Hey, what’s one more?” There’s an automatic open door whereas in the West, there’s so many people who are Post-Christian. They’re so angry and hurt that they just can’t even listen to you. They won’t even give it a chance and they say there’s no God. I find that to be more of an obstacle.

• What type of music do you listen to?

I’m a huge fan of modern folk music. Paul Simon, Bruce Cockburn, M. Ward and Bruce Springsteen’s acoustic stuff. I listen to a lot of Indian classical music as well but I love lyrics. It’s kind of funny that I love words as much as I do and I’m in a group that sings in Hindi. It’s almost like the other side of my journey of worship. When a songwriter can just strip down a situation to show the need of God or the glory of God, my heart just explodes. I get a little obsessive. I get into an author and I just read all their books. It’s the same with music, I’ll just wear a CD out and I go around and tell everyone “You’ve got to listen to this song!” Fiona just kind of humors me in that and will say “Good for you, Pete, good for you.”

• Who are some of your favorite authors?

I’m a big fan of the classics like Dostoyevsky. I don’t think there’s anything about 19th century Russian culture that really attracts me but Tolstoy also. They can take a life and really make me identify with it. About six months ago I was introduced to Mark Helprin. I just finished another of his novels a couple of days ago and I’ve just taken to getting out a pen and paper and just writing notes as I read. I find that a lot of my thoughts about journeying with Christ come from novels. I was just reading about a guy who was in the first World War and how his love gets assailed. Everyone around him was bitter and they want him to become bitter and yet he managed to still believe in God, to love God and it’s just beautiful writing. C.S. Lewis is an absolute hero to me and also to Fiona.

• For the person reading who has not heard your music, what would you say to them?

Give it a chance! I’d want them to know that this is one of many incredible expressions of hope and love and devotion to Christ. If they’ve never been introduced to anything like this before, this is a good starting place to be reintroduced to the vastness of God.

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