International inner work teacher Diana Zaheer in collaboration with Lincoln Parish, founding member and original lead guitarist of Cage the Elephant, recently released their single/music video, “Your Side of the Street,” taken from the upcoming album, Over The Counter Meditations.
Talking about the album, Zaheer shares, “Most people feel too alone with the challenging moments in their lives. Music already keeps us company. This spoken word album gives us companionship and wellness education along with the familiarity of music.”
In 2022, after helping hundreds of people navigate their lives during the Covid pandemic, Zaheer proposed the unusual recording project to Parish — who joined Cage the Elephant at age 15 and left the band nine years later to pursue a producing career at his Nashville-based Talk Box Rodeo. Zaheer counsels many creative artists and met Parish during one of her teaching visits to Nashville.
Zaheer and Parish saw the project as a way to deeply help people during challenging times but with a positive and creative approach to accessing support on music platforms. For the album, Parish composed and produced many different styles of music to match the tone of each song’s spoken word message and to appeal to all kinds of music listeners.
Zaheer explains, “I would give a teaching and then Lincoln would create an amazing soundscape around it. It was incredible to watch his gifts in action. The music truly moves the teachings along.”
Parish adds, “This project was as much therapeutic for myself as it’s so vastly different from what I typically do in songwriting and music production on a day-to-day basis. It allowed me to break down the confines of what writing a typical pop song would look like and forced me into creating a world that’s main goal was to create emotion and a cinematic landscape whilst also not getting in the way of the topic at hand and allowing Diana’s voice to stay in the forefront of it all. Truly a once in a lifetime experience for me.”
“Your Side of the Street” features a retro rhythmic pulse, made up of crisp percussion and a gently throbbing bassline. Gleaming waves of delicious harmonic surfaces travel above as Zaheer’s soothing, hypnotic voice imbues the spoken-word lyrics with beckoning warmth, inviting listeners to center down on their “side of the street.”
With its calming, spiritual message, “Your Side of the Street” envelopes listeners in an alluring aura of peaceful relaxation.