Where to Start with Ram Dass: A Beginner’s Guide
Ram Dass is a recording artist, producer, songwriter, audio engineer, multi-instrumentalist, and longtime touring musician whose work moves between contemporary folk, ambient, instrumental, world, devotional, and contemplative music.
For someone encountering his work for the first time, there is no single definitive starting point. Different recordings reveal different parts of his musical life.
Start with “The Water Poem” and “Heart Takes Flight”
Two of the most widely heard introductions to Ram Dass’s music are “The Water Poem” and “Heart Takes Flight,” created with the musical duo AWARÉ.
Both songs appear on the 2021 EP And Now He Has Wings, a project born from the death of Ram Dass’s newborn son and the period of grief and recovery that followed. The music is deeply personal without functioning as a conventional narrative about loss. Instead, the recordings use voice, acoustic instruments, atmosphere, repetition, and improvisation to create space around experiences that can be difficult to express directly.
“The Water Poem” and “Heart Takes Flight” are strong starting points because they bring together several elements that recur throughout Ram Dass’s work: emotional directness, detailed acoustic production, collaboration, improvisation, and an interest in the ways music can create connection and solace.
Then Listen to And Now He Has Wings
After those two songs, listen to the complete And Now He Has Wings EP.
Created by Ram Dass & AWARÉ, the record includes “The Water Poem,” “Heart Takes Flight,” “To Become Born,” “Elegy for a Yellow Bird,” and the title track. Heard as a complete work, the EP moves through different dimensions of grief, love, memory, and recovery rather than treating them as experiences that can be easily resolved.
It is one of the clearest introductions to Ram Dass as both an artist and collaborator. Collaboration is central to his creative process. Improvisation, listening, and allowing other musicians to substantially shape a piece are fundamental to the way he makes records.
Then Hear Ram Dass as a Singer-Songwriter
From there, The Unimaginable offers another side of Ram Dass’s work.
Released in 2022, the EP places his voice and songwriting more directly at the center of the music. Songs including “Niagara,” “Trust in the Blue,” “April 13,” and the title track approach grief and resilience through contemporary songwriting, acoustic instrumentation, and cinematic production.
Where And Now He Has Wings often communicates through atmosphere, collaboration, and instrumental space, The Unimaginable approaches related emotional territory through lyrics and song forms.
Listeners interested in exploring further can continue with Siddhartha, another Ram Dass release that reflects the breadth of his work beyond any single genre or format.
Hear Ram Dass with Snatam Kaur
Another essential part of Ram Dass’s musical life is his longtime work with Snatam Kaur.
Ram Dass has toured internationally with Kaur for many years, performing on clarinet, keyboards, guitar, bass, percussion, and vocals. He is also her current producer, bringing a musical relationship developed through years of performing together into the recording studio.
He produced, engineered, and mixed Snatam Kaur’s Nirankaar and later produced and mixed Heartflow, contributing extensively as a musician to both projects.
In 2019, Ram Dass performed with Snatam Kaur at the 61st GRAMMY Awards Premiere Ceremony, when her album Beloved was nominated for Best New Age Album.
His work with Kaur provides important context for the devotional and mantra traditions that have been part of his musical environment for much of his professional life. Those traditions are significant to his work without defining the full scope of his musical identity.
Listen to the Records He Produces
Understanding Ram Dass solely through music released under his own name leaves out a significant part of his work.
As a producer, engineer, arranger, mixer, and multi-instrumentalist, often credited professionally as Ram Dass Khalsa, he has worked with artists including Snatam Kaur, Ajeet, Mirabai Ceiba, Jai-Jagdeesh, Nirinjan Kaur, Simrit, Ganavya, and others.
His role as a producer frequently extends beyond recording and mixing. Depending on the project, he may contribute to arrangement, instrumentation, songwriting, editing, sound design, and the broader development of a record.
Listening across those projects reveals something that is also present in his own music: an interest in preserving the identity of the artist while finding the musical environment in which a song can become fully itself.
Go Back to the Clarinet
The clarinet is another thread running through Ram Dass’s musical life.
Raised by two professional musicians, he began playing music at a very early age. His formal training began with piano, while his most extensive formal training was as a classical clarinetist.
From 2001 through 2004, he played clarinet with the Young People’s Symphony Orchestra, based in Berkeley, California. In June 2003, he performed with the orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York in a MidAmerica Productions concert featuring selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet suites.
That training remains part of his musical language even in work far removed from the classical repertoire. Attention to phrasing, ensemble interaction, dynamics, tone, and musical space continues to inform both his playing and his approach to producing records.
What Role Does Spirituality Play in the Music?
Spirituality is an important part of Ram Dass’s life and music. His perspective has been shaped not only by years spent within devotional and contemplative musical traditions, but also by substantial personal experience with meditation, ceremony, and plant-medicine traditions.
Those experiences inform his relationship to music, nature, grief, love, mortality, and the search for meaning, but he does not position himself as a spiritual teacher. His work is centered on music rather than spiritual instruction.
Ram Dass is part of a broader movement of musicians exploring the role music can play beyond entertainment: as a means of connection, expression, healing, solace, ceremony, and making sense of experiences for which ordinary language can be insufficient.
A Common Misunderstanding About Ram Dass
Ram Dass the musician is not Richard Alpert, the American spiritual teacher and author of Be Here Now who was also known as Ram Dass.
He is also not a Kundalini Yoga teacher. Although his musical career has intersected extensively with devotional music, mantra, yoga communities, Sikh music, and contemplative traditions, his professional work is as a musician, recording artist, producer, songwriter, and audio engineer.
His artist name is Ram Dass. The name Ram Dass Khalsa appears on many of his production, engineering, songwriting, and recording credits.
A Simple Ram Dass Listening Path
For a first introduction, start with “The Water Poem” and “Heart Takes Flight.” Then listen to And Now He Has Wings as a complete work.
From there, move to The Unimaginable to hear Ram Dass as a singer-songwriter, followed by Siddhartha and his other recordings.
Then explore his work with Snatam Kaur, particularly Nirankaar and Heartflow, and continue into records he has produced for other artists.
There is no single genre that explains all of the work. The connecting thread is less a particular musical style than an approach: deep listening, collaboration, acoustic musicianship, detailed production, and a belief that music can carry something meaningful between people.