Save Me Video OUT NOW!

Happy Earth Day – the Save Me video is live! Watch here.

Save Me is a plea for interspecies empathy and action. A random vintage store find, a vinyl record of Humpback whale songs, planted the lyrical seed, “Would you save me if you understood my song – would you save me?”. As I walked home, I wondered how we would change our actions if we could communicate with other creatures and truly comprehend what they had to say.

I wrote the rest of the song after the screening of the documentary “Dammed to Extinction”. This powerful film examines the impact of the Snake River dams on the decline of Salmon populations and the health of Southern Resident Orcas in the Pacific Northwest. 

Sometimes songs materialize very quickly, like lightning bolts. Others take shape over a longer time, like a river carving its way through rock. Sometimes I stumble on a seed on the path, just a few words or a couple of lines, and I gather it, save it in a notebook, and hope it will grow into a full song or poem someday. 

In the middle of the documentary, this song seed started to take root. The humans featured in the film described the names, features, and families of the Orcas they knew, in a population with only 75 creatures left. They showed the tragic footage of a mother Orca, Tahlequah, who lost her calf, but continued to carry her for 17 days in a tour of grief. They showed the dams that block the free flow of rivers, heat the water, and make it difficult for Salmon, the food of choice for the Southern Resident Orcas, to survive.

Orcas do speak, as do many animals. Most of us don’t listen, and don’t understand what they are saying. How would we change our actions if we could communicate with other creatures the way we can with other humans?