Elephant Stone’s Rishi Dhir

Photo by Bowen Stead.

As a young radio DJ at WRUW-FM 91.1 Cleveland, the discovery of Elephant Stone’s The Three Poisons was a revelatory moment, heralding a new wave of psychedelic music that has dominated the past decade. With the arrival of their new EP Le voyage de M. Lonely dans la lune, frontman Rishi Dhir joins The Eisenberg Review to detail his experience seeing the Stone Roses at Madison Square Garden, the genesis of the EP’s titular character, how The Afghan Whigs taught him about soul music (and weed), his love of sci-fi and more.

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Is your project named after The Stone Roses’ song?

I wanted to call it Elephants originally because I have a stone statue of Ganesh, the Hindu god of new beginnings, but there was a band called Elephants and I was like “[Well], I like the Stone Roses.” The only problem with that is that everyone thinks they’re our main influence. The first record is a good record…

And then Second Comming, not as much.

Yeah, it’s alright… there’s moments.

It’s kind of a mess. The drugs made the first record sound great and the next record lesser.

I did go see them at Madison Square Garden for the reunion tour.

And how was that?

That was great. It was a lot of like football hooligan guys, like, bald British guys, ex-pats.

Really? That’s not the crowd I’d imagine.

*Laughs* Everyone’s a bit older now.

We are here to talk about Elephant Stone’s new EP, Le voyage de M. Lonely dans la lune, which is a companion piece of sorts to Elephant Stone’s last record from 2020: Hollow. Here, you’ve shifted from questions of surviving in a decaying world to a fictionalized escape from it. There’s a lot I want to unpack there. First, is the theme of the record more of a reflection on the appeal of escapism, sonic or otherwise, or is it more a reflection of our world being beyond the point of reclamation?

It’s funny, like any songwriter, you’re always kind of filtering what’s around you, forming your own opinion, belief system and then putting it in song. Writing Hollow, climate change is very real. I remember Greta Thunberg in the news a lot and I guess that kind of helped me develop the Hollow storyline. With M. Lonely, I guess it was the pandemic. My wife kind of pointed it out to me that she always thought I was the extroverted one and she the introverted one, but with everything’s that’s happened, I’m actually totally fine being by myself, in my basement in the studio not seeing anybody. That formed M. Lonely in some ways. It’s about this hermit who lives a solitary lifestyle and then the pandemic hits and everyone starts sheltering in place and he sees that as a mockery of his condition. He truly wants to be unique, and alone, so he builds a spaceship and goes to the moon.

It’s also that I love Le Voyage dans la Lune by Méliès. Air did a soundtrack for the film, they released an EP that I loved that’s always been on my mind, the space race and all that. Everything informs my songwriting.

I was particularly struck by the fact that you’ve had the riff for the title track for ten years, dating all the way back to playing with The Black Angels. Walk me through your creative process because I know it’s different for everybody. Certainly song ideas take a long time to germinate sometimes. Of the four songs on the EP, was this the only idea that was that old, or was a lot of it written of the course of the pandemic when we were all sheltering in place?

I just started reading Jeff Tweedy’s book How to Write One Song. I love reading about other songwriters and their process because people don’t really discuss the process of songwriting. I remember Greg Dulli from The Afghan Whigs… When I was 15 years old, The Afghan Whigs came to Montreal for the Gentlemen tour—I’m a huge fan—and I got backstage and I met them. They taught me about soul music and they gave me weed, they gave me whiskey… it was a huge moment in my life. A few years ago, they re-united and put out a new record [In Spades) and for the local magazine Cult MTL they asked me if I wanted to interview Greg Dulli. I remember asking him about songwriting. I never really saw myself as a songwriter, I just kind of did it and had my own process. Speaking with Greg, when I asked him, he said it was like everybody else: I have a guitar, I come up with a melody, I mumble some words that don’t make sense and then I flesh it out. And I was like “Wow, that’s what I do.” Reading Jeff Tweedy’s book, it’s the same idea.

All this to say, for the EP, “M. Lonely” and “La fusée du chagrin” where just riffs, just snippets I had on my iPhone. Like you said, “M. Lonely” was from when I was playing with Black Angels in 2012. We played a show at Exit Inn in Nashville and I remember Christian [Bland] and I got drunk backstage and we were just playing guitars. I came up with this really kind of garage-y riff and lyrics on the spot… *Laughs* It was actually Mr. Horny. We were going to make a joke group called The Woodpeckers where we were wearing Woody Woodpecker masks, totally out there garaging, but it never happened and we never talked about it again. Over the pandemic, I just saw this as a good opportunity to go through my bag and see what riffs I had lying around. Those songs just came together, and the reason they’re in French is because I was mumbling words—gibberish lyrics—and they all had this kind of French intonation to them, so that informed the idea that the EP should be in French.

You anticipated one of my questions! This is the first of your projects to be sung entirely in French. What made this the right time? That part of the creative process?

It was the sound of it, and I thought “wow, this could be really interesting.” We weren’t touring anytime soon, and I have a recording studio in my house built in my basement, so I recorded Hollow there and thought “why don’t I work on this?” We—my drummer Miles, who’s a Francophone, and I—always talked about doing something in French one day. We did one song off our 2016 release, but that was kind of a freak-out song with vocoder. It was called “Au Gallis.”

Lyrically, I had the storyline set, but my French is not that great. It’s good enough to get by conversationally, but as far as writing lyrics isn’t not. My buddy Félix Dyotte, who’s a great musician, lives two blocks away and I wrote and asked him to help write lyrics for the EP.

I just recorded a demo of me mumbling gibberish words that sounded French, with little tags like “M. Lonely,” and he wrote four beautiful songs.

It really is a beautiful EP. You definitely capture the sci-fi element of it. It sounds like you’re also pretty sci-fi obsessed. Do you have books, movies, tv series that you’d recommend as primers for people not into the genre?

I love Isaac Asimov. I just watched Foundation. It’s about this society that’s kind of in a brain drain in some ways. They’ve lost all understanding of technology, so they’re creating a foundation to preserve all this knowledge so that when society crumbles they can rebuild again.

I love sci-fi and dystopian literature, just the fact that it’s never too far off from where we are and always a warning for where we’re going to go. We can do all we can to stop it, but it keeps going, the train keeps going.

The Luddites aren’t necessarily going to win at the end of the day. The sci-fi angle is cool, because I spoke with Jake from the band Spaceface a couple of weeks ago—who’s also in kind of a psychedelic vein—and he ended up using samples from the Large Hadron Collider on one of the singles on their record, and you ended up using audio from one of NASA’s projects on the first single from your record. I’m not fluent in morse code, so what is the hidden message embedded in that track?

*Laughs* I have no idea actually because I was deep in the process of mixing when that happened. I think for “Andromeda,” off of our record from 2016, I used some NASA stuff because NASA just released all this copyright free audio you could use.

Sampling gold!

For “La fusée du chagrin” it was perfect. I knew what the morse code was at the time I was mixing, but I don’t know… Maybe one of your listeners can tell us.

You’ve just announced a tour… What are you most looking forward to about being back out on the road?

I just got over COVID, so I feel like I’m invincible now. It’s been so long since we’ve toured. We’ve played a few shows here and there in Montreal. It’s all about connection… re-connecting with our fans and seeing how everyone is doing and what’s new. All our lives have changed.