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I became reacquainted with Raffi in the spring of 2020, around my son’s first birthday. These were the early days of the pandemic: People had barely stopped hoarding toilet paper; we’d started going to the car wash for fun. It was on one of these drives that I first burst into tears to Raffi’s “All I Really Need.” Ostensibly, I was playing the track for my baby, who was babbling in his car seat behind me as I drove through eerily quiet San Francisco, trying to forget Trump had just suggested we all drink bleach. The lyrics were a balm for my frayed nerves: All I really need is a song in my heart, food in my belly, and love in my family…

Raffi Cavoukian, should you need a refresher, is a widely beloved Canadian children’s singer with a deep, kind voice. He’s sold more than 15 million records during his nearly 50-year career, but he’s best known for his hits from the ’80s and early ’90s: “Baby Beluga,” “Down by the Bay,” and “Bananaphone.” Before the advent of streaming services birthed a thousand on-demand entertainment options aimed at young children, Raffi was—and for many of us adults who grew up with his music, known as “Beluga grads,” still is—a superstar. He inhabited the same stratosphere as Mr. Rogers: a calming, nearly hypnotic, and constant presence in our living rooms and inner worlds.

Though he’s faded a bit from the limelight, Raffi, now 75, has never stopped making music; his 24th album, Penny Penguin, dropped April 19. In the last three decades he’s also become a vocal climate activist, performed for Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, rejected an offer to make ungodly sums of money with a Baby Beluga movie from the producers of Shrek, and established the Raffi Foundation for Child Honouring, a nonprofit organized around the singer’s “children-first” vision of sustainability. You can read about all this and more in his memoir, one of three books he’s published for adults.

But the best way to learn about Raffi’s movements (as I learned in the spring of 2020 after wondering, through tears, “What has that guy been up to?”) is to follow him on Twitter. There, he maintains perhaps the most earnest, sweetly radical feed in the history of the internet.

A typical Raffi Twitter day in 2024 includes dismay at the 1 percent (“don’t need no billionaires / need to breathe clean air”) and the right-wing legislators who enable them (#fascists); calls for a ceasefire in Gaza; a Wordle score; a retweet of a climate expert; some pop culture opinions (he’s a Swiftie, and he loved Barbie); quotes about the importance of nurturing children; descriptions of his healthy dinners; and commentary on whatever hockey game he’s watching (sometimes in poem form). The cumulative effect is charming, occasionally hilarious, and—in a sea of painstakingly curated celebrity political statements so vague and careful they fail to say anything—incredibly refreshing.

Ahead of the release of Penny Penguin, Raffi’s first real record in five years, I spoke to the musician over Zoom from his home on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.

Your new record, Penny Penguin, is a collaboration with the group Good Lovelies. What were its inspirations?

I was watching a Netflix series, Atypical, about a family with a 16-year-old boy on the autism spectrum, and his great love was penguins, especially in Antarctica. He would always be on about this penguin in this aquarium he would go to—drawing penguins, everything. That kind of stayed with me. Fabulous series, by the way.

Other songs, like “My Forest Friend,” I wrote for my forest that I live with. I live on a few acres of land, and no matter what, this forest keeps on going. Its........

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