BOSTON-"Legend has it, the roads of Boston are so tangled because they were built over old cow trails," I inform pop icon Donovan as we amble past the Saturday rush-hour traffic of the Massachusetts Turnpike. The Scottish-born troubadour's face, surprisingly youthful for his 60 years, is alight with interest. He expects that sort of mad past for Boston-the city where, he remarks as he drapes a friendly arm across my back, "They built an airport on an ocean!"Not many would describe Logan's landfill-supported extension into Boston Harbor with such enthusiasm, but positivity virtually defines Donovan. To the hippie generation of the 1960s, Donovan, with his "flower power" hits like "Sunshine Superman" and "Mellow Yellow," was a pivotal mouthpiece for the decade's dogged idealism and mysticism. This role was cemented when, alongside The Beatles, Mike Love from the Beach Boys, Mia Farrow and her sister Prudence, Donovan made that renowned 1968 trip to India to study Eastern philosophy and Transcendental Meditation from guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

By now, we've reached our destination, and after considering the absurdity of interviewing Donovan in a pub called Dillon's, I follow the singer in, taking the stool next to his at the end of the bar. As we huddle around my temperamental digital recorder and our twin pints of Guinness, I ask him the question I've been pondering all evening: After more than 30 years away from the major concert scene, what made him decide to launch a tour throughout Europe and the United States?

"Why I'm coming back in a big way," Donovan answers, "is to spin a lot of wonderful things off my 40th anniversary. The first one was in 2004. I released Beat Cafe [as] a companion disc to my [2005] book, The Hurdy Gurdy Man. I wouldn't have come back if it was just for the money-I really had so much money from my fans buying my records and my songs on the radio. It had to be a mission.

"I don't [come into public life] as an entertainer," he says. "I feel the mission as a poet, and for millennia, [we] poets in the tribe ... have been in service to humanity ... We have a way of releasing obscure emotional stress through the music." I nod, recalling childhood memories of my parents singing me to sleep with his "Jennifer Juniper."

Donovan takes a thoughtful sip of his drink. "'How do you do it?' said a pagan to a pagan priest once after he had created a ceremony, [from which] hundreds had benefited ... the pagan priest said-see, I'm always on the lookout for how it was done in the ancient days-'I didn't do it.'"

"Meaning," explains Donovan, his voice quiet amid the din of the pub, "I didn't write the songs. I created the circumstances for [them] to happen." The idea is familiar to me. Back in Sep. 2005, when I spoke with avant-garde film director and TM devotee David Lynch, he had told me about the concept of the "unified field," a great universal consciousness. According to the TM movement, meditation allows one to tap into this field, resulting in intellectual, spiritual and creative enlightenment.

Lynch and Donovan have bonded over their shared interest in TM, and recently, Donovan has been appointed the musical arm of the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace. The organization seeks to fund the practice of meditation in U.S. schools with the hope that stressed students will be able to reach that harmonious state of which both Donovan and Lynch speak reverently.

"In music and special forms of art and certain poetry and literature you can be placed in this state, but it's only temporary," Donovan says. TM, he insists, takes less time to achieve, with more permanent results. "It sounds like science fiction, it sounds like a fairy tale, it sounds like magic ... but it can only be described as that. There is a magic. Your life can be transformed."

I cannot help but ask Donovan-the first major British pop star to be arrested for marijuana possession-whether drugs would have the same effect. Older and wiser now, the singer dismisses that notion. "The peyote and the holy plants, they did something, LSD did something, but in such a terrific, terrifying and extreme way that it became clear that we couldn't keep saying that this was the way that our generation could try to find the inner world. We would have to find it in a more gentle way.

"With meditation," he explains, "you can go down below the thoughts, and when your thought patterns take you away, you won't be in such an extreme condition that peyote puts you in-you will be in a state of rest. Or, if you get agitated, you'll remember the mantra. But on peyote, there is no mantra."

A kooky picture flits into my head: flower child Donovan, attempting to convince my 9/11-traumatized generation that all will be well if they only put down the drugs, shed the anger and start meditating. I share this skepticism with Donovan, who, to my astonishment, declares, "You're quite right! You should be feeling this, because my generation-we have the tools-and my generation is now in government.

"Really," Donovan marvels, "the West should have learned to have led the way, because we opened all the doors ... me, Joanie Baez, Bob Dylan, we should all be saying, 'You idiots! Why didn't you see what we brought out of Bohemia, to show you that this is the way forward?' But Maharishi and David Lynch would look at it this way: It hasn't been applied ... how it wasn't adapted is because the illusion is still firmly in place. Like George Harrison said: 'The illusion is very strong.'

"What didn't work?" asks Donovan. "You can't just go to somebody and say, 'Give me a mantra,'" he reasons. "It's the same in any university. If you want something, you're going to have to arrive at class in a certain frame of mind. Not know it all."

Still, Donovan figures that young TM practitioners-as well as would-be ones-could always use an extra bit of motivation. As such, he and Lynch are planning a joint lecture-and-concert college tour for next year. "We're going to start with two or three in January [for meditating students]," he says. "Others will be open to the public. Where, I can't tell you yet. But all one has to do is log onto Davidlynchfoundation.org and just keep pace, and my own, Donovan.ie."

As I stumble out into the cow-trail streets of Boston, my mind feels disjointed from simultaneous exposure to ancient wisdom and the potency of a good Guinness. Off in the distance, I spot Donovan hailing a taxi-after an hour of intense conversation, the Hurdy Gurdy Man needs to rest his melodic voice before his 8 p.m. concert in the Berklee Performance Center. "Hell," I muse with a grin as I watch the cab pull away from the curb, driver undoubtedly oblivious to his famous passenger, "There goes the spirit of the '60s.