With her song Fight for You, Raye Zaragoza is able to tap into her multi-faceted heritage and channel the fight to protect natural resources that seems all too common among indigenous people around the world. It is a tragic flaw in humanity itself that a simple imbalance in power structure among humans can create a sort of greed that is happy to eat its own tail.

I had a musician friend of mine ask me the other day about why more music isn't coming through the system that deals with what we as a country have been going through. Why no protest stuff? Where is all the anger?

The truth is that a good protest song is hard to come by; hard to write, and hard to market. I have always found it hard to write songs in any sort of deliberate way; the good ones always seem to come from somewhere else. This one feels authentic in a way that is disarmingly simple: you fight for me, and I'll fight for you.

Raye Zaragota hits some notes that remind us of Florence and the Machine, but sadly her message of empowering community and collective action is missing from most of mainstream pop.

UPDATE: Raye was just selected as finalist for the No Depression Singer-Songwriter Award. It seems her message will soon be reaching a much larger audience. Congratulations Raye!