Charlotte Mabon

My musical journey began at the age of 19. Disillusioned with the Cambridge teenage world of schooling and partying, I bought a ticket to India, emerged from Calcutta airport to the heat, the smells of spice and rubbish, the traffic mayhem and was enraptured. After 3 weeks of walking the city, I booked myself into a Vipassana retreat. I emerged after 10 days of silence, shaved my head and soft as a baby, I travelled to Varanasi, threw myself into yoga and bought a guitar.

I met a new friend who was studying classical Indian music and together we travelled to an uninhabited Andaman Island and spent our days bathing in the ocean, gazing at the milky way and singing with her shruti box. It was the first time I had explored my voice or come to know singing as meditation. 

We parted ways and I found myself alone again travelling North. Having been so saturated in the heat and headiness of the India I had come to love, this last part of my journey brought up some deep feelings of loneliness. My guitar became my loyal companion. I’d hide myself away in concrete guesthouse rooms and tentatively pick chords and (quietly quietly) sing.

I returned to the UK to study philosophy and literature but was itching to continue travelling. One summer break I found a tipi community in the mountains in Spain. I deferred my studies and spent 2 years immersed in the simple life; growing food, walking barefoot on the earth, bathing in spring pools and singing round the big lodge fire. I learnt many things in this time – how to live in deep connection with the earth, how to find sacredness in simplicity – but I still found it hard to trust people and feel a sense of belonging. One warm spring day whilst walking by a shrubby hedge of hawthorn and brambles, I felt a rekindling of love of my homeland and a desire to return and pick up the broken pieces of the self I’d left behind.

That time came around after hearing about such a thing as plant medicine ceremonies. I returned to the UK and, armed with my guitar and a small bag of clothes, I took a train to Penzance and stepped into a whole new chapter of my life. The plants showed me a path on which I could gather up the many fragmented parts of my youth and become whole. I followed the medicine path to Japan, Spain, Italy, Austria, and with my new husband, to South America to deepen our study of the plants and the healing power of song. Together, we crewed on a four-man sailing boat across the Atlantic and it was under the wide starry skies that I began to hear my own songs.

My first book fo songs ‘Song of the Earth’ was warmly received and travelled far and wide through the medicine world. The period of intense ceremonial work came to an end in 2010 and my husband and I returned to India to continue the study I had discovered through my friend many years before; Naad yoga.

This trip was a profound time of rebirth for me and I returned in 2011 to begin a new life in West Wales and become a mother for the first time. It is impossible to convey the depth and scale of the changes that parenting brings but the subsequent 12 years of raising 2 children and establishing a home have been an intense process of unmaking and remaking my relationship with music and its mysterious source. Having landed back where we started, in South Devon where we remain today, I have finally entered into a period of more time and space in which I can start recording my music.

My 3 track EP "Of Grief and Gratitude", co-produced with award winning bass player Misha Mullov-Abbado was released in May 2022 on the Nixi Music label. Inspired by the death of a young friend, it is an intimate, heartfelt musical and videographic journey through grief, confusion, hope and the promise of coming home to who we truly are.