This article looks at 'I Know a Garden', the latest album by Montreal-based songwriter Edwin Raphael, focusing on how it brings together his experiences across India, Dubai and Montreal into a meditation on home and belonging. It highlights the album’s indie and alternative folk sound with chamber-pop elements, and explores themes of childhood, identity, fleeting relationships and an inner sanctum.
Edwin Raphael is a Montreal-based songwriter whose work comes out of a life split across geographies. He was born to Malayali parents from Kerala, grew up in Dubai, and moved to Montreal in his early twenties for university, a shift that placed him inside the city’s indie music scene and shaped the direction of his work. His music leans toward indie folk but pulls from a wider palette from Western singer-songwriter traditions to elements drawn from Indian classical music and Eastern melodic structures. That mix comes from his upbringing in a place like Dubai, where he has spoken about feeling a sense of dislocation growing up among people who all carried different ideas of home, and that experience feeds directly into his writing.
He started out with early EPs like 'Ocean Walk' and 'Cold Nights', then moved into full-length work with 'Will You Think of Me Later?' and 'Warm Terracotta', gradually building a sound that leans into atmosphere, layered instrumentation, and introspective songwriting. Alongside his releases, he has been active as a touring artist across Canada and the US and has also built his own label, Favourite Library, out of small, intimate shows he hosted in Montreal.
On his latest album, 'I Know a Garden', Edwin Raphael brings together the different lives he has lived across India, Dubai, and Montreal into a record that examines the search for a sense of home. The album sits within indie folk and alternative folk, with a strong chamber-pop presence that fills out the sound through strings, saxophone, synths and intricate layered arrangements. The record plays out like a kind of inner refuge, a space built from memory, myth, and small, half-forgotten moments where past and present sit next to each other. The heart of the record lies in the inner world he built of myth, memory as a child running through forests around his grandmother’s house in India, inventing stories, treating light and nature as something alive. The album moves through that space, treating each song like a different corner of a garden, where grief, wonder, and the search for oneself overlap.
Across I Know a Garden, Edwin Raphael keeps returning to the same negotiations with belonging. ‘Moonstruck’ navigates the regret over unspoken words while questioning identity and self-worth. ‘Hymn for a Dragonfly’ and ‘A Sunbeam Lent To Us Briefly’ look at how brief people, moments, and connections are, and how they pass, whether you’re ready or not.
'First Time on Earth' and 'Mosaic in the Sun' dive into recognising a strange sense of home within uncertainty and reconstructing a relationship through fragmented memories that appear whole only in hindsight. The artist touches upon religion, family, and the habits formed in childhood, showing how those ideas continue into adult life. "I Know a Garden is what happens when the stories you once imagined start singing back to you. It is me learning to speak clearly: to the forest, to the fireflies, to the river, and to myself," says Edwin. "I still don’t have the answers. But this album is what my journey looks like when I slow down enough to notice."
Edwin is taking I Know a Garden on tour immediately after its release, starting with a show in Mumbai at antiSOCIAL, which also marks his first time performing in India. From there, the tour moves through Canada with venues like The Garrison and La Petite Boîte Noire on the schedule. The run then continues into Europe with shows in London, Zurich and more.
Follow Edwin here.
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