From Punk Rebellion to Sacred Surrender: Ananda Xenia Shakti’s “Devotion” Feels Right at Home in Portland
By: Rowan Messenger
Portland has always had room for musicians who don’t fit neatly into the industry’s boxes. This is, after all, a city where indie rock can share cultural real estate with experimental electronics, folk, punk, ambient music, yoga studios, ecstatic dance and practically any other creative practice capable of attracting a roomful of curious people.
That makes Ananda Xenia Shakti and Love Power the Band’s “Devotion” an intriguing record to consider from the Pacific Northwest.
It doesn’t sound like Portland in any obvious geographical sense. “Devotion” was born thousands of miles away during a silent meditation retreat in Andhra Pradesh, India. Yet its rejection of commercial formulas, its spiritual curiosity and its willingness to blur the line between music and experience feel compatible with Portland’s independent streak.
“Devotion” doesn’t rush.
That alone feels borderline radical in 2026.
Rather than constructing a conventional pop single around an instantly identifiable chorus, Ananda and Love Power the Band allow the music to unfold through repetition and atmosphere. The Hare Krishna Maha Mantra becomes part of a meditative cycle, with Ananda’s vocal moving through the arrangement less like a pop star demanding attention than a guide inviting listeners into the experience.
The song’s origins explain that intimacy.
During a silent retreat in Andhra Pradesh, Ananda woke in the middle of the night suffering from digestive distress. Unable to sleep or continue meditating comfortably, she began quietly singing the names of Radha and Krishna.
Then a melody arrived.
She continued singing for hours as the composition gradually formed around the mantra. The remarkable part of the experience, as Ananda has described it, was the contradiction: her body was uncomfortable and contracted while internally she experienced an increasing sensation of peace, love and expansion.
“Devotion” emerged from the space between those two realities.
That makes it particularly appropriate for a Portland audience accustomed to treating music as something more expansive than entertainment. From the city’s yoga and meditation communities to its sound-healing gatherings and eclectic independent venues, Portland has long provided space for the idea that listening can be participatory rather than passive.
“Devotion” belongs to that territory.
Love Power the Band’s arrangement doesn’t overwhelm the song’s spiritual center. Instead, atmospheric textures and understated rhythmic elements surround Ananda’s voice, giving the track enough motion to remain musical without disrupting its contemplative character.
The repetition matters.
Listen casually and “Devotion” can function as peaceful background music. Give it sustained attention, however, and repetition begins doing something different. Words gradually surrender some of their literal meaning. Melody becomes pattern. Pattern becomes atmosphere.
Eventually, listening itself becomes the activity.
For Portlanders accustomed to rain ticking against windows through months of gray skies, there may be something familiar in that proposition. Repetition doesn’t always mean stagnation. Sometimes subtle changes become visible only when everything else becomes quiet.
Ananda’s own history makes the tranquility considerably more interesting.
Before becoming a spiritual teacher, yoga instructor and leader of Love Power the Band, she was Xenia Holliday of The B-Girls, the pioneering all-female punk group that emerged during the late 1970s. She toured with The Clash during the London Calling era and contributed backing vocals to Blondie’s AutoAmerican.
That history provides “Devotion” with an unexpected connection to Portland’s own stubborn punk and DIY lineage.
Sonically, the two worlds couldn’t appear further apart. But punk was never solely about distorted guitars. At its core was an insistence that people could reject the identities, institutions and rules handed to them and construct something different.
Ananda eventually applied that principle to punk itself.
As greater success beckoned, a spiritual awakening changed her priorities. She stepped away from that musical world and immersed herself in meditation, yoga and spiritual exploration, eventually spending substantial time in India.
In that sense, “Devotion” isn’t the opposite of punk. It’s the continuation of the same rebellion using radically different tools.
Once, freedom meant noise.
Now it means stillness.
That’s where the song’s Portland connection becomes most persuasive. This is a city with a well-established suspicion of anything overly packaged. Portland’s best creative culture tends to favor the handmade, unconventional and personally meaningful over whatever some distant industry office has declared marketable.
“Devotion” is decidedly unconcerned with conventional marketability.
It asks listeners to slow down at precisely the moment culture keeps asking them to accelerate.
There are no frantic attempts to generate a viral moment. No musical elbows are thrown in the competition for attention. Ananda simply establishes an emotional and spiritual space and trusts listeners to decide whether they want to enter.
The song’s underlying philosophy is equally compelling: discomfort and peace don’t necessarily cancel one another out. Beauty can emerge while life remains unresolved. Expansion can occur inside contraction.
That idea seems particularly resonant in a city where wellness culture and counterculture have frequently overlapped. “Devotion” isn’t offering spirituality as an escape from reality. Its very existence came from a night when reality was distinctly uncomfortable.
The song proposes staying with the moment anyway.
Ananda Xenia Shakti may have traveled from punk clubs to Indian meditation retreats, but the underlying search has remained remarkably consistent. She’s still interested in liberation. She’s simply changed her understanding of what needs to be escaped.
For Portland listeners willing to turn down the noise long enough to hear it, “Devotion” offers something increasingly precious:
Not another demand for attention, but permission to be still.
