Deva Premal
Deva Premal, born Jolantha Fries on April 2, 1970 in Nuremberg, Germany, is a German singer known for performances of Sanskrit mantras. Her music is produced with Prabhu Music. Her 2018 album Deva was nominated for Best New Age Album at the Grammy Awards.
She met her partner Miten at the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune, India, in 1990 while studying holistic therapies. The two have toured together since 1992, giving concerts and chant workshops.
In July 2005, Premal chanted the Gayatri Mantra for her dying father. She has said the moment showed how chanting can connect deeply with life and death, ending with the mantra Om as a circle completed.
In interviews, Premal has explained that the meaning of Sanskrit chants is secondary to the sound itself, describing the word ananda as the blissful vibration thatWork on a cellular level.
Premal’s chants have reached wide audiences. Cher used Premal’s Gayatri Mantra on her Farewell Tour, and a Russian dancer performed to Premal’s Gayatri in a dance piece. Edward James Olmos gave copies of Premal’s Gayatri to the Battlestar Galactica cast and crew and used Om Hraum Mitraya from her Dakshina album in the HBO movie Walkout. Premal and Miten also performed for The Dalai Lama at a 2002 conference in Munich, singing the Tara Mantra.
Her Tibetan Mantras for Precarious Times (2010), recorded with the Gyuto Monks of Tibet, features eight mantras chanted 108 times.
Premal and Miten say they use a natural selection process to choose mantras for their albums and prefer Sanskrit mantras. They believe letting go of ego helps reveal the mantra’s true meaning, and they describe themselves as messengers of a 5,000-year-old tradition. Premal’s vocal range is contralto.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 13:52 (CET).