Protest, Prayer and a Lei of Roses: Anthony Pfluke's "Ku'u Lei Lokelani"

Some records are dedicated to a place. This one is bound to it. Anthony Pfluke's "Ku'u Lei Lokelani," the young Maui musician's newest album, celebrated with a release show back on January 31, is a collection of original contemporary Hawaiian songs written as a lei — a garland of roses — for the island that raised him. Six months on, it's the local release worth sitting with this summer.

Pfluke is a product of the same lineage this archive keeps circling back to: he studied kī hō'alu with George Kahumoku Jr., and he plays 'ukulele, six- and twelve-string slack key, and sings in a soft, unhurried tenor. His previous album, We Will Rise, earned him a Nā Hōkū Hanohano nomination. What makes Ku'u Lei Lokelani land harder is that it refuses to be only pretty. The record opens with "Waiakoa" and includes the Haleakalā tribute "Kaulana 'o Haleakalā," but its spine is three protest songs — "Lahaina Strong," "Free the Wai," and "So We Stand," the last a collaboration with Kamaka Camarillo.

Those titles are not decoration. "Free the Wai" — wai meaning fresh water — plants itself in the fight over West Maui's diverted streams that the 2023 fire turned from a policy dispute into a matter of survival. "Lahaina Strong" carries the name of a town and a grief that the whole island shares. Pfluke's move is to set that weight inside the gentlest of forms; the songs sound like slack key on a lanai and land like editorials, and the tension between the two is the album's real subject.

Why this matters for the scene: post-fire Maui has produced a lot of benefit concerts and a lot of well-meaning outside sympathy. What it has produced less of is durable art made from the inside — records that will still say something true in ten years. A young local musician putting protest, place-names and prayer onto one album, in Hawaiian and in his own hand, is exactly the kind of work that keeps a music scene from becoming a nostalgia act for visitors.

You can hear Pfluke live around the island and in the slack-key circles he came up in; the album is the place to start. Play it in order, top to bottom, the way a lei is strung.

Sources: Maui News: "Anthony Pfluke to celebrate release of new album Jan. 31" (Jan 2026); Kanile'a 'Ukulele — Anthony Pfluke; George Kahumoku — Anthony Pfluke