Yo-Yo Ma, Pattie Gonia and Quinn Christopherson made the music video for “Will not Give Up” at Kenai Fjords Nationwide Park.

William Woodward

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William Woodward

Yo-Yo Ma, Pattie Gonia and Quinn Christopherson made the music video for “Will not Give Up” at Kenai Fjords Nationwide Park.

William Woodward

“Will not Give Up” was initially conceived as a requiem — an act of remembrance — for a melting glacier in Alaska.

“We have been standing, all three of us, on Exit Glacier, in a spot the place even 5, ten years in the past, the glacier was 100 toes tall,” stated drag queen and vocalist Pattie Gonia, who collaborated on the tune with 2019 NPR Tiny Desk Contest winner Quinn Christopherson and famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The trio traveled to the location in Kenai Fjords Nationwide Park to shoot the accompanying music video. “And now it is nothing,” Gonia added. “Now it is the rocks beneath.”

But not like many different tracks reflecting on environmental catastrophe, from Joni Mitchell’s “Large Yellow Taxi” to Anohni’s “4 Levels,” “Will not Give Up” — as its title suggests — goals to counteract peoples’ emotions of despair on the subject of lowering world warming.

“The truth of local weather change could be very actual, however so are the options and so are the individuals engaged on them,” stated Gonia.

“We’re not going to surrender on nature,” stated Christopherson, an indigenous Alaskan of Iñupiaq and Ahtna descent. “We’re not going to surrender on one another.”

Melting glaciers — together with rising seas and excessive climate occasions — have change into highly effective visible markers of the worldwide impression of fossil gasoline consumption, the driving reason for local weather change. The Nationwide Park Service has been charting the retreat of Exit Glacier for many years.

Ma’s cello solo within the tune even evokes the weeping glacier.

“He is taking part in these ethereal harmonics that are stunning and likewise slightly haunting,” stated Nate Sloan, a College of Southern California musicologist and co-host of the pop music podcast Switched on Pop. “And that rigidity to me captures one thing concerning the topic of this tune, which is preserving this stunning planet we reside on whereas acknowledging how delicate and fragile it’s and the way rapidly it is being threatened.”

Regardless of the tune’s connection to melting glaciers, its lyrics do not particularly reference local weather change. Sloan stated the “Will not Give Up” chorus might function a rallying cry for a lot of social actions.

“It is slightly imprecise,” stated Sloan. “It is slightly inspirational, which is maybe what the world wants from a local weather anthem.”

The creators of the tune stated the broadness of the messaging is intentional.

“There’s a number of potential for this tune to be sung at local weather rallies, to be sung as part of the local weather motion,” stated Gonia. “But additionally for the tune to be what it must be and imply what it must imply to different individuals, irrespective of who they’re. If an individual hears it and thinks that it isn’t about local weather however that it is about racial justice or that it is about queer rights, that is stunning. Take it, go for it.”

“Will not Give Up” formally dropped this week. Some contributors in Fairbanks bought a sneak preview once they joined the artists for a sing-along at a current neighborhood music workshop.

“We’ve got to have the ability to categorical these large feelings so we are able to proceed to take motion and never fall into this pit of despair,” stated workshop organizer Princess Daazhraii Johnson, a board member of Native Motion, an indigenous-led advocacy group in Alaska. (Johnson identifies as Neets’aii Gwich’in and Ashkenazi Jewish.) “The tune is a lot extra than simply concerning the local weather disaster and our Mom Earth. It’s about our connection as a human species and as a household.”

The musicians stated they hope “Will not Give Up” will change into an anthem for the local weather change motion, as Charles Albert Tindley’s “We Shall Overcome” did for civil rights within the twentieth century and “Quiet” by Milck for ladies’s rights within the months following the 2016 presidential election.

Christopherson stated one of the best ways to do this is by getting different individuals to sing it.

“It is so that you can sing, to scream, and to bounce to,” he stated. “It is simply to be shared.”