“How beautiful must death be,” Chavela Vargas once asked, “that no one has ever returned from it?” In 2024, Silvana Estrada moved into Vargas’ home to try and find an answer. She watched hours of grainy interviews with the Costa Rican-Mexican icon—one of the great chroniclers of heartbreak and mortality—and wrote through her own grief, hoping that music might become a form of listening.
Estrada has always been a writer who treats words like fragile glass: she turns them over, hesitates, sometimes lets them drop. On Vendrán Suaves Lluvias, her most searching record yet, she often doubles back mid-thought, or abandons language altogether. The quiet, deliberate phrasing that defined 2022’s Marchita—the Veracruz-born songwriter’s remarkable breakout, built around her cuatro venezolano and a whisper that could level a mountain—returns here, but the silences between her words now feel heavier, more sacred.
The album’s title translates to Soft Rains Will Come, a nod to Sara Teasdale’s 1918 poem about the indifference of nature to human suffering. Estrada borrows the line as both question and promise: what happens after the storm, when mourning refuses to end but the world keeps blooming anyway?
Over several years, she navigated overlapping griefs—the dull ache of heartbreak, and the unthinkable violence that claimed two of her close friends in 2022. Much of Vendrán Suaves Lluvias is set in that liminal space between despair and devotion: nights spent lighting velitas while the city hums outside, prayers half-remembered, comfort sought in motion. “Se entrelazarán las piernas por cariño y por piedad,” she sings on “Como un Pájaro”—“Legs will intertwine for love and pity.” The line reads like a confession muttered to no one, a reminder that tenderness and survival often share the same bed.
Estrada roots her mourning in the natural world. On opener “Cada Día Te Extraño Menos,” she sings, “El viento arrastra sus nubes/Así arrastro yo mis penas” (“The wind drags its clouds the way I drag my sorrows”). The song itself seems to shift shape with each breath: verses blur into laughter, choruses dissolve into sighs. She’s never sounded more human, or more willing to leave things unsaid.
The arrangements—many guided by Owen Pallett—expand Estrada’s intimate songwriting into something quietly orchestral. “Dime” begins in stillness, with clarinets and horns that sound like they’re exhaling; then the strings enter, and the floor seems to tilt beneath her. Her voice, supple and sharp as a reed, curls around each phrase: “Por todas las flores que arrancaste…Déjame al menos alejarme” (“For all the flowers you uprooted…At least let me turn away”). Her heartbreak is precise, measured, but never distant. Even her restraint feels like an act of endurance.
By the time “Good Luck, Good Night” arrives, Estrada’s grief has sharpened into anger—the slow, cleansing kind that demands to be witnessed. It’s a bolero that burns from the inside, her phrasing luxuriating in cabaret drama: “Pensé que tu cantar era tormenta, era flores, era fiesta…” (“I thought your song was a storm, was flowers, was celebration…”). When she stretches that final “llorar,” it feels communal, echoing through a lineage of tear-streaked boleros and rancheras that have filled Mexican bars for generations.
“Un Rayo de Luz” strips the emotion bare again. A single ray of light, a room in shadow, the sea sighing somewhere beyond—images as sparse as a Hopper painting. Then the plea: “Devuélvanme a mis amigos.” Give me back my friends. It’s one of the simplest, most devastating lines Estrada has ever written. Vargas’ old question returns, now refracted through Estrada’s own: “¿Cómo será de frágil la suerte que siempre elegimos amar?” (“How fragile must our luck be that we always choose to love?”)
That choice—to keep loving, to keep naming what’s been lost—is what anchors Vendrán Suaves Lluvias. At a listening event, Estrada described the album’s title as a “realistic hope,” something sturdier than optimism, a belief that “softness is going to come somehow.” Her music doesn’t argue for transcendence so much as presence; she understands that some griefs never leave, only learn to live beside you.
The record ends where words give out. “El Alma Mía” dissolves into a hum, the melody carrying what language can’t. In that moment, Estrada joins the long, unbroken chorus of singers who’ve made silence their most eloquent verse.
There’s no shortage of songs about death. But what makes artists like Vargas—and now Estrada—so enduring isn’t what they know about it. It’s how they listen to its quiet.
And then Estrada sings, one last time, “No te vayas sin saber / Que yo te quiero y siempre te querré” (“Don’t leave without knowing that I love you and always will”). It’s the smallest prayer, the only kind that matters.
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