‘Emotions’, released on March 28, is a soul anthem about disturbing emotions and how to transform them. Instead of calling anger, greed, jealousy, pride, etc. ‘sins’, in Buddhism these emotions are seen as raw material for enlightenment.

This is one of the aspects of Buddhism that I find most fascinating! Every disturbing emotion contains a corresponding wisdom. When you eliminate the ego illusion, the disturbing emotion transforms into wisdom. In practice, this means observing an emotion as it arises in the mind, without suppressing it, but also without acting on it.

For example, when you feel anger, you don’t punch the person who triggers that reaction in the face, nor do you scream and make a drama out of it. You just stay calm and maybe realise that the person in front of you is only showing you a side of you that you don’t like.

In the verse, I list various disturbing emotions. I like the contrast of the happy melody, driving beat and cheesy backing vocals when I sing about anger, fear and frustration.

The chorus and bridge then mention the concept of transforming disturbing emotions into wisdom. Since it’s just a pop song, the lyrics don’t go into detail or explain how to do that. A song can only spark interest and curiosity. Maybe some people will then read a good book about it or listen to a Buddhist lecture.

For the music video, I originally planned to work only with animated typography, but that wasn’t enough to keep the video interesting. So I added some scenes filmed with a small amateur camera at a Buddhist stupa near Malaga. Then I filmed myself singing in a park and on the beach and added an ‘old film’ effect so that the unstable movement of the camera looks as if it was done on purpose.