Rock star nun: how Nepal's rebel with a cause became an unlikely sensation
Ani Choying Drolma tells Bibek Bhandari about escaping a traumatic childhood to blaze her own trail as a world-famous singer and a philanthropist.
As Buddhist chants and prayers echoed through the Nepalese hilltop monastery where Ani Choying Drolma lived, the 19-year-old nun was listening to, and losing herself in, Bonnie Raitt's Something to Talk About.
She rewound and replayed the American blues singer's uplifting anthem over and over on her cassette player - "Luck of the Draw", the album featuring Raitt's big hit, was the first Western music Drolma had owned.
Fourteen years later, Raitt went to see Drolma play live in San Francisco, in the United States. The teenage fan had become the rock star nun.
"Hi, I'm Bonnie Raitt, and I'm one of your biggest fans," giggles Drolma, re-enacting her treasured meeting with the flame-haired singer she'd first seen on that cassette cover.
"She said 'Cho' was one of her favourite albums."
People like to put you in a box. I always disappoint them, and I always wanted to disappoint them.
Drolma's debut album is the perfect introduction to her music, with her haunting melodies and ancient Buddhist mantras set to the guitar riffs of American Steve Tibbetts. The Philadelphia Inquirer describes hearing the nun chant as "like being present at the creation of something fragile and miraculous".