77: DTN Podcast | Jim Alstott Ep. 77 | God Told Me to Make This Record | Drew McManus of Satsang

Drew McManus learned the word that would become his band's name on a mountain pass in Nepal. It means sitting in the company of truth. He's built ten years and six records on it.

The new one is called Elohim, and he didn't pick the title. He was told to.

We talk about the revelatory experience that preceded it and the illness that followed, about a father who was a preacher and told a skateboarding punk rock kid he had a minister's heart, and about the question Drew asked for years growing up poor in a house he doesn't pretend was safe: why did all of this happen to me? The answer, when it arrived, had changed shape. Perhaps none of it happened to him. Perhaps it happened for him.

We also get into why he won't play two of his early songs anymore, what the music industry looks like from the inside when you've refused to play along, the one sentence a Buddhist said to him at a merch table that became a mantra, and a hidden Nipsey Hussle track that he heard on the Pacific Coast Highway beside a friend who'd been in federal prison three hundred days earlier.

Elohim is out now. Twenty seven minutes, built to be played start to finish. Satsang plays Garcia's Chicago on November 4th.

Every song Drew named, in the order he named them, 21 tracks from Jackson Browne to Nipsey Hussle. Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2lrJeDuNf7H8TIAMjd3lXY

Elohim: https://satsang.ffm.to/elohim

Satsang: https://satsangmovement.com

Instagram: @satsang

Chicago: Garcia's Chicago, 4 November 2026

Drew McManus is the founder and frontman of Satsang. He named the band after a word he learned on a mountain pass in Nepal in 2013, meaning to sit in the company of truth. Six records later he remains independent and owns all of his music. His new album, Elohim, released 4 September 2026, and the Elohim Tour runs through the autumn. Press photo credit: Drew Korf.

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