This season’s socially-conscious pop anthem comes from a very different trio than you’re probably imagining: an Indigenous trans musician, an environmentalist drag queen, and cello legend Yo-Yo Ma.
“Won’t Give Up,” streaming now on major platforms, is a collaboration between Ma, climate-conscious drag performer Pattie Gonia, and Quinn Christopherson, a transgender singer-songwriter of Ahtna Athabascan and Iñupiaq descent. According to an interview with the three in Broadway World this week, Ma first reached out to Gonia (whose real name is Wyn Wiley) to join his ongoing project, “Our Common Nature,” which Ma describes as a “cultural journey” uniting communities with one another and the planet to promote climate action. Upon discovering she was already working on a song centered around Alaskan glaciers, the two combined their projects and brought on Christopherson, who is native to the region. Gonia sings on the track, backed up by Christopherson, who also rounds out the instrumentation with acoustic guitar.
The result: a tune combining each performer’s talents that passionately exhorts the listener not to give up on saving the environment and solving the climate crisis. If it sounds cheesy, maybe it is, but it’s already had the intended impact on at least one person: Christopherson himself.
“Making this song about glaciers started as a goodbye, but through the process we realized we couldn't do that,” Christopherson told Broadway World. “Creating this work activated more of a fight in me immediately, and that feels powerful.”
Ma, the 19-time Grammy award winner whose name has become synonymous with the cello, echoed Christopherson’s sentiments, describing Alaska as “an incredible part of the planet.”
“I was deeply moved by my time there: I felt grief when I saw our glaciers receding and when I heard about the effects of melting permafrost — but I also left Alaska full of hope,” Ma reflected.
As musicologist Nate Sloan explained to NPR, Ma’s “haunting” cello itself reflects those themes, with its tones and drawn-out notes even evoking the feeling of a glacier’s slow melt. “And that tension to me captures something about the subject of this song,” Sloan said, “which is preserving this beautiful planet we live on while acknowledging how delicate and fragile it is and how quickly it's being threatened.”
This kind of thing is par for the course for Gonia, whose drag is explicitly informed by environmental crises and the need for sustainability (if you couldn’t tell from the “Patagonia” pun). In a 2021 interview, Gonia said her “unshowered” drag — which often includes upcycled materials and sometimes literal trash — is part of a fight for climate justice, and to “make the outdoors as gay as possible” in the process.
As all three participants are keenly aware, a song on its own can’t save the planet, but the humans who listen can make a difference. That goes double for the Indigenous activists who have been doing this work for decades, some of whom worked with Ma, Christopherson, and Gonia to promote the song’s release.
“We have to be able to express these big emotions so we can continue to take action and not fall into this pit of despair,” said indigenous organizer Princess Daazhraii Johnson of the Alaska-based activist group Native Movement, which recently helped organize a community workshop focusing on the song.
“The song is so much more than just about the climate crisis and our Mother Earth,” Johnson told NPR. “It is about our connection as a human species and as a family.”
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