Singing Resistance emerged as a movement in response to the ICE occupation that occurred in the Twin Cities over the winter of 2025–26. Its members gathered to peacefully raise their voices in song to bring people together, using joy as an act of resistance and community as an act of building power.

Sarina from the group explains that performance isn’t the objective for Singing Resistance. “Your goal is to be more connected with the folks around you,” Sarina says, “and to raise your voice for what you care about, and the world that we all deserve.”

The group membership is fluid, but a large contingent of the Singing Resistance choir visited The Current studio to perform three songs and to share the group’s story and vision.

Watch and listen to the session above, and find interview highlights below.

Interview Highlights

On being part of the tradition of movement singers and songs

Sarina: I think we're all learning from an incredible lineage of movement songwriters in this country, around the world, so it's not like, "Movement songs — what an idea! We came up with that!" Like, no, no, no. And in the U.S., a lot of movement songwriters have been really deeply embedded in communities of color, that's who have been creating music that is fueling movements, and we're a little piece of that stream and its mighty tributaries, so we're learning from movement songwriters who have taught us, "Oh, simple songs work really well." Songs that we can be taught in a call-and-echo way, that works really well. Songs that carry a powerful message but in a really accessible way, so people can see themselves in these songs. So we're learning from this incredible lineage of movement music that already exists, and new creators are stepping into that stream all the time.

On the focus not being on performance itself

Annie: We kind of got to the point of like, “It's OK!” We can just all be singing with the people around us, and still working on this bigger message together, and it's all good.

Sarina: I think that gets at the heart of what makes us different from a choir, and makes our music — it's not arranged — is that it's not about performance. So we walk through that with folks at our meetups before we do an action. That, hey, you're going to notice that sound cascades slower and slower. Great news: It's not a performance. Your goal is to be more in your body than you otherwise could be. Your goal is to be more connected with the folks around you, and to raise your voice for what you care about, and the world that we all deserve. So acoustically, you'll probably be singing with a group of 50 people around you. Don't stress about anything else. Be connected, be in your body, be in this experience together. And it's not a performance.

On the origin of the song “We Belong to Each Other”

Annie: It's based on a quote by James Baldwin that goes, "Every bombed village is my hometown," and then the rest of this poem is by Nikita Gill, and it goes like this: "And every dead child is my child. Every grieving mother is my mother. Every crying father is my father. Every home turned to rubble is the home I grew up in. Every brother carrying the remains of his brother across borders is my brother. Every sister waiting for a sister who will never come home, is my sister. Every one of these people are ours, just like we are theirs. We belong to them, and they belong to us."

On how singing gets people involved in the issues that matter to them

Sarah: When we're facing really big hard challenges like we are facing right now in our country, and have been for a long time, it can be easy to feel like isolated, or "I don't really know what to do about that," like, "What could I do as one person?" So, part of a practice of community organizing is helping people understand our conditions and understand our own experiences, our own experiences as not individual, but actually, collective, and then training people on how can we come together and build something that's more powerful than any one of us could do on our own.

On the origin and impact of the song “It’s OK to Change Your Mind”

Sarah: The "It's OK to Change Your Mind" song was written by Annie Schlaefer, who's one of our awesome local organizers and songwriters. And we wanted to do an action outside of the hotels where ICE agents were staying. There were a few hotels in particular in downtown Minneapolis. And we wanted to go to those places and sing to the ICE agents inside, calling on them to leave their jobs, and in particular we wanted to communicate it in a way that was inviting them to like come on over to the side of humanity, and we were inspired by a lot of different social movements around the world that have called on people who are upholding or carrying out the work of oppressive regimes, calling on them to step away or leave that behind. And research shows that that's actually a really core strategy for successful civil resistance movements.

And we were particularly inspired by the Serbian resistance movement to Milosevic in the '90s, who was their dictator. The movement was called Otpor. It was youth-led, and they would regularly be beaten up by the police, taken to jail, and when any member of their group was abused and taken to jail, they would show up right away outside of the houses of those police officers or military forces, and they would say to them, "You may not join us today, but you can join us tomorrow." And they did that for years, so they kept communicating over and over again that, you know, "We may not be on the same side right now, but ultimately there is a role for you here, and we welcome you over to our side." And at the pivotal moment of that revolution, there were 100,000 people who converged on Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, and Milosevic ordered the military and security forces to fire on protesters, and they didn't. So they refused to fire on their own countrymen, and they … There's folks who said, you know, "My children, my family are in that crowd."

So we were really inspired by that, and we wanted to create a song that could help popularize this idea that we need people to defect or step away from carrying out the orders of those who are in power right now.

Doe: I think that Brandi also kind of expanded that message in some of her interviews around the show [Brandi Carlile’s February 21 concert, Be Human: A Concert for Minneapolis] of really, anyone who feels like they regret any decision, whether that was voting for Trump or joining ICE, can be invited into changing their mind, and so I think that song has been continuing to put this idea of defection out into the cultural zeitgeist, and we're just seeing that phrase actually get repeated more and more these days.

Video Segments

00:00:40 We Are Many
00:04:20 Interview with host Zach McCormick, part 1
00:11:38 We Belong to Each Other
00:15:23 Interview with host Zach McCormick, part 2
00:26:16 It's Okay to Change Your Mind

Credits

Guests – Singing Resistance
Host – Zach McCormick
Producer – Derrick Stevens
Video Producer – Ariel Tilson
Video – Josh Sauvageau
Audio – Michael Osborne
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Producer – Luke Taylor