“Love Wins” is a mantra for these times, a chant I composed about a decade ago and, at the ancestors’ nudging, brought to the whales for the first time during the 2024 season. When I considered the genocides and the fires and the wars raging in so many places right now, I dropped into a sense of rooted clarity about this song being the focal point for my recording work with the whales during my travels back to the archipelago of Abrolhos off the coast of southern Bahia in October. With the intentionality of someone who understands the vast distances that sound travels underwater and the even greater expanse whalesong covers as it’s passed form population to population around the globe, I offered this song as my vibrational intervention, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew this would be the one that the whales sang back to me. Still, nothing could have prepared me for the experience of hearing a whale repeat the melody that I was singing over and over, clearly determined to learn the song and, in my understanding, reinforce the affirmation expressed through its two lyrics. Yes, they said, affirm this.

This is another long track—almost 17 minutes. I invite you to listen with the time, space, and conditions that allow you to sink fully into absorbing what, to my knowledge, is the first time something like this has been recorded live between whales and a human. I encourage you to sing it any and everywhere, as if you know that singing it can make it so.