NOTE: Spoilers for the documentary, The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52.
If you follow me on any of my social media accounts, you will likely already know that my new single, ‘The Loneliest Whale,’ is officially OUT! I love this song so much and I’m so excited for you all to hear it – it is, without a doubt, one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written.
If you’re a regular on my blog, you will probably have read the posts about ‘Write This Out‘ and ‘In The Mourning,’ the two singles that I released prior to this one. ‘The Loneliest Whale’ is the first official single of my upcoming EP but the earlier songs felt really important in establishing the foundations of this new project. Plus it meant I could release more music with the EP.
I wrote this song with an amazing artist and songwriter, lukeistired, who I went to university with. It was the summer of 2021 and our course had remained online up to this point and, finally able to work onsite again, we booked a practice room and started writing this song. We made a solid start and I later finished it by myself before working on the production with my long time collaborator, Richard Marc. It was then beautifully mixed and mastered by Josh Fielden.
Photographer: Thomas Oscar Miles // Cover Design: Richard Sanderson
The song, unsurprisingly, uses the story of The Loneliest Whale as a metaphor for the loneliness that can often come with being autistic. This whale calls at a frequency much higher than other whales (it’s believed to be a hybrid) and while other whales can hear it they can’t understand it; they can’t communicate. That was something that I desperately related to, both before and after I was diagnosed as autistic. I’ve always felt like I’m on a different, more difficult to access frequency, so I’ve had this story in the back of my mind for a really, really long time.
When I sat down to start writing songs for this project, I knew this was a story that I wanted to write a song about. Although I knew the story well, I wanted to make sure I had all of my facts right and so I started researching. But what I didn’t expect to find was just how many individuals and communities also related to this whale, how many people have made art about this whale… I was so inspired. I’d expected the song to be a lonely, melancholy one but this changed the emotional direction: the loneliness and isolation is still there but there’s also hope. It’s a much more uplifting song than I’d ever imagined it would be.
The one obvious source of research that I avoided was Joshua Zeman’s documentary, The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52. It was a documentary that I was really excited to see but I knew that, if they did find the whale during the documentary, I would never be able to write the song I was so inspired to write. So I decided that I’d watch it after the song was finished and then, if there was anything I wanted to change about the song, I could but I could also leave it as it was.
The documentary is great and I highly recommend it (although major trigger warnings for gruesome scenes of whaling – I’m not convinced that that level of blood and violence was necessary to make the point but that’s just my personal opinion): it manages to perfectly balance the story and mythology of the whale with the physical search and all of the science involved. And while they didn’t find the whale, they do manage to record two separate whale calls at this same frequency, close together but far enough apart that they had to belong to two separate whales. So there are two of them: two 52Hz whales. The Loneliest Whale no longer needs to be lonely. I was so moved by this discovery: just as the whale is no longer lonely, neither am I.
I am so excited to finally have this song out in the world. As I said, it is one of my favourite songs I’ve ever written and I think it’s the song that I’ve had most people reach out to me about, after playing it live or sharing snippets of it here and there. It seems to really resonate with people and that is so, so special. At the heart of it all, that’s what I want for my music; all I want is for people to feel seen and heard and understood when they listen to it.
