Yoga Soundtracks Volume 2: Pop Meets Bhakti in English

Two musicians sit in a studio, recording an interview about an album they've just finished. The conversation is playful, but beneath it runs a quiet philosophical commitment: they've made a yoga album in English, with pop hooks and unexpected chord changes, and they're not apologizing for it. Johanna Beekman and Ben Leinbach's Yoga Soundtracks Volume 2, released July 14, 2023, represents something rarer than it should be—a spiritual music project that trusts Western pop audiences to meet depth halfway.

How a Producer and a Singing Yoga Teacher Found Common Ground

Johanna Beekman, a touring singing yoga teacher rooted in gospel and soul traditions, first noticed Ben Leinbach's work at community performances. "I had seen him perform with different artists that were really inspiring to the community," she recalled in the interview. Leinbach, known for his long production tenure on the bhakti album Jayatal, brought something Beekman recognized immediately: an audio sensibility that served the music first, the tradition second.

The collaboration clicked because their personalities complemented each other so precisely. Beekman sings from deep emotional wells; Leinbach, self-described as an introvert and a shy person, thrives creatively alongside extroverts who "put it all out there." He credits her with "deep Souls" and "roots in gospel and soul music," strengths that drew him in. For Beekman, Leinbach's production touch—his ear for unconventional harmonies, his willingness to remix and reimagine—felt like it could hold space for a singing yoga teacher looking for a new chapter in her career.

But the real alignment was philosophical. Both wanted to find, as Beekman put it, "a really beautiful space in between Western and Eastern music where we could share the practice of yoga" without relying on Sanskrit or traditional language lyrics. This wasn't a dumbing-down; it was a translation of intent.

Why Removing Sanskrit Didn't Diminish the Spiritual Weight

The risk in stripping lyrics of their original language is losing the sonic and spiritual gravity they carry. Sanskrit has texture; it has centuries of acoustic tradition coded into its vowels and consonants. But Leinbach and Beekman approached this differently. They weren't abandoning mantra; they were reframing it.

"We took out the Sanskrit so that we could try to convey some spiritual wisdom, some mantra-like things, but have it be very accessible and have it be in English," Beekman explained. This distinction matters: they weren't trying to replace Sanskrit; they were creating pathways for people for whom English lyrics feel like home.

Take "Om Shanti," a rework of a previous track, featuring Benji Worthheimer on essarage. Beekman described it as "a prayer for peace," and what Leinbach accomplished in production illustrated the philosophy perfectly. "We took a little Om Namah Shivaya and mashed it into a delicious pop song," Beekman said, almost laughing at the improbability of it working—and yet it did. The vocal harmonies became the spiritual anchor; where Sanskrit syllables might have been, Leinbach and Beekman created "Lush sort of vocal pads" with wordless oohs and ahs, letting the frequency and texture carry what language usually does.

The Genre That Doesn't Know Its Own Name

One persistent assumption about yoga music: it must be chill. Mellow. Restorative. Yoga Soundtracks Volume 2 deliberately subverts this. The album's most upbeat track, "Take Me In Your Wings," worried Leinbach a little. "We were a little concerned there about what is it yoga enough, you know?" he admitted. Then he reframed it: go to a Shiva Ray class, or even a David Ray yoga session at Bhakti Fest. "There's a lot of hooping and hollering and dancing around going on," he said. The track earned its place.

It begins in "half time," a laid-back foundation, then "bumps up to a double time flavored thing." The production choice—building energy rather than settling into stillness—expanded what yoga music could do. A practitioner could move to this. Could sing it aloud. Didn't have to sit perfectly still to receive its benefits.

When a Pop Impulse Became the Album's Backbone

The original vision, Beekman revealed, came from Hans Christian, "a great producer and multi-instrumentalist." He'd proposed an instrumental album—a palette of pure sound, no voice layered on top. It was a solid idea. But then Beekman put it plainly: "We're such pop junkies that we couldn't just do that."

This honesty—admitting that pop sensibility won the day—is the album's real secret. They added vocals because Beekman needed to be on it, yes, but more importantly because pop structure knows how to make people listen. A verse-chorus architecture, a bridge that shifts perspective, a solo that lands like emotion—these are the tools that make songs sticky, memorable, worth returning to. And return listeners did, in the 383 views and counting.

The opening track, "Love Lives," exemplified this hybrid approach. Leinbach described it: "pretty much a pop song," but constructed from "like three or four songs that we mashed into one and then wrote new lyrics for." They wove together the intro from one Beyond Love track, an invocation that transformed "a little Om Namah Shivaya," and created something new. Galleon Matthews' guitar solo landed like a 90s Sarah McLachlan moment—"not only a step back but a step forward at the same time," as Beekman said, which is perhaps the most succinct definition of what the whole album does.

A Poem as a Bridge: The Story of "Beauty We Love"

Not every song came from the bhakti tradition. One track drew from Rumi, whose words carry their own spiritual weight but exist outside the Sanskrit lineage entirely. "Beauty We Love," built on a Rumi poem, had a secret history: Beekman had written a melody for it when she was "15 or 16 in a songwriting Workshop." She'd loved the poem's content, always thinking she'd return to it, but the original melody had vanished from memory.

Sitting in the studio years later, she realized those lyrics needed a home again. What emerged was production rooted in harmonic choices from Beyond Love, a previous collaboration, with "a few extra chords and some more delicious electronics," as Beekman noted. The Rumi took it further still. What mattered: a teenager's intuition about a poem, preserved in a new life, in a new context, with new ears to hear it.

The Production Philosophy: Listening as Craft

Throughout the interview, Leinbach kept circling back to one thing: hearing. His gift, as Beekman pointed out, was "hearing these really unusual harmonies that most producers might not think of." This isn't flashiness; it's attentiveness. It's the ability to listen to a vocal line and imagine not the obvious harmony but the one that carries resonance slightly off the beaten path.

When Beekman talked about singing "Om Shanti" in the studio, she described feeling "this wave of the exhale come over me." That wasn't accident. Leinbach had shaped the track so that vocal pads could "feel like an anchor that feel like the essence of what peace is." Production, at its best, is invisible until you notice it—and then you realize it was doing the work all along.

Where to go from here

If you're drawn to the intersection of devotional music and Western pop production, Yoga Soundtracks Volume 2 is available for pre-save and pre-order through the artists' official channels. The album's philosophy—that spiritual practice can speak English, can dance, can surprise you with a Sarah McLachlan guitar solo—has quiet implications for how yoga music evolves. It suggests that accessibility and depth aren't opposing forces. That removing Sanskrit doesn't hollow out meaning; sometimes it clarifies it. And that the future of bhakti in the West might sound a lot like pop, just produced with the ears of someone who understands that every chord change can be an offering.