Heart Takes Flight

Heart Takes Flight follows Ram Dass’s earlier release “To Become Born,” which sat with grief and loss. This song marks a turn toward joy, written during Ram Dass’s own healing journey in the aftermath of a significant loss, and it asks a different question of the listener: what does it feel like to keep living, fully, once the hardest parts of life have passed through you?

Ram Dass describes the song’s core as a kind of existential happiness — “the perception and internal knowing that all of the things in life are sacred, connected, and beautiful.” It is not an escape from grief, but an expansion alongside it, as he explains: “I wanted to give voice to my experience of beauty and joy within grief, and that happiness does not preclude having hard feelings.”

Musically, the track mirrors that emotional arc, opening with yearning guitar and vocals before giving way to rhythmic, propulsive percussion — a shift Ram Dass describes as representing the joy of life as a whole, complete with both tragedy and triumph.

Part of the album And Now He Has Wings, the track explores life, death, love, grief, and the search for serenity through sound.

The song came together swiftly. Ram Dass had the idea for the chorus melody, and Bogdan Djukic, borrowing a shoddily-made electric guitar, began shaping what would become the track’s main riff. The whole piece was conceived and recorded in under three hours at the Niwa Condos in Tulum, Mexico, then edited and mixed afterward at Ram Dass’s studio in Northern California.