Description
About the Song
WE ARE ONE
CATEGORY
Humanity, Unity and Global Understanding
PRIMARY EMOTION
Hope
ALSO FITS
Human Rights, Cultural Identity, Peace, Language, Cooperation, Belonging, Courage, Social Responsibility, Human Behaviour, Strength and the Future of Humanity
WHAT THIS SONG IS ABOUT
“We Are One” is about something humanity has talked about for generations but has never completely figured out.
How do billions of different people share one world without turning every difference into a reason to divide?
We come from different countries.
We speak different languages.
We have different cultures, traditions, histories and beliefs.
We look different.
We think differently.
We certainly do not agree about everything.
I do not believe we ever will.
But underneath all of that, we are still human beings living on the same planet.
That is where this song begins.
We are one if we stand together.
That little word if is important.
I am not pretending humanity is already united. Anyone looking honestly at the world knows that isn’t true.
Unity is something we have to choose.
The song is hopeful, but the music and vocal performance do not deliver that hope quietly.
This is a powerful song.
The singer has an enormous voice. There are moments when individual words are driven into extremely high pitches with an almost operatic power. When he cries out “WE ARE ONE,” it does not sound like somebody politely suggesting that humanity should get along.
It sounds like a declaration.
That matters because I never wanted the message of this song to feel weak.
Standing together takes strength.
Refusing division takes strength.
Building peace takes strength.
Getting knocked down and rising again takes strength.
Sometimes even believing that humanity can do better takes strength.
That is why the music has to carry some muscle behind the message.
The lyrics become shorter as the song develops, but the song itself does not become smaller.
The voice becomes part of the language.
A phrase like “We are one” can mean something different when it is sung softly than when it is driven upward by a singer reaching for a massive note.
By the end of this song, those repeated words are not there because I ran out of things to say.
They are there because eventually the message does not need another paragraph.
It needs to be heard.
WE ARE ONE.
THE STORY BEHIND THE SONG
The idea behind this song came from looking at something incredibly obvious that human beings somehow manage to make incredibly complicated.
There is only one human world.
We have divided it into countries, territories, cultures, religions, political systems and thousands of other identities.
Some of those differences are important.
Some are worth protecting.
I would never want a world where every culture disappeared and everybody became exactly the same.
That would not be unity to me.
That would be loss.
I want people to be proud of where they come from.
I am proud of my Portuguese roots.
Most of my life unfolded in Canada, and Canada became another major part of my story.
Those things do not have to compete.
I can carry Portugal with me while living the life Canada gave me.
Someone else can carry their own history in exactly the same way.
That thinking became important when I decided different languages should actually appear inside the song.
I did not want to write about the world entirely in English and then simply tell everybody that language does not matter.
I wanted the listener to hear the change.
Spanish enters.
Then French.
Then my own Portuguese.
Then Italian.
German.
Dutch.
Russian.
Polish.
Arabic.
Hebrew.
Ten languages appear in the song, each carrying a short human message.
Do not be afraid.
Together we are stronger.
Hand in hand, we will win.
United in heart.
Together we rise.
Together we build the future.
Together we are strength.
Together we will change the world.
Hand in hand, we create peace.
Together we stand strong.
Different languages.
Different sounds.
The same direction.
My Portuguese line has a personal place among them.
De mãos dadas, vamos vencer.
Hand in hand, we will win.
I wanted Portuguese there because if I am asking other cultures to enter the song, mine should walk through the door too.
That is what I believe unity should look like.
Bring something with you.
Do not erase yourself.
Share it.
WHY I WROTE THIS SONG
I wrote “We Are One” because division is easy.
Sometimes frighteningly easy.
Give people a label and before long somebody will tell them who they are supposed to hate.
Tell people another group is responsible for everything going wrong and somebody will believe it.
Repeat fear often enough and eventually fear begins sounding like truth.
I wanted to push in the opposite direction.
Not with a weak message.
Not by pretending dangerous people do not exist.
Not by pretending every ideology is peaceful.
Not by saying humanity should tolerate terrorism, violent extremism, cruelty or people deliberately harming innocent lives.
That is not unity.
You can believe in humanity and still stand firmly against inhuman behaviour.
You can respect another culture without agreeing with everything another person believes.
You can listen without surrendering your own opinion.
You can disagree without hatred.
That distinction is important to this song.
“We Are One” is not asking for one united mind.
It is asking whether different minds can share one world without constantly trying to destroy each other.
That is a much harder question.
It is also a much more interesting one.
WHY THIS MATTERS TO ME
This song matters to me because I have never believed a person’s value should be decided by the colour of their skin, their physical appearance, their birthplace, their accent or the peaceful culture they came from.
I also know identity matters.
I do not want people stripped of it.
Being Portuguese means something to me.
The language means something.
The culture means something.
Where my family came from means something.
Spending almost my entire life in Canada means something too.
One does not have to destroy the other.
That is one reason hearing Portuguese inside this song means more to me than simply hearing another language.
Português:
De mãos dadas, vamos vencer.
Hand in hand, we will win.
There is something about hearing your own language inside music that reaches differently.
And then another listener may have exactly that experience when Spanish arrives.
Or French.
Or Arabic.
Or Hebrew.
That is part of what I wanted.
For a few moments, the song keeps changing its voice while refusing to change its purpose.
WHY THIS SONG FITS MOITA
MOITA was never meant to be one subject repeated over and over.
Life is too large for that.
There are songs about pain.
Love.
Loss.
History.
Anger.
Family.
Human behaviour.
Questions.
Mistakes.
Strength.
And sometimes there are songs that pull the camera all the way back and look at humanity itself.
“We Are One” does that.
It asks what we are capable of when we stop treating difference as an automatic threat.
The answer is not always comfortable.
Human beings are capable of extraordinary cooperation.
We are also capable of extraordinary destruction.
The same species that builds hospitals builds weapons.
The same human mind capable of compassion is capable of hatred.
That contradiction is part of us.
So I did not want this song to say humanity is naturally wonderful and everything will work itself out.
It will not.
The opening lyric makes that clear.
We are one if we stand together.
If.
Choice.
Responsibility.
Action.
Those ideas belong inside MOITA because I want the songs to do more than entertain someone for a few minutes.
I want some of them to leave a question behind.
This one leaves a big one.
What are we going to do with the world we share?
READ THIS FIRST
Do not mistake the simplicity of the words for simplicity in the idea.
“We Are One” does not mean everyone is the same.
We are not.
It does not mean everyone should believe the same things.
We should not.
It does not mean countries, cultures or individual identities should disappear.
They should not.
It does not mean accepting violent extremism, terrorism, hatred or cruelty because somebody hides those things behind culture, religion, politics or ideology.
Human dignity and human behaviour are two different questions.
I can recognize another person’s humanity while still condemning something they have done.
I can respect cultural difference while refusing violence.
I can believe in peace while believing innocent people deserve protection.
Unity without the ability to make those distinctions becomes meaningless.
The other thing to understand before listening is the importance of the voice.
Some songs carry their meaning mostly through detailed lyrics.
This song does something different.
As it builds, the vocal performance begins carrying more and more of the emotion.
The singer reaches extremely high pitches. Certain isolated words are almost operatic in their force. The repeated declarations near the end are meant to become bigger each time.
So when you see the words “We are one” repeated again and again, do not read them as though they are sitting quietly on a page.
Hear the voice.
Hear the climb.
Hear the power behind the individual words.
The repetition is part of the build.
By the ending, the singer is no longer explaining the message.
He is driving it home.
FULL LYRICS
WE ARE ONE
We are one if we stand together
We are strong when we don’t divide
Different voices, same forever
Side by side, no place to hide
If we fight together, we can get it done
If we rise together, we outshine the sun
Hands in the dark, hearts in the light
One world breathing, one shared fight
We are one
If we stand together
We are one
Now and forever
Different words
Same human sound
Same heartbeat
Same ground
Say it loud
We are one
Spanish:
Si estamos unidos, no hay miedo
(If we are united, there is no fear)
French:
Ensemble, nous sommes plus forts
(Together, we are stronger)
Português:
De mãos dadas, vamos vencer
(Hand in hand, we will win)
Italian:
Uniti nel cuore, un solo cammino
(United in heart, one path)
German:
Gemeinsam stehen wir auf
(Together we rise)
Dutch:
Samen bouwen wij de toekomst
(Together we build the future)
Russian:
Вместе мы сила
(Together we are strength)
Polish:
Razem zmienimy świat
(Together we will change the world)
Arabic:
يدًا بيد، نصنع السلام
(Hand in hand, we create peace)
Hebrew:
ביחד נעמוד חזקים
(Together we stand strong)
We are one
If we work together
We are one
If we fight together
We can lift the wall
We can break the chains
We can light the dark
We can light the dark, FOREVER
We are one
One voice, one fire
We are one
We rise higher
We are one
We are strong
We are one
We are one
We are one
We are one
We are one
We are one
We rise at light
We rise all night
We are one
We are one
SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 1
We are one if we stand together
We are strong when we don’t divide
Different voices, same forever
Side by side, no place to hide
The song begins with the whole idea sitting right in front of us.
We are one if we stand together.
That little word if is doing a lot of work.
I am not saying the world is united. Anybody looking around can see that it isn’t. We divide ourselves constantly. Sometimes the reasons are serious. Sometimes they are political or religious. Sometimes they come from history. Sometimes they come from fear. Sometimes people divide over things so small you wonder how they ever became important in the first place.
So I could not honestly begin this song by simply declaring that humanity stands together.
We don’t.
The lyric says we can.
There is a difference.
We are one if we stand together.
That makes unity a choice.
Standing together does not mean thinking alike. I would never want billions of people thinking exactly the same way. Different minds are part of what moves humanity forward.
It also does not mean accepting everything another person believes or does.
There are things worth opposing.
Cruelty is worth opposing.
Violence against innocent people is worth opposing.
Terrorism and violent extremism are worth opposing.
Hatred is worth opposing.
Standing together does not require surrendering our judgment.
What it asks is that we do not turn every difference into an enemy.
That leads directly into the next line.
We are strong when we don’t divide.
Strength is something people usually imagine individually.
A strong person.
A strong leader.
A strong athlete.
A strong voice.
But some of the greatest strength human beings have ever demonstrated came from cooperation.
Look at almost anything enormous that humanity has accomplished.
A city.
A hospital.
A bridge.
A scientific discovery.
A spacecraft.
A piece of music performed by an entire orchestra.
None of those things exists because one person knew how to do everything.
People brought different abilities together.
That is a kind of strength we sometimes overlook.
I understand that from construction too.
You can have excellent equipment and talented people on a job, but if everybody is working against everybody else, you are going to have problems.
One person understands one part of the work.
Somebody understands another.
The job moves because those abilities connect.
Humanity is obviously much more complicated than a construction site, but cooperation still matters.
Division can destroy enormous amounts of energy.
People spend so much time fighting one another that sometimes nobody remembers what they were originally trying to accomplish.
That is why the first two lines belong together.
Stand together.
Don’t divide.
Then the song moves into something that becomes extremely important later.
Different voices, same forever.
Different voices are not a weakness in this song.
They are the point.
I did not want a song about humanity where everybody suddenly sounded the same.
That would make no sense to me.
I want to hear the difference.
I want Portuguese to sound Portuguese.
I want Spanish to sound Spanish.
I want French to sound French.
I want Arabic to sound Arabic.
I want Hebrew to sound Hebrew.
I want Russian to sound Russian.
The differences should remain audible.
Later in the song, those languages actually enter the music. But this line begins preparing us before we ever get there.
Different voices.
There is something else inside that idea too.
A voice is more than a language.
It is a person.
Everyone has a story behind the sound coming out of their mouth.
Where they grew up.
Who raised them.
What they were taught.
What they survived.
What they believe.
What they have questioned.
What they are proud of.
What they regret.
You can hear two people speaking the same language and still be hearing two completely different worlds.
I like that.
I don’t want humanity reduced to one voice.
I want different voices capable of standing together when something matters.
Side by side, no place to hide.
Now the opening puts some pressure on us.
It is easy to believe in unity from a distance.
It becomes harder when another human being is standing beside you.
Maybe they have an accent you are not used to.
Maybe they dress differently.
Maybe they pray differently.
Maybe they do not pray at all.
Maybe their political opinions drive you crazy.
Maybe their family came from a country you know almost nothing about.
Now what?
That is where the idea gets tested.
Side by side.
You cannot hide behind a label as easily when you actually know the person.
You begin learning their name.
You hear about their family.
You find out what they do for a living.
You discover what makes them laugh.
You hear what they have been through.
Suddenly the category becomes a human being.
That does not guarantee you will like them.
It does not mean you will agree.
But at least now you are dealing with a person instead of an idea somebody else handed you.
That is an important difference.
If we fight together, we can get it done
If we rise together, we outshine the sun
Hands in the dark, hearts in the light
One world breathing, one shared fight
The energy starts climbing here.
If we fight together, we can get it done.
When I use fight in this song, I am not talking about people turning on each other.
There are enough songs about that.
This fight is about what people can confront together.
Human beings spend their lives fighting things.
Disease.
Poverty.
Addiction.
Loneliness.
Ignorance.
Hatred.
Disaster.
Fear.
Sometimes we are fighting something inside ourselves that nobody else can even see.
There are battles happening around us every day that will never make the news.
A family trying to hold itself together.
Someone trying to rebuild their life.
Someone sitting beside a hospital bed.
Someone trying not to give up.
Someone trying to find enough strength to begin again.
That is why together matters more to me than fight.
The battle may still be difficult.
Standing together does not magically make the problem disappear.
But it changes how the weight is carried.
If we rise together, we outshine the sun.
Now the song reaches for something huge.
Outshine the sun.
Obviously, I am not making a scientific claim.
The lyric is supposed to feel enormous because the music is beginning to feel enormous.
And this is where the singer becomes important.
He has a voice capable of taking a word like rise and making you actually feel the song lifting.
Those high pitches are not there just to show what he can do.
They belong to the meaning.
The song rises.
The voice rises.
The message rises with it.
When he gets into those extremely high notes, there is almost an operatic size to the voice. Not because the song has suddenly become opera, but because one human voice can become so large that it feels as though it is filling the whole space around it.
That is exactly what this part of the song needs.
If we rise together, we outshine the sun.
One person can create something remarkable.
People together can create things no individual could possibly create alone.
But there is another side to that, and I think it is important enough not to avoid.
People can also unite around terrible things.
History has proved that.
A large crowd is not automatically right because it is large.
Millions of people believing something does not automatically make it good.
So unity itself cannot be the only value.
What we unite around matters.
If people unite around hatred, unity becomes dangerous.
If people unite around cruelty, their cooperation does not make the cruelty acceptable.
The unity I am writing about has human dignity behind it.
Protecting innocent people.
Building.
Learning.
Helping.
Creating.
Trying to leave something better than what we inherited.
That is the kind of rising I mean.
Hands in the dark, hearts in the light.
This is one of those lines where I want to stay for a little while.
Hands in the dark.
That is life.
We pretend we know where we are going much more than we actually do.
We plan.
We work.
We save.
We build.
We make decisions about next year.
We imagine what our lives will look like five years from now.
Then something happens that was never part of the plan.
Everybody eventually discovers that.
You can prepare for life.
You cannot control all of it.
So our hands are always reaching into something we cannot completely see.
Tomorrow.
That is the dark.
But hearts in the light says something different.
I cannot control everything that is coming.
I can control more of what I bring into it.
My values.
My decisions.
How I treat people.
Whether I help when I am able to help.
Whether I listen before judging.
Whether I admit when I am wrong.
Whether I allow fear to do all my thinking for me.
The darkness is what I cannot know.
The light is what I choose to carry into it.
That makes the next line feel much larger.
One world breathing, one shared fight.
For the first time, the song pulls all the way back.
Look at the planet.
Not the borders.
Not the countries.
Not the governments.
The planet.
One world breathing.
At any moment, billions of completely different lives are happening at the same time.
Somebody is being born.
Somebody is dying.
Somebody is falling in love.
Somebody is getting married.
Somebody is getting divorced.
Somebody just got the best news of their life.
Somebody just received the worst.
Somebody is starting their first job.
Somebody is retiring.
Somebody is sitting alone.
Somebody is surrounded by family.
Somebody is laughing.
Somebody is terrified.
Somebody is writing a song.
All of that is happening together.
We normally experience only our tiny piece of it.
That is natural.
Our own life is the one directly in front of us.
But the rest of humanity does not stop existing because we cannot see it.
One world breathing.
I love that image because breathing is something we rarely think about until it becomes difficult.
Most of the time, the body simply does it.
One breath after another.
Billions of people doing the same basic thing without ever knowing each other.
Then comes one shared fight.
I do not think that line has only one meaning.
The shared fight can be survival.
It can be building a future.
It can be protecting human dignity.
It can be learning how to live beside people who are different without constantly finding reasons to destroy one another.
For me, the biggest fight underneath all of it is whether humanity can become better without having to become the same.
That is where the opening English section leaves us.
Then the song proves that it means what it has been saying.
The language changes.
Spanish:
Si estamos unidos, no hay miedo
If we are united, there is no fear.
The first new language brings us directly to fear.
That makes sense to me because fear sits underneath so much division.
Fear of people we do not understand.
Fear of losing what we have.
Fear of another culture.
Fear of another religion.
Fear of another country.
Fear of change.
Some fear is legitimate.
Danger exists.
I would never pretend otherwise.
The problem begins when fear loses accuracy.
One dangerous person becomes an excuse to fear millions.
One terrorist organization becomes an excuse to condemn everybody who shares a religion.
One government’s actions become an excuse to hate every person who speaks that country’s language.
That is where fear stops protecting us and starts controlling us.
Si estamos unidos, no hay miedo.
I do not hear the line as saying a united person never feels fear.
That would not be human.
I hear it differently.
When people stand together, fear does not have to make every decision.
There is courage in knowing you are not standing alone.
Then another voice enters.
French:
Ensemble, nous sommes plus forts
Together, we are stronger.
Spanish brought us through fear.
French answers with strength.
Not my strength.
Not your strength.
Our strength.
That is the movement.
And now the next language is waiting.
Português.
SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 2
Português:
De mãos dadas, vamos vencer
Hand in hand, we will win.
This one reaches me differently.
The other languages belong to the world I am trying to bring into the song.
Portuguese belongs to me too.
Portugal is part of where my story began. I have spent almost all my life in Canada, and Canada became the place where most of my life unfolded, but living somewhere else does not erase where you came from.
Your roots travel with you.
Sometimes they travel through food.
Sometimes through family traditions.
Sometimes through stories.
Sometimes through music.
And sometimes through language.
That is why I wanted Portuguese inside “We Are One.”
If I am going to write a song asking different cultures to stand beside one another, I should bring my own culture into the room too.
De mãos dadas.
Hand in hand.
There is something very human about that image.
Nobody is standing above everybody else.
Nobody is kneeling beneath somebody else.
We are beside each other.
Then:
Vamos vencer.
We will win.
The important word is we.
Not I will win.
Not you will win.
We will.
That is the whole song sitting inside one Portuguese sentence.
And I like the fact that somebody listening who understands Portuguese will hear it immediately, while somebody who does not may first hear the sound and emotion of the language.
For a moment, they are listening from the outside.
Then the translation opens the door.
That experience is part of the song.
Not understanding another language does not make the language meaningless.
It simply means there is something you have not learned yet.
Italian:
Uniti nel cuore, un solo cammino
United in heart, one path.
Now the song moves from holding hands to sharing a direction.
One path does not mean one identical life.
That would go against everything I am trying to say.
I do not want one culture.
One religion.
One political opinion.
One way of thinking.
One kind of music.
One way of living.
Humanity would lose an enormous amount if everybody became a copy of everybody else.
The path I am talking about is more basic than that.
Can we move forward without destroying each other?
Can we disagree and still recognize another person’s humanity?
Can we protect what matters to us without automatically deciding that everybody outside our group is against us?
Can we carry our own history without using it as a weapon against somebody else’s?
That is the path.
United in heart does not mean united in every belief.
It means there can still be some basic human ground underneath those disagreements.
An innocent person should not become a target because of their race.
A child should not become a target because of religion.
Somebody’s birthplace should not determine whether their life matters.
Those principles do not require us to think alike.
They require us to remain human while thinking differently.
German:
Gemeinsam stehen wir auf
Together we rise.
Rise is one of the important words in this song.
It appears in different forms because I like what it represents.
To rise means you were somewhere lower before.
Maybe life knocked you down.
Maybe you failed.
Maybe something happened that you never expected.
Maybe an entire community suffered.
Maybe a country had to rebuild.
Maybe somebody simply reached a point where they decided they were not staying where they were anymore.
Everybody gets knocked down somehow.
That is life.
What interests me is what happens afterward.
Gemeinsam stehen wir auf.
Together we rise.
Sometimes we get up ourselves.
Sometimes somebody gives us a hand.
I have never believed accepting that hand makes somebody weak.
There are moments in life when the strongest thing you can do is admit you cannot carry everything alone.
The music can rise here too.
That is important in this song because the singer has the voice to make these words physical.
When the lyric says rise, I want to feel movement.
I want the voice and the music to start lifting us.
The multilingual section is not supposed to interrupt the power of the song.
It should keep building it.
Dutch:
Samen bouwen wij de toekomst
Together we build the future.
Now we stop talking about rising and start talking about building.
That word is very natural to me.
Build.
I understand what it means to look at something before the work begins and know that what you see today is not what will be standing there later.
Building requires imagination first.
Then work.
You need a plan.
You need people.
You need equipment.
You need different skills.
You need somebody thinking about what happens next, not only what is happening right now.
That is exactly how I look at the future.
People talk about the future as though it is coming toward us already finished.
It isn’t.
We are working on it right now.
What we teach children is part of it.
The technology we create is part of it.
The laws we make are part of it.
The damage we do is part of it.
The problems we solve are part of it.
The hatred we pass down is part of it.
The hatred we refuse to pass down is part of it too.
Samen bouwen wij de toekomst.
Together we build the future.
That future will eventually belong to people who had no say in what we did today.
I think about that.
Future generations will inherit things we are deciding right now.
They will benefit from some of them.
They will probably look at some of our decisions and wonder what the hell we were thinking.
We do that to previous generations already.
Why would the future look at us any differently?
Building something means taking responsibility for what you leave behind.
Russian:
Вместе мы сила
Together we are strength.
Now strength returns.
We heard it near the beginning.
We are strong when we don’t divide.
But after everything we have travelled through, the word feels a little different.
We have held hands.
We have shared a path.
We have risen.
We have started building.
Now strength sounds less like physical power and more like the ability to continue.
There is another reason I think this line matters.
Russian is a language spoken by millions of human beings.
A language is not a government.
That distinction becomes extremely important when the world is divided by conflict.
Governments make decisions.
Leaders make decisions.
Armies make decisions.
Organizations make decisions.
Individual people make decisions.
But simply speaking a language does not make somebody responsible for everything done by another person who speaks it.
That applies everywhere.
If I include Russian in a song about humanity, I am not making a political statement in support of a government.
I am acknowledging human beings.
The same principle has to apply to every language in this song or the message falls apart.
You cannot sing about refusing to judge entire populations and then quietly make exceptions whenever world politics becomes uncomfortable.
Actions should be judged.
People responsible for those actions should be held responsible.
But collective blame is something different.
That difference matters.
Polish:
Razem zmienimy świat
Together we will change the world.
That is a huge sentence.
Together we will change the world.
But the truth is, every generation changes the world.
Whether it intends to or not.
Look at how different life is from when I was a kid.
The way we communicate has changed.
The way music is created has changed.
Medicine has changed.
Technology has changed.
Work has changed.
The amount of information available to an ordinary person has changed beyond anything most people could have imagined.
Some of those changes made life better.
Some created completely new problems.
That is the thing about changing the world.
Change by itself is not automatically good.
What matters is the direction.
And changing the world does not always mean becoming famous.
Most people who change another person’s world will never appear in a history book.
A parent changes a child’s world.
A teacher can change a student’s world.
Someone who gives another person an opportunity can change the direction of an entire life.
A stranger can do something they forget ten minutes later while the person they helped remembers it for twenty years.
Not every change announces itself.
Sometimes it happens quietly.
Sometimes the person who caused it never even finds out.
That is why Razem zmienimy świat belongs here.
The song keeps widening the meaning of together.
Arabic:
يدًا بيد، نصنع السلام
Hand in hand, we create peace.
Now we arrive at peace.
And I think create is the most important word in the translation.
We create peace.
Peace does not simply happen because everybody gets tired of fighting.
Real peace has to be built.
People have to find a way to live with disagreement.
People have to negotiate.
People have to listen.
People have to protect innocent life.
People have to deal with injustice.
People have to decide that the future matters more than continuing every hatred inherited from the past.
That can take generations.
I also do not believe peace means weakness.
That is important to say clearly.
If innocent people are being deliberately attacked, protecting them does not make somebody opposed to peace.
If terrorists murder innocent people, calling that wrong is not intolerance.
If violent extremists want to destroy people who do not share their beliefs, unity does not require accepting them.
Peace without the ability to protect innocent people can become nothing more than leaving peaceful people defenceless.
That is not the peace I am talking about.
Peace needs courage.
Sometimes restraint takes courage.
Sometimes compromise takes courage.
Sometimes standing against violence takes courage.
The purpose should remain the same.
Protect life and create enough room for ordinary people to live without being trapped forever inside somebody else’s hatred.
Then the next language enters.
Hebrew:
ביחד נעמוד חזקים
Together we stand strong.
I wanted Arabic and Hebrew both inside this song because the song is about people, not about choosing which human beings deserve to be represented.
These two languages carry histories far larger than anything I could explore inside one song.
I am not going to pretend a lyric can solve conflicts that governments, communities and generations have struggled with.
It cannot.
But a song can refuse to erase the ordinary people living inside those conflicts.
A mother is still a mother.
A father is still a father.
A child is still a child.
Fear is still fear.
Grief is still grief.
The nationality changes.
The language changes.
The human loss does not.
Together we stand strong.
Strength here cannot mean one people standing strong by making another people less human.
That would destroy the meaning of the lyric.
Real strength has to leave room for truth and responsibility without turning every innocent person into an enemy.
That is difficult.
Hatred is easier.
Hatred gives simple answers.
This group is good.
That group is bad.
We are right.
They are wrong.
Real human beings are more complicated than that.
That is why I wanted the different languages beside one another.
Not because the world is peaceful.
Because it isn’t.
Not because everybody agrees.
Because we don’t.
They belong beside one another precisely because the differences are real.
And now, after travelling through Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, Dutch, Russian, Polish, Arabic and Hebrew, the song has done what I wanted it to do.
It has allowed different parts of the world to speak without asking any of them to stop sounding like themselves.
Then all those voices lead us back into English.
We are one
If we work together
We are one
If we fight together
When English returns, I do not hear those words the same way anymore.
At the beginning, we were talking about different voices.
Now we have actually heard them.
The idea has become sound.
The song has travelled.
And when that powerful lead voice comes back with:
We are one
he is no longer standing there by himself in my mind.
The other voices are already inside the song.
Now the anthem can really begin.
SECTION ONE
LYRIC JOURNEY
PART 3
We are one
If we work together
We are one
If we fight together
When the English comes back, the singer has room to take control again.
This is where the power of his voice matters.
The different languages have carried us around the world, but now everything comes back into one enormous statement.
We are one.
Those words are short enough to be shouted.
They can be stretched.
They can climb.
They can be held on those high notes until the voice almost becomes another instrument.
That is part of what makes this section work for me.
There are lyrics that need explanation, and there are lyrics that need to be felt.
We are one is becoming one of those moments.
When that voice goes high and holds those individual words with almost an operatic power, I don’t want the music fighting him for space.
Let the words fly.
If we work together.
That brings the message back to something practical.
Unity sounds wonderful until work is involved.
Working together means somebody has to listen.
Somebody has to compromise.
Somebody has to admit they don’t know everything.
Sometimes somebody has to accept that another person’s idea is better.
That is where cooperation becomes difficult.
I know this from working most of my life.
You can put good people and good equipment on the same job, but if nobody communicates, things can go wrong very quickly.
One person is waiting for another.
Somebody misunderstood the plan.
Somebody moves before somebody else is ready.
The individual ability may be there, but the cooperation is missing.
The world is obviously much larger than a job site, but the principle still makes sense to me.
Most of what we depend on every day exists because people worked together.
Someone grows food.
Someone transports it.
Someone builds the road.
Someone maintains the truck.
Someone keeps the electricity running.
Someone designs the hospital.
Someone treats the patient.
Someone develops the medicine.
Someone teaches the next generation how to do all of it again.
We live inside cooperation even when we don’t notice it.
Then:
We are one
If we fight together
Fight is a stronger word.
I wanted it to be.
There are things worth fighting for.
There are also things worth fighting against.
Disease.
Hatred.
Violence.
Ignorance.
Poverty.
Addiction.
Abuse.
Corruption.
Fear.
The belief that another human being has no value.
Those battles are not solved by everybody sitting quietly and hoping they disappear.
Sometimes humanity has to push back.
That does not contradict the message of unity.
It defines what the unity is for.
If somebody hears the word fight and thinks the song suddenly means fighting each other, they have missed where the entire journey has taken us.
This is about standing beside each other when something needs to be faced.
Then the song begins throwing out what that unity can accomplish.
We can lift the wall
That line is different from the earlier version of the lyric, and I actually think wall fits this finished song very well.
A wall can mean many things.
There are physical walls.
Political walls.
Cultural walls.
Emotional walls.
Walls people build around themselves because they have been hurt.
Walls societies build because they are afraid.
Walls between families.
Walls between religions.
Walls between countries.
Walls between people who have stopped speaking to each other.
Not every wall is wrong.
Some walls protect.
Some boundaries are necessary.
That matters because I don’t want to turn a strong image into something simplistic.
The question is what the wall is doing.
Is it protecting somebody from genuine danger?
Or is it preventing two human beings from ever seeing one another clearly?
We can lift the wall.
I like lift rather than destroy because it creates another possibility.
Maybe everything separating people does not have to be smashed.
Sometimes it simply has to be moved.
Sometimes people need an opening.
A way through.
A chance to see what is on the other side.
And sometimes the wall that needs moving is inside us.
We can break the chains
Now the image becomes harder.
You don’t gently move a chain that is holding somebody down.
You break it.
Chains represent restriction.
Something preventing movement.
Something keeping a person, a community or even a way of thinking trapped.
There are obvious chains in human history, but there are also chains we don’t see.
Prejudice can become a chain.
Fear can become one.
Addiction can become one.
Hatred passed from parent to child can become one.
A belief that you are worthless can become one.
Sometimes somebody puts the chain on you.
Sometimes life does.
Sometimes you slowly build it around yourself without realizing what is happening.
Breaking a chain takes force.
That is why this lyric belongs inside a song sung with this much power.
The voice should not apologize for it.
We can break the chains.
That needs conviction behind it.
Then:
We can light the dark
This connects directly back to:
Hands in the dark, hearts in the light.
Earlier, the darkness was the unknown.
Now we are doing something about it.
We are bringing light into it.
Knowledge can do that.
Truth can do that.
Education can do that.
Experience can do that.
Meeting somebody you were taught to fear can do that.
Sometimes one conversation can expose how little we actually knew about another person.
But light is not always comfortable.
People like truth when truth agrees with them.
The harder test is what happens when the light reveals something we don’t want to see.
Maybe we were wrong.
Maybe somebody we trusted lied.
Maybe our own side did something we criticized the other side for doing.
Maybe the person we judged was nothing like the person we imagined.
If I only want light pointed at everybody else, then I don’t really want light.
I want a spotlight I can control.
Real light reaches everybody.
Including me.
Then the singer takes the line again.
We can light the dark, FOREVER
That FOREVER should feel enormous.
This is one of those single-word moments where the singer’s range can completely change the scale of the song.
The word can climb above everything underneath it.
Almost operatic.
Not opera in the arrangement, but that kind of vocal command where one sustained word becomes bigger than the sentence around it.
FOREVER.
That is not a quiet promise.
It is the song reaching upward.
Of course, forever is bigger than anything one generation can guarantee.
We cannot promise that darkness never returns.
History tells us it does.
People forget.
Old hatred finds new clothing.
Ideas we thought humanity had learned from sometimes return years later.
So I don’t hear forever as a guarantee.
I hear it as determination.
Keep the light alive.
Pass it forward.
Don’t assume somebody else will do it.
Every generation has to protect what the previous generation learned.
Otherwise darkness does not need to defeat us.
It only needs to wait until we forget.
We are one
After FOREVER, the title comes back.
Short.
Direct.
Powerful.
The singer does not need twenty words here.
Three are enough.
We are one.
By this stage of the song, those three words have been carrying more and more weight every time they return.
One voice, one fire
One voice does not mean everybody suddenly speaks English.
We just proved the opposite.
We have heard different languages.
One voice means different people can sometimes speak toward the same purpose.
There are moments when sixteen languages can carry one human message.
That is the voice.
Then one fire.
Fire can destroy.
Everybody knows that.
But fire can also warm.
It can light.
It can signal.
It can keep people alive.
And inside a person, fire can mean something else.
Drive.
Determination.
The refusal to quit.
That thing inside somebody that keeps saying get up.
Keep moving.
Try again.
I wanted that fire here.
Not rage for the sake of rage.
Human energy pointed toward something.
We are one
Again the title returns.
And again I can hear the singer taking those words higher.
The repetition is not there because I ran out of things to say.
It is there because the song is moving away from explanation.
We have already made the argument.
Now we are entering the part where the voice has to carry it.
We rise higher
Higher than what?
Not higher than another race.
Not higher than another country.
Not higher than another culture.
That would turn the entire song upside down.
Higher than where we were.
Higher than the divisions we inherited.
Higher than the fear that controlled us.
Higher than the hatred somebody tried to teach us.
Higher than the belief that another person’s success somehow makes us smaller.
That is the rise.
Then the song becomes even more stripped down.
We are one
We are first
We are one
We are first.
That is the correct lyric, and it needs to be understood in the context of everything around it.
It does not mean one nation is first.
It does not mean one race is first.
It does not mean MOITA is declaring one group superior to everybody else.
The word we is the key.
Humanity first.
Before the labels.
Before the arguments.
Before somebody decides what box another person belongs in.
We are first.
People first.
That is how I hear it.
And with the kind of singer carrying this song, first can become one of those words that punches through the arrangement.
FIRST.
A single word delivered high and hard can sometimes say more musically than an entire paragraph can explain.
Then:
We are one
The answer comes immediately.
Who is the we?
The song has already spent its entire journey answering that.
Different languages.
Different cultures.
Different histories.
Different people.
We are one
We are one
We are one
We are one
Now I don’t want to over-explain every repetition.
That would work against the song.
This is where the Chorus Principle matters.
The meaning has already been established.
The repetition is doing something musical and emotional now.
Every We are one is another strike.
Another voice can join.
Then another.
The band can become bigger.
The backing vocals can become bigger.
The crowd can become part of it.
What began as the singer’s statement can become something thousands of people could shout back at him.
WE ARE ONE.
That is where I can picture the song becoming almost physical in a live setting.
The singer with his arms open.
The band behind him.
People from different backgrounds in front of him.
Not one kind of face.
Not one flag.
Not one culture.
A crowd.
And everybody knows the three words.
You do not need a translation anymore.
We are one.
Then the lyric changes.
We rise at light
There is something almost visual about that.
After all the references to darkness and lighting the dark, now we rise at light.
Light becomes the moment of movement.
It can be morning.
It can be understanding.
It can be the point when somebody finally sees a way forward.
It can be the moment after a terrible period when life begins opening again.
We rise at light.
We don’t hide from it.
We rise into it.
Then:
We rise all night
I like the contrast.
At light.
All night.
The message is no longer dependent on conditions being perfect.
We rise when there is light.
We rise through the darkness too.
That may actually be the stronger half of the thought.
Anybody can feel powerful when everything is going right.
The real test is what happens at night.
What happens when you cannot see the answer yet?
What happens when the thing you are fighting is still there?
What happens when hope is harder to find?
We rise all night.
Keep going.
That is where the power in the singer’s voice can really matter again.
The lyric is becoming almost chant and proclamation now.
The intellectual part of the song is behind us.
We have travelled through the idea.
Now we are feeling it.
And finally:
We are one
We are one
There is nowhere else the song needs to go.
It does not finish by introducing another argument.
It does not suddenly explain itself again.
It returns to the only words that could really close it.
We are one.
The first time I heard those words inside the song, they were a possibility.
We are one if we stand together.
There was a condition attached.
Then the song travelled.
Different languages entered.
Different cultures stood beside one another.
Fear was confronted.
Strength was shared.
The future was built.
Peace was created.
Walls were lifted.
Chains were broken.
Darkness was challenged.
The voice kept rising.
And now the condition disappears from the final words.
We are one.
I don’t hear that as saying the work is finished.
I hear exactly the opposite.
I hear it as saying the responsibility belongs to all of us.
That is why I wanted the ending repeated.
Not because there is nothing else to say.
Because there is nothing more important left to say.
The singer can take those final words as high and as powerfully as his voice allows.
The band can push underneath him.
The voices around him can join.
The whole thing can become larger than the person who started the song.
And that is exactly where “We Are One” should end.
Not with one man speaking for the world.
With the feeling that the world has started singing back.
We are one.
SECTION TWO
THE STORY
“We Are One” started with a simple thought that became much bigger the longer I stayed with it.
We live in one world, but we have spent thousands of years finding ways to separate ourselves inside it.
Countries.
Borders.
Languages.
Cultures.
Religions.
Politics.
Race.
Money.
History.
Even the way somebody looks or sounds can become enough for another person to decide where they belong.
Some of those differences are real and important.
I do not want to erase them.
I do not want everybody speaking one language.
I do not want every country becoming the same.
I do not want cultures disappearing into some giant version of humanity where nobody remembers where they came from.
That would defeat the whole purpose of the song.
I wanted the opposite.
Bring your culture with you.
Bring your language.
Bring your history.
Bring the things you are proud of.
Let somebody else bring theirs.
Then see what happens when those people stand beside each other instead of against each other.
That is where the title becomes important.
WE ARE ONE.
Those are only three words.
The singer can hold those three words with so much power that they become larger than a sentence.
That became one of the things I loved about the song.
The lyrics did not have to explain everything.
Sometimes the voice could do it.
This singer has an incredibly powerful voice. When he reaches those extremely high pitches and drives out individual words, there is almost an operatic quality to it.
Not opera in the traditional sense.
I am talking about the size of the voice.
The control.
The height of the notes.
The way one word can be stretched until it feels like the whole song is hanging from it.
That changed how I looked at the shorter lyrics.
At first, somebody reading the words on paper might think there should be more.
But when you hear the performance, you understand why there does not always need to be more.
The voice fills the space.
WE ARE ONE can become enormous when the singer takes it up there.
FOREVER can become a moment of its own.
HIGHER can climb exactly the way the word describes.
STRONG can be delivered with the force the word deserves.
That is part of the storytelling too.
Not every story needs to be told through hundreds of words.
Sometimes the sound of a human voice tells you what the printed word cannot.
The beginning establishes the condition immediately.
We are one if we stand together.
That word if keeps the whole song grounded.
I could have written:
We are one.
And left it there.
But that would have been too easy.
Look around the world.
We clearly do not always stand together.
We divide.
Sometimes for understandable reasons.
Sometimes for ridiculous ones.
Sometimes because people genuinely disagree about something important.
Sometimes because somebody has discovered that frightened and angry people are easier to manipulate.
Human beings have always been vulnerable to the idea of us against them.
Give people an enemy and suddenly complicated problems can be blamed on somebody else.
That is why I did not want “We Are One” to become some soft fantasy where everybody holds hands and all the world’s problems disappear.
That is not the world I know.
There are dangerous people.
There are violent movements.
There is terrorism.
There is hatred.
There are people who deliberately hurt innocent human beings.
There are governments and organizations capable of terrible things.
There are also ordinary people living underneath all of it who did not create those problems.
That distinction is important.
I do not believe an entire population should become guilty because of the actions of a government.
I do not believe an entire religion should become guilty because extremists claim to act in its name.
I do not believe a language makes somebody responsible for what another person speaking that language has done.
That thinking became especially important once I started bringing different languages into the song.
The multilingual section could not simply be a trick.
It had to mean something.
The first voice after English is Spanish.
Si estamos unidos, no hay miedo.
If we are united, there is no fear.
Then French.
Ensemble, nous sommes plus forts.
Together, we are stronger.
Then the language that reaches closest to my own roots.
Português.
De mãos dadas, vamos vencer.
Hand in hand, we will win.
That one is personal.
I have spent almost my entire life in Canada, but Portugal did not disappear because I grew up somewhere else.
It is still part of me.
It is in the family.
It is in the language.
It is in the history.
It is in things that probably became part of me before I was even old enough to understand them.
So when Portuguese enters this song, I hear it differently.
De mãos dadas.
Hand in hand.
Vamos vencer.
We will win.
The word we is what makes it belong.
Not I.
Not Portugal.
Not Canada.
We.
Then Italian enters.
Uniti nel cuore, un solo cammino.
United in heart, one path.
German follows.
Gemeinsam stehen wir auf.
Together we rise.
Dutch.
Samen bouwen wij de toekomst.
Together we build the future.
Russian.
Вместе мы сила.
Together we are strength.
Polish.
Razem zmienimy świat.
Together we will change the world.
Arabic.
يدًا بيد، نصنع السلام
Hand in hand, we create peace.
Hebrew.
ביחד נעמוד חזקים
Together we stand strong.
Ten languages.
Ten different sounds.
But listen to what they are actually saying.
Do not be afraid.
Be stronger together.
Walk hand in hand.
Rise.
Build.
Change the world.
Create peace.
Stand strong.
The languages are different.
The human direction is remarkably similar.
That was the story I wanted the music itself to tell.
Then everybody comes back together.
We are one
If we work together
We are one
If we fight together
The word fight could easily be misunderstood if somebody only pulled that one line out of the song.
I am not talking about fighting each other.
I am talking about fighting together for something worth protecting.
People fight disease.
People fight poverty.
People fight addiction.
People fight hatred.
People fight injustice.
People fight ignorance.
People fight to keep their families together.
Sometimes somebody is fighting just to make it through another day.
Those battles happen in every country.
They happen in every language.
That is another place where all the labels start becoming smaller.
Then the song says something I really like.
We can lift the wall.
A wall can be physical.
It can also be something people build between themselves.
Fear can become a wall.
Prejudice can become a wall.
Pride can become a wall.
A lie repeated for generations can become a wall.
Sometimes people inherit walls they never built.
They are simply taught that the people on the other side are different.
Then comes:
We can break the chains.
That goes even deeper.
Some chains are visible.
Most are not.
Hatred can be a chain.
Fear can be a chain.
Ignorance can be a chain.
A belief that you are better than somebody because of where you were born can become a chain without you ever realizing you are wearing it.
The song keeps pushing upward from there.
We can light the dark.
Then the singer does not simply move on.
He hits it again.
We can light the dark, FOREVER.
That is one of those moments where the performance becomes part of the writing.
FOREVER is not supposed to slip past unnoticed.
That voice takes the word and makes it huge.
That is where the song begins moving away from explanation and toward declaration.
We are one.
One voice, one fire.
We are one.
We rise higher.
The language gets shorter.
The voice gets bigger.
That relationship matters.
By this point, I do not need another long verse explaining unity.
The song has already done the travelling.
Now I want the listener to feel the message.
We are one.
We are strong.
We are one.
Then it keeps coming.
We are one.
We are one.
We are one.
We are one.
We are one.
On paper, that is repetition.
Inside the performance, it is escalation.
Each return gives the singer another opportunity to push the phrase.
The high notes become part of the meaning.
The song starts sounding less like one man singing and more like something meant for thousands of people to answer.
That is how I imagine it.
A massive crowd made up of different nations, different faces and different languages.
The singer drives out the words.
The crowd knows exactly what comes back.
WE ARE ONE.
Then:
We rise at light.
We rise all night.
There is something almost unstoppable in that ending.
Day or night, we rise.
The message keeps moving.
And finally there is nowhere else the song needs to go.
We are one.
We are one.
That is the story.
Not that humanity has already become united.
Not that everybody agrees.
Not that evil has disappeared.
Not that every difference should be erased.
The story is that beneath all the things separating us, there remains a choice available to us.
We can build another wall.
Or we can lift one.
We can pass another hatred to the next generation.
Or we can break the chain.
We can remain in the dark.
Or we can bring some light into it.
We can spend our lives deciding who belongs inside the word we.
Or we can make that word larger.
That is why this song does not end by explaining itself.
It ends with the only words it needs.
We are one.
SECTION THREE
THE CREATIVE JOURNEY
“We Are One” became one of those songs where the music had to carry just as much meaning as the words.
That became even clearer once I heard what the singer could do with it.
This is not a quiet unity song.
It is not supposed to sit politely in the background.
It rises.
It pushes.
It becomes enormous.
The singer has the kind of voice that can take a very small phrase and turn it into a major musical moment. When he reaches those extremely high pitches, especially on the single words, there is almost an operatic power behind the delivery.
That changed the way I thought about the structure.
A lyric does not always need another sentence after it.
Sometimes the voice needs the space.
When he sings:
We are one
the words themselves are simple.
But the performance is not.
The note can climb, stretch and become something far larger than the three words written on the page.
That is important because this song is ultimately about bringing many voices into one human message.
The lead voice has to sound capable of carrying that message.
Then the song opens with:
We are one if we stand together
We are strong when we don’t divide
Different voices, same forever
Side by side, no place to hide
Musically, I wanted the beginning to establish strength immediately without using everything the song has.
There has to be somewhere to climb.
That matters in a song built around a voice this powerful.
If everything begins at maximum force, there is nowhere left to go when the singer reaches those huge moments later.
The opening needs power, but controlled power.
Then:
If we fight together, we can get it done
If we rise together, we outshine the sun
Hands in the dark, hearts in the light
One world breathing, one shared fight
Now the song starts widening.
The images get bigger.
Rise together.
Outshine the sun.
One world breathing.
Those words naturally ask the arrangement to grow with them.
Then something important happens before the languages begin.
We hear:
We are one
If we stand together
We are one
Now and forever
Different words
Same human sound
Same heartbeat
Same ground
Say it loud
We are one
That section gives the central message to the listener before the song starts travelling around the world.
I think that is important.
The listener already knows what the song stands for.
Now we can prove the idea another way.
We stop talking about different languages.
We start hearing them.
Spanish begins:
Si estamos unidos, no hay miedo
Then French:
Ensemble, nous sommes plus forts
Then Portuguese:
Português
De mãos dadas, vamos vencer
That Portuguese moment matters personally to me, but creatively it also matters because the song is doing exactly what it says.
It is allowing each language to remain itself.
I did not want the languages forced into English just to make everything comfortable for an English-speaking listener.
Somebody may hear a sentence they do not understand.
That is all right.
The translation gives them the meaning on the website.
The music gives them the feeling.
Italian follows.
German.
Dutch.
Russian.
Polish.
Arabic.
Hebrew.
Each language changes the sound of the human voice without changing the direction of the message.
That creates an unusual musical challenge.
The pronunciation has to matter.
The rhythm has to work.
The languages cannot sound as though they were thrown into the song simply because having multiple languages looked impressive on paper.
They need to belong to the music.
That is why the short statements work.
Together we rise.
Together we build the future.
Together we are strength.
Together we will change the world.
Hand in hand, we create peace.
Together we stand strong.
These are ideas that can be delivered with force.
They can almost become individual voices entering a gathering.
Then English returns:
We are one
If we work together
We are one
If we fight together
At this point the arrangement should feel different from the beginning because the listener has already travelled through all those voices.
The chorus is no longer just the singer telling us we are one.
We have heard part of the world standing behind him.
Then the language becomes even more physical:
We can lift the wall
We can break the chains
We can light the dark
Each statement is an action.
Lift.
Break.
Light.
Those are strong words.
They should sound strong.
Then comes one of the vocal moments that helps define the song:
We can light the dark, FOREVER
FOREVER deserves the space.
That is where the singer’s upper range can become part of the storytelling.
I do not want that word thrown away just to reach the next lyric.
Let him own it.
Let that note rise.
Let the instruments support him instead of fighting him for attention.
Sometimes the most powerful thing musicians can do is understand when the voice has the room.
Then:
We are one
One voice, one fire
We are one
We rise higher
HIGHER is another word that almost tells the singer what to do with it.
The vocal can rise with the meaning.
That is one of those combinations I love when it happens naturally.
The lyric says higher.
The melody goes higher.
The singer pushes higher.
The whole song feels as though it physically lifts.
Then we arrive at:
We are one
We are strong
We are one
That correction matters.
We are strong fits the entire song.
Strength has been underneath the message from the opening.
But it is not strength through domination.
It is strength through standing together.
From here, repetition becomes part of the arrangement.
We are one
We are one
We are one
We are one
We are one
I would not treat those as five identical lines.
That would waste them.
Each one can grow.
The first can belong mainly to the lead singer.
The next can bring voices behind him.
Another can become larger.
Another can feel almost like the audience has taken over.
By the final repetition, I want the words to feel bigger than the individual singer.
That is where a simple lyric becomes an anthem.
You do not need complicated words when thousands of voices are capable of answering the same three.
WE ARE ONE.
That is also where the singer’s power becomes especially important.
Those extremely high notes should not sound like screaming for the sake of showing how high he can sing.
There is a difference between showing off a voice and using a voice to serve a song.
Here, the high register has a purpose.
The song keeps talking about rising.
The voice rises.
The song talks about strength.
The voice demonstrates strength.
The song talks about one fire.
The singer sounds like he is carrying that fire.
That is where the almost operatic quality works beautifully inside a powerful rock song.
Not because the song suddenly becomes opera.
Because the human voice becomes enormous.
Then the ending keeps that momentum alive:
We rise at light
We rise all night
We are one
We are one
I like that the song does not finish with a complicated conclusion.
After everything it has done, there is nothing left to explain.
The languages have spoken.
The message has travelled.
The singer has taken the voice as high as the song demands.
The arrangement has grown from one statement into something that can feel like an entire world answering.
And we arrive exactly where we began.
We are one.
Except now those words should sound completely different.
At the beginning, they are the idea.
At the end, they are the anthem.
That is the creative journey I hear inside this song.
The words give it direction.
The languages give it humanity.
The arrangement gives it scale.
The singer gives it power.
And those final three words give everybody else a chance to join in.
WE ARE ONE.
SECTION FOUR
REFLECTION
When I look at “We Are One” as a finished song, I do not hear it as a promise that humanity is suddenly going to figure itself out.
We have been trying to figure ourselves out for a very long time.
We still fight.
We still divide.
We still judge people before we know them.
We still allow religion, politics, race, nationality, money and power to become reasons to separate ourselves.
Sometimes those divisions involve serious disagreements that cannot simply be ignored.
Sometimes they are created by fear.
Sometimes they are deliberately encouraged by people who benefit when everybody else is angry at each other.
That is why I keep coming back to one word in this song.
If.
We are one if we stand together.
That is not a guarantee.
It is a choice.
I think that makes the song stronger because I do not want to sell people a fantasy.
I am not asking somebody listening in Portugal, Canada, Russia, Israel, an Arab country, Poland, Germany or anywhere else to forget where they came from.
I certainly would not want to forget where I came from.
My Portuguese roots matter to me.
The life I have lived in Canada matters to me.
Both can exist inside the same person.
That is something I think the world sometimes forgets.
Identity does not have to be a competition.
Being proud of where I come from does not require me to disrespect where you came from.
Loving my language does not require me to hate yours.
Loving my country does not require me to believe another country’s people matter less.
That sounds obvious when you say it plainly.
Human history shows us how difficult it has been to live by it.
The multilingual part of this song probably says that better than I ever could in a speech.
Spanish enters.
Then French.
Português.
Italian.
German.
Dutch.
Russian.
Polish.
Arabic.
Hebrew.
They do not sound alike.
I do not want them to.
That is the beauty of it.
Imagine how boring this world would be if everybody spoke exactly the same way, ate exactly the same food, played exactly the same music, told exactly the same stories and came from exactly the same history.
Difference gives the world character.
The problem begins when difference becomes superiority.
When somebody stops saying, “This is who I am,” and starts saying, “Therefore I am worth more than you.”
That is the line humanity keeps crossing.
“We Are One” pushes back against that without pretending every human action deserves acceptance.
It does not.
There are things we should condemn.
There is cruelty.
There is terrorism.
There is violent extremism.
There is racial hatred.
There is religious persecution.
There are people who deliberately target innocent human beings.
Calling for unity does not require me to pretend those things are acceptable.
Actually, I believe real unity requires the courage to stand against them.
If we care about humanity, then protecting human beings has to mean something.
Peace cannot mean allowing violent people to do whatever they want because confronting them makes us uncomfortable.
Tolerance cannot mean tolerating deliberate cruelty.
Understanding somebody’s background does not remove their responsibility for their actions.
That balance matters to me.
Human dignity and accountability can exist at the same time.
I can recognize your humanity and still tell you that what you did was wrong.
I can disagree with your beliefs without hating you.
I can respect your culture without accepting every practice simply because it belongs to a culture.
I can protect my own values without deciding everybody different from me is an enemy.
Maybe that is one of the hardest forms of unity.
Not standing beside people who already agree with us.
Standing in a world full of disagreement without immediately losing our humanity.
There is another reason this song stays with me.
The lyrics are relatively short.
There are not hundreds of lines telling the listener exactly what to think.
The voice carries part of the story.
When that singer reaches those incredibly high notes, the words change.
FOREVER becomes more than a word.
HIGHER becomes more than a word.
STRONG becomes more than a word.
WE ARE ONE becomes more than three words.
The voice stretches them until you can feel the conviction behind them.
That is something written lyrics on a website can never completely reproduce.
You have to hear it.
There are moments when that powerful upper register almost carries an operatic size to it.
The singer is not simply delivering the lyric.
He is lifting it.
That matters because the entire song is about rising.
If we rise together, we outshine the sun.
We rise higher.
We rise at light.
We rise all night.
The music itself rises with the idea.
By the time the repeated lines arrive near the end, I do not hear repetition.
I hear accumulation.
We are one.
We are one.
We are one.
Each time it comes back, it can become bigger.
More voices.
More force.
More people.
Until eventually I can imagine the lead singer almost disappearing inside the response of a massive crowd.
Not a crowd from one country.
A crowd from everywhere.
Different flags.
Different faces.
Different languages.
Different histories.
Different beliefs.
All answering the same three words.
WE ARE ONE.
There is something else inside those words that I think becomes more important the older I get.
None of us gets through life alone.
We like to think we do.
We become proud of being independent.
We build businesses.
We raise families.
We solve problems.
We survive things.
We tell ourselves we did it ourselves.
But look closely at almost any life and you will find other people inside it.
Someone taught us something.
Someone gave us an opportunity.
Someone built the road we travelled on.
Someone grew the food we ate.
Someone designed the medicine we needed.
Someone answered the phone.
Someone stood beside us.
Someone believed in us.
Sometimes somebody helped us without ever knowing they changed anything.
That is part of being human too.
We are connected in ways we rarely notice.
The song makes that connection visible for a few minutes.
Different words.
Same human sound.
Same heartbeat.
Same ground.
I especially like that last one.
Same ground.
We draw borders across the Earth.
We give pieces of it names.
We raise flags.
We build fences.
We fight wars over it.
We buy it and sell it.
We inherit it.
We argue over who owns it.
But underneath everything we have built, there is still one planet.
Nobody owns another Earth somewhere in reserve.
Whatever happens here is what future generations inherit.
That should give the words “We Are One” another meaning.
We are not only sharing the world with the people alive today.
We are sharing it with people who have not been born yet.
The decisions we make become part of their starting point.
They will inherit what we build.
They will inherit what we damage.
They will inherit some of our knowledge.
They may also inherit some of our hatred if we keep teaching it.
That is why unity cannot only be about feeling good today.
There is responsibility attached to it.
What are we handing forward?
More walls?
More chains?
More reasons to fear one another?
Or something better?
I do not know whether humanity will ever reach the kind of unity imagined in this song.
Maybe we never will completely.
We are too complicated.
We are not one mind, and I would not want us to become one.
But I believe we can become better at living beside different minds.
Better at listening.
Better at separating dangerous individuals from innocent populations.
Better at disagreeing without dehumanizing.
Better at protecting what matters without turning protection into hatred.
Better at remembering that every flag ultimately stands on the same Earth.
If this song makes somebody think about that for even a few minutes, then it has done something worthwhile.
And if somebody hears that final voice climbing higher and higher, hears all those languages, hears the repeated words WE ARE ONE and feels the urge to sing them back, then maybe the song has done something else too.
For those few minutes, it created the world it was talking about.
Different people.
Different voices.
One song.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for reading the story behind it.
And wherever you are in the world, whatever language you speak and whatever peaceful culture you carry with you, bring it.
Do not erase it.
Do not hide it.
Bring something of yourself to the rest of us.
That is how one world becomes interesting.
That is how different voices become something powerful together.
Not by becoming the same.
By learning how to stand side by side.
MOITA
WHERE EVERY SONG TELLS A STORY
EVERY STORY TEACHES SOMETHING
SECTION FIVE
MOITA DOCUMENTARY & LEARNING CENTRE
“We Are One” finishes with a simple message, but the subjects underneath it are enormous.
Humanity.
Language.
Culture.
Borders.
Identity.
Fear.
Cooperation.
Conflict.
Peace.
Belonging.
And one question that follows the entire song.
How do billions of different human beings share one world without having to become the same?
I do not think there is one answer.
That is exactly why this belongs in the Documentary & Learning Centre.
The song can open the door.
From here, curiosity has to do the rest.
HUMANITY IS ONE SPECIES
Long before we created countries, passports, political systems and national identities, human beings were already travelling, migrating, forming communities and adapting to different environments.
The differences we see between populations are real parts of human diversity, but they do not divide humanity into separate kinds of human beings.
That gives the title another meaning.
We Are One is an ideal about cooperation, but underneath that ideal is something much more basic.
We already share a human origin.
The difficult part has always been deciding what we are going to do with that connection.
Continue Exploring
Look into human evolution and migration.
Explore how populations moved across the planet over thousands of years.
Learn how genetics has changed our understanding of human ancestry.
Then ask a question the song keeps returning to.
If humanity is so deeply connected, why are we so easily taught to divide?
LANGUAGE DOES MORE THAN TRANSLATE WORDS
The multilingual section of “We Are One” is one of the most important parts of the song.
Spanish.
French.
Português.
Italian.
German.
Dutch.
Russian.
Polish.
Arabic.
Hebrew.
Every language changes the sound of the song.
That is exactly what I wanted.
Language carries more than information.
It carries family.
Humour.
Memory.
History.
Music.
Expressions.
Ways of describing things that may not translate perfectly into another language.
Sometimes one word can carry generations inside it.
That is why my Portuguese line means something different to me.
De mãos dadas, vamos vencer.
Hand in hand, we will win.
Someone else may hear a beautiful Portuguese sentence.
I hear part of where I came from.
That is one of the reasons preserving languages matters.
When a language disappears, humanity does not simply lose another way of saying the same thing.
We can lose stories, knowledge, oral traditions and ways of understanding the world.
Continue Exploring
Learn how languages develop and change.
Explore endangered languages and the work being done to preserve them.
Listen to people speaking languages you have never heard before.
You do not have to understand every word to appreciate what you are hearing.
WHY PEOPLE CREATE US AND THEM
One of the oldest human habits is forming groups.
There is nothing automatically wrong with that.
Families are groups.
Communities are groups.
Countries are groups.
Sports teams are groups.
Religions are groups.
Musical communities are groups.
Belonging can give people identity, friendship, security and purpose.
The danger begins when belonging requires an enemy.
Us can very quickly create them.
Once that happens, people may stop judging individuals by their behaviour and begin judging them by the group somebody has placed them inside.
That is one of the ideas underneath “We Are One.”
The song is not asking humanity to eliminate every group.
That would be impossible.
It is asking whether we can belong somewhere without automatically deciding everybody outside our group matters less.
Continue Exploring
Study social identity and group behaviour.
Learn how stereotypes form.
Look at how propaganda has used fear of outsiders throughout history.
Then look at your own life.
How many things do you believe about another group because you personally experienced them?
How many came from somebody else telling you what that group was like?
Those are not always the same thing.
FEAR CAN PROTECT US AND MISLEAD US
Si estamos unidos, no hay miedo.
If we are united, there is no fear.
Fear exists for a reason.
It can warn us about danger.
Without fear, human beings probably would not have survived very long.
But fear has another side.
It can be manipulated.
If somebody can convince us that an entire population is dangerous, we may stop looking at individuals.
That is when fear becomes a shortcut around thinking.
This does not mean every threat is imaginary.
Some threats are real.
Violent extremism is real.
Terrorism is real.
Political violence is real.
Organized hatred is real.
Protecting innocent people from genuine danger is necessary.
The challenge is learning to identify the actual danger without turning millions of uninvolved people into substitutes for the people responsible.
Continue Exploring
Learn how fear affects decision-making.
Study propaganda and persuasion.
Look at historical examples where entire populations were blamed for the actions of governments, organizations or individuals.
Then compare those examples with moments when communities refused collective blame.
COOPERATION BUILT CIVILIZATION
Samen bouwen wij de toekomst.
Together we build the future.
Human civilization depends on cooperation so completely that we often stop noticing it.
Think about an ordinary day.
Electricity arrives at the wall.
Water comes from the tap.
Food appears in stores.
Roads connect communities.
Hospitals operate.
Aircraft cross continents.
Information moves around the planet almost instantly.
None of that is the work of one person.
Behind almost everything we use is a chain of people with different knowledge and different responsibilities.
The same is true of scientific discovery.
One generation learns something.
Another improves it.
Another discovers that part of it was wrong.
Another finds something nobody expected.
Knowledge grows because people leave something behind for somebody else to continue.
That is cooperation across time.
Continue Exploring
Study major engineering projects and how many different professions were required to complete them.
Look at international scientific collaborations.
Explore how medical knowledge is shared between researchers and institutions.
Ask yourself how much of modern life would survive if everybody truly had to do everything alone.
BORDERS HAVE HISTORIES
Borders drawn by broken hands.
Borders can look permanent when we see them on a modern map.
History tells another story.
Borders have moved repeatedly.
Countries have appeared.
Countries have disappeared.
Empires have expanded and collapsed.
Territories have been divided, reunited, conquered, purchased, negotiated and fought over.
That does not mean borders have no purpose.
Modern countries require jurisdictions.
Governments require defined responsibilities.
Security matters.
The interesting question is how those boundaries came to exist and what happened to the people living around them when they changed.
Continue Exploring
Take a modern map and compare it with maps from one hundred, five hundred and one thousand years ago.
Do not only look at the lines.
Ask why they moved.
Who decided?
Was there a war?
A treaty?
Independence?
Colonization?
Migration?
Political collapse?
The lines become much more interesting once you know the human story underneath them.
PEACE IS SOMETHING PEOPLE BUILD
يدًا بيد، نصنع السلام
Hand in hand, we create peace.
I like the word create.
Peace is not simply what remains when nobody is shooting.
Real peace has to survive disagreement.
That makes it much harder.
People have to negotiate.
Listen.
Compromise.
Protect rights.
Create laws.
Build trust.
Deal with injustice.
And sometimes confront people who are determined to use violence.
Peace and weakness are not the same thing.
A peaceful society still has a responsibility to protect innocent people.
That is one of the balances I wanted “We Are One” to recognize.
Unity cannot require people to accept terrorism, violent extremism or deliberate cruelty.
Human dignity matters.
So does accountability.
Continue Exploring
Study peace negotiations that succeeded and negotiations that failed.
Look beyond the final agreement and learn what happened beforehand.
How long did negotiations take?
What compromises were necessary?
What almost caused them to collapse?
How was trust rebuilt?
Peace becomes much more meaningful when we understand how difficult it can be to create.
MUSIC CAN CROSS A BORDER BEFORE A PERSON DOES
Music has an unusual ability to travel.
You can love a song without speaking the language.
You can hear grief without understanding the sentence describing it.
You can hear celebration.
Anger.
Fear.
Power.
Hope.
A human voice can communicate before translation catches up.
That is one reason the vocal performance matters so much in “We Are One.”
When that singer reaches those extremely high notes, especially on words such as FOREVER, HIGHER and the repeated WE ARE ONE, the voice carries something the printed lyric cannot.
You feel the word before you analyze it.
That almost operatic power gives the song another language of its own.
Emotion.
Continue Exploring
Listen to music from a country whose language you do not speak.
Do not translate it immediately.
Listen first.
Try to understand the emotion from the voice, instruments, rhythm and dynamics.
Then read the translation.
See how close you came.
PORTUGAL, CANADA AND IDENTITY
Português.
De mãos dadas, vamos vencer.
That moment will always carry something personal for me.
Portugal is part of where my story begins.
Canada is where almost all of my life unfolded.
I do not need to choose one history and throw away the other.
That is something migration has created all over the world.
Millions of people carry more than one place inside them.
A person can speak one language at work and another with family.
They can celebrate traditions inherited from grandparents while creating new traditions in the country where they live.
Identity does not always fit neatly inside one box.
Maybe it was never supposed to.
That is another reason I wanted different languages inside this song.
Unity should not erase roots.
It should give those roots somewhere to meet.
THE QUESTION I WOULD LEAVE WITH YOU
After everything inside this song, I would not ask whether humanity can become one united mind.
I do not think we should.
Different minds create ideas.
Different cultures create perspectives.
Different experiences reveal different solutions.
The better question is harder.
Can we remain different without turning difference into hatred?
Can we disagree without automatically dehumanizing?
Can we protect our own communities while recognizing the humanity of somebody else’s?
Can we confront genuinely dangerous behaviour without blaming innocent people who happen to share a language, nationality, religion or appearance?
Can we be proud of where we came from without needing somebody else to be beneath us?
Those questions cannot be answered by a song.
But a song can make us ask them.
That is enough reason for me to write one.
CONTINUE EXPLORING
For reliable places to continue learning, the United Nations provides the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and material on international peace and cooperation. UNESCO explores cultural and linguistic diversity, including multilingualism and language preservation. The Canadian Museum of History provides another doorway into migration, culture, identity and the human stories that shape Canada.
The point is not to visit those places and simply accept everything you read.
Read.
Compare.
Question.
Learn.
Follow something that catches your attention.
Then follow it farther.
That is what this part of MOITA is supposed to encourage.
A song brings you through the door.
Curiosity decides how far you travel.
“We Are One” began with three words.
By the time we reach the end of the Documentary & Learning Centre, those three words have opened conversations about anthropology, language, psychology, history, migration, conflict, cooperation, identity, music and peace.
That is exactly what I want a MOITA song page to do.
The music can finish.
The thinking does not have to.
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