I have a bad habit of making music and drawing a lot for brief amounts of time, then going dormant for years.

I found “Pride” (listen below or download the MP3) while dusting off my musical equipment and digging through files.

I made the song and a drawing of a lion skull (above) in April of 2016, but for some reason never posted the song. I think it was the last one I worked on.

I’m making some new stuff now (read: learning how to do all of this all over again), but here’s this for the time being.

“Pride” features a sample from a well known cartoon movie about a royal lion, as well as a sample from a guy talking about how lions shouldn’t be hunted for sport. I probably wrote the source down or bookmarked it, but that would require more digging.

“Pride” was part of Project XTNCT, a short-lived concept—which I’d like to resurrect—through which I was producing clothing limited to the number of animals left in the wild that were featured on the pieces.

For example, there were estimated to be 30 Amur Leopards left in the wild about five years ago, so I’d planned to release only 30 of the limited edition tee. I think I sold two.

I’d planned to produce a song for every design, too. I did that for “Virunga”, about the decimated Mountain Gorilla population. But, as the saying goes, life gets in the way.

There are half as many lions living in the wild now as there were just 25 years ago, and they roam less than 1% of their natural range in West Africa. At this rate, my young niece and nephew will likely grow up in a world without them and the vast majority of other large wildlife.

#legalizepoacherpoaching