Rostam Batmanglij was so "deeply moved" by former National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman's heart-swelling inauguration day poem "The Hill We Climb," that he set it to music. The producer and former Vampire Weekend member explained in a note that he was so inspired that he "went to my studio and improvised three piano takes while listening back to the speech."
He posted the second take, "Improvisation in G Minor," in its entirety, which finds him laying a gentle piano accompaniment to Gorman's soaring rhetoric. "When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?/ The loss we carry/ A sea we must wade/ We braved the belly of the beast/ We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what 'just' is isn’t always justice," Gorman says as Batmanglij adds an emotional musical underpinning to the couplets about rising up together to leave division behind.