Guelph, ON singer-songwriter Trina Chakrabarti has released “Take A Stance,” a deliberately stripped-down protest song built to let its lyrics carry the whole weight of the record.
Where her debut EP, Underworld, processed personal trauma through myth and metaphor, “Take A Stance” drops the allegory entirely.
“I wanted this song to be more stripped down and really have the lyrics shine,” Trina said. “Just like I want to embrace the anger of my personal experiences, I believe in embracing the anger from world issues.”
The song grew out of two specific moments of frustration.
Trina, who works as a registered music therapist, said she wrote the first verse after watching colleagues in her field grow more concerned with the professionalism of language than with the human cost of the events being described, and wrote the second after watching public reaction to escalating conflict involving Iran. From there, the song widens into a broader argument about complicity and silence, delivered without a single metaphor standing between the listener and the message.
“This track has no metaphors,” she said. “It is calling out the hypocrisy so directly, because with this topic, metaphors just are not enough.”
The song’s extended outro becomes a chant naming a long list of regions experiencing occupation that Trina said deserve more global attention than they receive: Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Hawaii, Kashmir, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Lebanon, Syria, Myanmar and Ukraine among them.
Throughout the song, she returns to the phrase “none of us are free till all of us are free,” a sentiment she traces to Black activists, including Maya Angelou, Malcolm X and Opal Lee.
“We owe each other everything,” she said, “because that is what it means to be in community.”
For Trina, the song is personal as much as political. Her family history includes the impacts of colonization and partition, and she said continuing to speak out feels like a responsibility rather than a choice. A portion of the proceeds from “Take A Stance” are being donated directly to a friend’s family in Palestine. “You don’t need a giant platform to take action,” she said. “Using your voice is more and more important every day, and it is never too late to speak out.”
“Take A Stance” was produced, mixed and mastered by Ruthie Santiago. It follows Trina’s 2024 debut EP, Underworld, a concept project that reimagined the myth of Hades and Persephone as a vehicle for exploring personal trauma, anger, grief and chronic illness, built in collaboration with producer Wonder Truly and a community of musicians Trina met through music streaming on Twitch.
Trina holds a graduate diploma and master’s degree in Music Therapy from Concordia University, along with training from the Royal Conservatory of Music, and continues to work part time as a registered music therapist. She identifies as a member of the Desi, queer and disabled communities, and describes her work as a genre bending exploration of personal experience examined through a social justice lens.
“Art has the ability to create meaningful change,” she said, “and if there is one piece of advice I can put forward, it is to make your human made creations, even if no one sees it.”
Trina said her next single, “Something Like Hope,” is planned as the introduction to her next full-length project, continuing a catalogue built on turning difficult experience, personal and global, into songs meant to be felt directly.