Excerpt:
“Won’t Give Up” was originally conceived as a requiem — an act of remembrance — for a melting glacier in Alaska.
“We were standing, all three of us, on Exit Glacier, in a spot where even five, ten years ago, the glacier was a hundred feet tall,” said drag queen and vocalist Pattie Gonia, who collaborated on the song with 2019 NPR Tiny Desk Contest winner Quinn Christopherson and famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The trio traveled to the site in Kenai Fjords National Park to shoot the accompanying music video. “And now it’s nothing,” Gonia added. “Now it’s the rocks underneath.”
Yet unlike many other tracks reflecting on environmental disaster, from Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” to Anohni’s “4 Degrees,” “Won’t Give Up” — as its title suggests — aims to counteract peoples’ feelings of despair when it comes to reducing global warming.
“The reality of climate change is very real, but so are the solutions and so are the people working on them,” said Gonia.
“We’re not going to give up on nature,” said Christopherson, an indigenous Alaskan of Iñupiaq and Ahtna descent. “We’re not going to give up on each other.”
Melting glaciers — along with rising seas and extreme weather events — have become powerful visual markers of the global impact of fossil fuel consumption, the driving cause of climate change. The National Park Service has been charting the retreat of Exit Glacier for decades.
Ma’s cello solo in the song even evokes the weeping glacier.
“He’s playing these ethereal harmonics which are beautiful and also a little haunting,” said Nate Sloan, a University of Southern California musicologist and co-host of the pop music podcast Switched on Pop. “And that tension to me captures something about the subject of this song, which is preserving this beautiful planet we live on while acknowledging how delicate and fragile it is and how quickly it’s being threatened…”
