"Zoo Friend" explores two feelings that have quietly shaped me for as long as I can remember. The first is a deep sense of connection with non-human beings — animals, plants, landscapes — and the joy that comes when others feel it too. Whether it's a shared look with a companion animal, the moment we meet the eye of a whale, or the calm that settles under a canopy of trees, there's something powerful in remembering we’re all part of the same web.

But the song also holds grief — for how often that connection is dismissed. Despite the intelligence and sensitivity of non-human life, post-industrial (especially Western) cultures tend to place humans at the top of some imagined hierarchy. There’s also a deep helplessness in witnessing harm done to beings who don’t have a voice in the systems that exploit them — beings we can sense and love, but can’t always protect. Zoo Friend pushes back against that hubris and mourns the imbalance.

At its heart, though, this is a song about those rare, magical moments when the veil lifts and something bigger seeps through — when reality shakes itself awake, and so do we.

Musically, Zoo Friend moves gently through these feelings, inviting the listener to sway, drift, and dissolve into sound. The lyrics are intentionally sparse—like fragments of a memory or a transmission caught mid-air — leaving room for breath, movement, and emotion to fill the gaps. Rhythms shift and shimmer subtly, creating a soft sense of disorientation, like something quietly slipping out of place. Vocal layers shift in clarity and tone, as if filtering through different levels of consciousness or perception. Blurring the line between the organic and synthetic, the track doesn’t insist, but instead opens a space — an atmosphere — to tune in, feel deeply, and maybe even remember something ancient. It holds space for grief, awe, and recognition without needing to explain any of it.