Emotional Maps: Songwriting with a Sense of Place

Howard Gladstone explores the importance of place in his songwriting in this three-part blog series, writing about India (Part 1), Spain (Part 2), and New Orleans (Part 3). These are emotional maps, not travelogues — songs that grow from the character and contradictions of each locale.

Rather than document his travels, Howard reflects on how each place shaped the feeling or meaning of a song. Through this series, he explores how geography inspires creativity — and how travel, even brief, leaves something behind in the music.

Part 1: India

I was recently asked how many of my songs include place names in the title — a question that got me thinking about just how deeply travel shapes my songwriting. Many of my songs have grown out of encounters with the character and contradictions of the places I’ve been including India, Spain, Italy, Ireland, South Pacific — and even a few corners of the U.S. (well, really just one: New Orleans, which may sit in the U.S. but lives in a world of its own).

These songs aren’t travelogues — they’re emotional maps. Sometimes they come directly from a physical place, other times from the imaginative landscape that opens up through memory, reading, or dreams.

Some places leave a mark. India, for me, was not just a country — it was a place of emotional intensity, spiritual tension, and aesthetic overload. From incense rising at dawn in Benares to the temples of Khajuraho, India presented itself as a place where history, devotion, desire, and the unknowable coexist in uncomfortable harmony.

I didn’t go to India looking for songs. But they found me. These are songs born from experience, imagination, and the strange alchemy of being both witness and outsider.

Khajuraho

One place that left a deep mark on me was Khajuraho, a small city in central India known for its ancient temples covered in astonishingly detailed carvings — spiritual, sensual, and unapologetically human. These temples, built over a thousand years ago, somehow feel alive, telling stories of devotion, desire, and everyday life in stone.

My song Khajuraho emerged as an erotic fantasy — a memory that’s not quite mine, conjured by incense smoke and sandstone sculpture. 

Khajuraho isn’t on the usual tourist trail, but being there — in that quiet, dusty town surrounded by temples and history — stirred something that found its way into a song. Khajuraho is a fantasy, a poetic memory set in a temple where time and identity dissolve in passion:

I miss the smell of the incense
Your supple limbs spread like a vine
In the temple where passion reigns
I could not tell what was yours
And what was mine…

There is no linear story — just sensation, surrender, and a sense of being absorbed into something older and stranger than logic.  The lyrics just flow across time and mix with the steady beat of the music.  Listen or read or both and share the experience.  Or visit and create your own.  

Candles on the River

Another moment etched in memory — and into song — came during a pre-dawn walk through the ancient city of Benares (Varanasi).  It was 4:30 a.m. The streets were still, narrow, winding down toward the Ganges. I climbed into a small rowboat and drifted out as the first light touched the sky. All around me, candles floated gently on the water — offerings for the dead, prayers for release from the cycle of rebirth. In the distance, the smoke rose from the burning ghats.

I was an outsider — fully aware that this wasn’t my world, that I was only passing through. But I was also moved in a way I can’t fully explain. That tension — between witness and participant, between reverence and distance — shaped the song Candles on the River.

Down to the river
River of no memory
I am trying
To get closer
To the light

Benares isn’t just a place — it’s a portal. A city that lives between the sacred and the everyday, where life and death meet without pretense.   This isn’t a song of faith or judgment. It’s a song of witnessing — watching small candles float across the surface of the river — symbolic souls carried by water.  I was not of this world, but I couldn’t look away. I didn’t go there looking for a song. But one found me.

Photograph

Not every song begins with a journey taken. Some come from journeys imagined. Photograph was born from reading — a Margaret Atwood novel set in 19th-century Ontario and a dry but oddly compelling history of British India. Somewhere in my mind, the two narratives crossed paths, and a story took shape.

Two rivers — the Don in Ontario and the Ganges in India — flow through the song, carrying with them lost love, memory, and time out of joint. The result is an improbable tale, maybe even a dream, but one grounded in the emotional truth that photographs — and songs — can sometimes reveal (or hide):

I’m gazing at an old family photograph
Fading now in sepia tones…

She sat by the ticking clock
He shipped out from Kingston dock
To the Bombay Gates to defend the Raj…

We walk the gorgeous banks
Of these rivers without end
Hand in hand
We’re lovers linked through time…

Photograph is a reminder that not all places we write about are places we’ve stood. Some live in the imagination, shaped by books, and fragments of the past we inherit without fully understanding. Other Western musicians have grappled with India’s influence. George Harrison’s Within You Without You (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles) stands out — not just for its sitars and tablas, but for how it attempts to express Indian spiritual philosophy in English. The lyrics speak of dissolving ego and finding truth in stillness- like floating on the Ganges at dawn, watching the river carry prayers downstream. India doesn’t just change your scenery — it shifts your internal compass.

Conclusion

These songs — Khajuraho, Candles on the River, Photograph — each reveal how a sense of place can stir something deeper than description. Whether drawn from lived experience or imagined across time and distance, these landscapes shape the emotional terrain of the songs themselves.

In Part 2, I’ll continue the journey visiting Spain. Part 3 explores the singular world of New Orleans in song and lyric.

Enjoy the complete lyrics to these songs and many more in Timepieces: Selected Lyrics by Howard Gladstone.  For the full experience, listen to the songs on the favorite streaming service or from Howard Gladstone’s Music Store. https://howardgladstone.bandcamp.com