A close-up portrait of a young man with red hair and green eyes, wearing a white t-shirt under a maroon cardigan, captured...

Remembering Our Friend

The Rangas is a band of friends who met in college at BYU-Hawai’i in La’ie, Hawai’i. We lost our dear friend Lachlan Maluhia McQuivey in June of this year. After he passed, in a week of sleepless nights, we created a song to honor our beloved friend through music — a passion that we all had in common. Here we tell you about our friend and why we want the world to hear his song.

Learn More

The Story

Our Song

Lachlan Maluhia McQuivey left this life on June 7, 2025, just days after he turned 18. Everybody on the BYU-Hawai’i campus where we were all attending school was devastated to hear of his loss. As some of his closest friends, we found comfort in the one thing we all shared with Lachlan — a love of music.

That week we wrote a song, Today I Lost A Friend. The day of Lachlan’s La’ie memorial service we invited his family to the studio to hear our song for the first time. It was a special, tear-filled event. The family loved our song and encouraged us to release it so the whole world could share. You can hear the song, released by one of us under his producer name, Chaagii, on Spotify below. Or search for it on Apple Music or wherever you get your favorite tracks.

The song soon spread around the world. Thousands of people listened in over a dozen countries. Carried by word of mouth and divine assistance, the song reached people one by one with its message of love and loss. We hope you feel love and meaning when you hear the song that we put our hearts into.

Our name

We didn’t have a name for our band when we released our song. But when we were invited to perform at a benefit concert in LA we realized we needed one. We thought hard on this one — we wanted to use Lachlan’s middle name, Maluhia, since it means “peace” in Hawaiian. But that was hard for people to say or spell. We thought of so many of our favorite things about our friend and finally landed on “Ranga” — an Aussie and Kiwi slang term for red-head, like we say Ginger elsewhere. Lachlan had magnificent red hair and leaned into his Scotch-Irish ancestry just as much as he did his Hawaiian roots. But the kicker is how much Lachlan loved orangutans.

We all remember his most iconic prank. He’d sneak onto your phone or laptop when you weren’t looking, change the wallpaper to a picture of a hideous orangutan, and then sit back with that mischievous grin and wait for your reaction. A lot of us have kept the wallpaper till this day.

So like that The Rangas was born.

“Look at her…so beautiful, so intelligent” – Lachlan

All of Lachlan’s friends agree: we’ve all had to sit through this video at least once — his most prized gem on the internet.

A man stands proudly in front of a vibrant red backdrop, donning a red sweatshirt emblazoned with "Light the World" and "G...
Here is the alt text: "boy with red freckles, red glasses, and shirt, in front of brick wall."
The image shows a baby wearing a Red Sox hat and shirt, holding a baseball.
A young person with red hair and glasses sitting on a window-seat ledge. The background is a white wall.
An individual stands next to a large ancient Egyptian statue. Ancient Egyptian relief-like hieroglyph symbols can be seen ...
A Red-haired Child in Osh Kosh B'Gosh Overalls Sitting in Front of a Black Background.
A man with red hair and glasses sits on a white couch, petting a small dog lying across his lap. The man wears a gray t-sh...
Three men standing side by side on a beach, each with their arms around the shoulders of the men beside them, facing the c...
two young boys in front of a fire truck, one carrying a fire hydrant
A young boy sits on a grassy lawn, wearing a long-sleeved gray shirt with yellow and white stripes, tan pants, and black s...
This drone shot captures the sand etching we did at Hukilau Beach a day after Lachlan passed, spelling out “Live Like Lachlan.” Later, Lachlan’s dad introduced a variation of this mantra that we loved even more: “Give Like Lachlan.” It’s the perfect nod to his selflessness and the way he always shared his time, his spirit, and his light with everyone he met.

Who We Are…

Of all those invited, six of us went to Hollywood to perform live for the Promise2Live Global Livestream Event:

Gianna Maile Hohaia

Vocals • Songwriter

Evan Rutherford

Vocals • Guitar

Sophia (SES) Sagarese

Vocals • Songwriter

Charlie Bawden

Producer • Songwriter • Piano • Vocals

genevieve Kale’a Hohaia

Guitar • Ukelele

Joshua Lundin

Violin • Vocals

And more of us were in the studio that week:

liezl (Liz) Guillen

Violin

Michael Gardner

Vocals

Promise2Live Concert

On September 10, 2025, The Rangas performed as part of a benefit concert for suicide prevention. The concert was hosted by Promise2Live, a nonprofit that has assembled celebrities and talent to gather on Global Suicide Prevention Day to honor those we’ve lost and work to prevent the loss of any more people we love.

We were honored to be on the classic stage in The Avalon Theater in Hollywood where we sang our song for a potential audience of millions. We are so grateful to Brandy Vega, Founder of Good Deed Revolution and creator of Promise2Live, for inviting us to this special event and being so warm and loving. Learn more about Promise2Live and how you can protect and support the people closest to you who need it.

A 4-string ukulele adorned with a lei is positioned leaning at an angle on the ground, bathed in festive surroundings, inc...

Promise2Live.org

September 10, 2025

Learn more
Some of the members of The Rangas gathered for the first listen of Today I Lost a Friend in the production studio.

Bonus Track!

Here’s the backstory on our glorious logo. As you saw, our name comes from Ranga, a slang term for red-head that conveniently connects to Lachlan’s favorite animal, the Orangutan (see above YouTube video for 10 hours of enjoyment in this vein). When we were first in the studio listening to our song with Lachlan’s family, Lachlan’s brother used the sound-dampening walls of the studio space — which you can see above are velvet-like — to draw a simple Orangutan icon.

Our gentle friend, with GLL for #givelikelachlan, combed into the wall’s velvet-like surface.

He was like a gentle overseer of our project. We also wrote some things on the walls to inspire us.

That’s Evan, on vocals and guitar, in the studio moment with friends and family.

We embraced the ape, or the Ranga, and made him our mascot and icon. We hope you love him as much as we do.

Extra bonus lore

It’s classically Polynesian to look for layers of meaning in words, songs, dances, and in the world around us. Hawaiian, for example, only has 13 letters of the alphabet so there are only so many sounds you can make in the language; as a result, each combination of sounds has to mean multiple things. This creates great opportunities for poetry. This is also true throughout Polynesia. Our band members are of various ethnicities, all of them wonderful — several of us are of multiple Polynesian descent, including Maori, the name for the people of New Zealand, close cousins to the Hawaiians. So you can imagine the chicken skin we got (local term for “goose bumps”) when we looked up Ranga in a Maori dictionary:

Yeah, another reason why we love our name. You’re welcome.