Songfacts®:

• Raye Zaragoza is a singer-songwriter of mixed Indigenous, Asian and Latina heritage who earned national recognition in 2016 with "In The River," a folk-pop protest song about the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Although she's continued to tackle serious social-justice topics, the singer learned she needed to make room for joy, especially during troubling times.
  
  "Joy Revolution" is about capturing that spirit and honoring her ancestors who fought for it. She told the Songfacts Podcast why the message behind the Hold That Spirit single is crucial in today's world.
  
  "There's this air about the world at times, especially during the pandemic, where it's like we do not deserve to have fun - we need to really be very diligent about improving the world around us. Joy and fun has been put on the back burner because there have been a lot of reasons and there have been a lot of things we need to focus on," she explained.
  
  "But those two things can exist at the same time - we can fight for our rights, we can practice safety and everything around Covid and we can be very mindful of how we show up in the world while also experiencing the small joys in life… You can do that while also fighting for these very adult and very important causes that we do as adults, but we still have to find that inner child within us every day just for our own mental health. And that's pretty much what 'Joy Revolution' is about - it's about how existence is resistance, and our ancestors fought for our laughter and we deserve to experience it."
• Zaragoza wrote this with Connie K. Lim, an LA-based singer-songwriter who performs under the name Milck. Lim also sings on the track and her backyard was the setting for its breezy music video.
  
  Zaragoza told Songfacts she wanted the clip to "capture this energy of two women in their 30s having a slumber party, having fun." It features the friends frolicking through the grass and kicking their feet in the air against the backdrop of a summer sky. It also includes a pair of googly-eyed rocks as a nod to the 2022 sci-fi movie Everything Everywhere All At Once.
  
  Zaragoza credits Milck with coming up with a lot of the ideas for the video. "I get to her house and she's in total director mode and she's like, 'We need to have a shot here and a shot there,'" she recalled.
  
  "She had the idea of shooting us singing into the phone, but it looks like our heads in the clouds. And then, 'Let's do a couple with us both in the shot over here.' It was all in her backyard. We ended up, almost on the fly, storyboarding this entire video that's pretty much just us having fun."