A Maine Folk Band Finds Its Voice in a Warming World

PORTLAND, Maine—Onstage, Zak and Lena Kendall sing in steady harmony about the flood that left their hometown under 8 feet of water. It’s the sixth track on their new album, “All the Light in Autumn,” and, like much of their work, pairs folk riffs with stories of climate disruption.

“After a few weeks of heavy snow, Christmas rolled around, it warmed up to 55 degrees and we got torrential downpours,” Zak told a crowd of a few hundred at the band’s album-release show. “All the snow and water came rushing down from Sugarloaf and Saddleback mountains.”

Locals were paddling down Main Street in Farmington, Maine, in canoes, Zak recalled. Rather than join them, he turned the icy floodwaters into material for a song about climate anxiety. “Been afraid my whole life of the rise in the tide,” the siblings sing on stage.

GoldenOak, made up of siblings Zak and Lena Kendall, bassist Mike Knowles and drummer Jackson Cromwell, formed around 2016. As the band’s main lyricist, Zak draws on his background in ecology and his close attention to how climate change is reshaping daily life in Maine.

At the College of the Atlantic, he studied human ecology, immersing himself in climate science and environmental issues while sneaking in songwriting between classes. After graduating, he dove into climate activism as executive director of Maine Youth for Climate Justice. 

Then he began to notice something: tropes of displacement, violent storms and dying forests were bleeding into his lyrics. He saw a way to combine his passions of climate activism and folk music, and that convergence has defined his songwriting ever since.

“It was scary at first,” he said. “When you write love songs or other popular music, there are set maps to follow. Trying to incorporate climate change into music isn’t something a lot of people do.”

Bands like AJR and Grammy-winning artist Jon Batiste have done the same. “As an artist, you have to make a statement,” Batiste said in an interview with Covering Climate Now. “You got to bring people together. People’s power is the way that you can change things in the world.”

Batiste called his recent song “Petrichor” a “warning set to a dance beat.” GoldenOak’s discography has taken it a step further, featuring multiple conceptual albums bringing climate urgency into the folk tradition.

The band’s first climate-focused album, “Room to Grow,” is a 10-song invitation to climate action, laying out what’s at stake and why the natural world is worth protecting.

In “Ash,” for instance, Kendall frames the loss of ash trees as a kind of breakup song—a farewell to a species that once filled the forests where he grew up. This was the wood he carved into canoe paddles and that Wabanaki basket-makers relied on for generations, now disappearing under the spread of the emerald ash borer.

Most of the album leans somber, with nine tracks moving between poetic depictions of ecological loss, frontline activist anthems and moments of climate hopelessness. But its most popular song, “Little Light,” reaches in the opposite direction: a hopeful ode to renewable energy and Indigenous knowledge.

“Music can be a powerful form of activism,” Zak said. “Over time I found a way to incorporate my lived experience, academic research and frontline stories to tell these stories.” 

It’s a hard balance, Zak explains. Push the climate narrative too far and suddenly you’re just singing statistics; lean too much on personal experience and it becomes another introspective track.

With “All the Light in Autumn,” released December 5, Zak keeps testing that balance. Ten birds on the album cover represent its 10 songs. Some, like “The Flood” and “All the Birds,” return to themes of ecological loss, while others pull back to connect climate change to the political forces shaping it.

Written in the weeks after the election, aptly named “Always Coming, Always Going” confronts the environmental protections dismantled under the Trump administration. Other tracks take aim at resource extraction under capitalism, environmental inequity and the hollow myth of the American dream.

“Before this album came out people kept asking me if this one would be about climate change too,” Zak said. “And I think the answer is always going to be ‘yes’ because climate change touches every aspect of our lives.”

Folk music grappled with climate themes long before the genre’s famed artists recognized them—ballads about coal country, songs about scarred landscapes. Now, the ubiquitous nature of climate impacts may push more artists to write about it, extending even beyond artists like AJR and Jon Batiste and into mainstream pop.

“Music can help people process their emotions about climate change,” said Fabian Holt, a former music sociologist at Roskilde University in Denmark who now studies climate and culture. “But it can also serve as a medium for mobilization.”

“Just writing these songs about climate change doesn’t always feel like enough,” Zak said. “We try to lean into our role as activists, creating spaces for people to gather and share their own stories.” GoldenOak uses its platform to promote voting initiatives, amplify protests and sometimes even perform at them.

Back onstage, Zak and Lena lean into the microphone to dedicate their most beloved song to climate activists and people living on the frontlines. Its lyrics insist on hope, even when climate progress falters. As the crowd joins in, humming, singing or whispering the words to themselves, it becomes clear how music can turn shared climate grief into collective resolve.