Album Notes

Prahlad’s musical career began at the age of fourteen, when he started taking piano lessons from the church pianist. He went on to play for several church choirs as a teenager. Inspired by folk singers such as Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, he began teaching himself guitar at seventeen, soon falling in love with country blues giants like Mississippi John Hurt. He was nourished by a steady diet of recorded and lives blues in the seventies, first in Richmond, Virginia, and then in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the early 80s, Prahlad met the likes of Lightnin’ Hopkins, Taj Mahal, John Lee Hooker, Elizabeth Cotton, Sonny Rhodes, Muddy Waters, and George Harmonica Smith, sometimes playing opening sets or just sitting down to play with them.

While working on degrees in Folklore in Berkeley and Los Angeles, Prahlad became exposed to many ethnic and folk music communities from the United States and around the world. He became a student of the renown, Sierra Leonean guitarist/songwriter, Souleman Rowgie, and learned traditional “palm wine” guitar and other African highlife styles. Around this same time he was also submerged in reggae and Nyahbingi music, and was introduced to African mbira music by a student of Dumisani Maraire, the late, mbira master from Zimbabwe. Throughout the 1980’s he worked on songwriting while expanding his musical skills on different instruments, including ethnic drums, mbira, guitar, keyboards, and birumbau, for a brief period, working with a band to perform some of his own songs and reggae covers.

In the early 1990s, Prahlad put his music aside to devote time to an academic career and raising a family. After more than fifteen years, he was inspired in 2006 to begin playing music and writing songs again. Hover Near grew out of a desire to reconnect with music and to integrate some of the influences he has been exposed to over the past few decades. This is his first effort at recording some of his work.