Silvana Estrada – Vendrán Suaves Lluvias

The latest album from Silvana Estrada, Vendrán Suaves Lluviastook root from a life-changing period of self-discovery, tragedy, and eventual transcendence for the globally beloved singer/songwriter. Following the release of her 2022 debut studio LP Marchita, the Mexico City-based multi-instrumentalist took off on a stratospheric rise that included winning a Latin Grammy for Best New Artist, headlining tours around the world, and earning massive acclaim from major outlets like The New York Times, Pitchfork,and Rolling Stone (who hailed her as “an artist of the past, the present, and the future”). But as she set to work on her next full-length, the Veracruz native found herself thwarted by a series of false starts and devastating personal upheaval, including the murder of her best friend in late 2022. After taking timeto heal and recalibrate, Estrada decided to produce the album on her own—a daunting but wildly gratifying leap that ultimately brought even greater depth and color to her resplendent form of indie-folk.“For a long time I felt so lost, and finally I realized that maybe I just needed softness and sweetness and a safe space to reconnect with my intuition,” says Estrada. “When I found that space again, it became clear that I was the only person who could produce this album. The entire experience was like a rebirth, where I made it through so much loss and pain and then came out the other side with a new understanding of how to face reality with grace and hope.”With its title translating to Soft Rains Will Come (a phrase inspired by a 1918 poem by Sara Teasdale), Vendrán Suaves Lluvias expands on the gorgeously detailed sound of Marchita—Estrada’s debut release for Glassnote Records, featured on best-of-the-year lists from the likes of NPR, SPIN, and The Guardian. The latest turn in a career that’s included performing and/or recording with a diverse mix of artists (e.g., Laufey, Devendra Banhart, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and more), Vendrán Suaves Lluviasfinds her working with her longtime bandmates (a group of jazz musicians featuring pianist/arranger Roberto Verástegui and drummer Alex Lozano) as well as Oscar-nominated composer Owen Pallett (Frank Ocean, The National, Lana Del Rey) and a coterie of Montreal-based musicians known for their work with the late jazz-folk luminary Lhasa de Sela. In dreaming up thealbum, Estrada drew from a deep well of influences encompassing everything from tropicália to Tom Waits to minimalist classical composer Arvo Pärt—slowly building a spellbinding backdrop to her soul-searching reflections on self-preservation. “This album came from asking myself how to honor my anger and create an existence that’s both truthful and beautiful,” says Estrada, who also penned everytrack on Vendrán Suaves Lluvias. “I’ve always felt very connected to sadness, but now I understand that anger canbe an energy that motivates you to change your life for the better.”A three-year-long saga, the making of Vendrán Suaves Lluviasbegan back in spring 2022, when Estrada holed up in the studio with a former collaborator immediately after completing an extensive tour in support of Marchita. “I was expecting the production process to feel free and playful, but instead it was so rigid,” she recalls. “I was putting so much pressure on myself, and it turned out to be a total disaster.” Later shelving that album, Estrada embarked on another prolonged stretch of touring (including arun of dates as support for Andrew Bird and Iron & Wine), but headed home to Mexico City after suffering a spinal-cord injury that briefly left her in a wheelchair. “To this day the doctors still don’t understand what happened, but I think it was partly mybody asking for rest after pushing myself for too long,” she notes. After winning the Latin Grammy that November, Estrada’s life was thrown into chaos when her best friend and his brother were abducted and murdered in Mexico City. “I felt like nothing made sense anymore, and it took me a very long time to rewiremy brain to try to accept what happened,” she says. “For the first time in years, I took a break from everything.” As she dove back into music, Estrada cycled through multiple rounds of fruitless attempts at working with outside producers, then experienced a watershed moment after being invited to perform at a fall 2024 tribute to Lhasa de Sela—a turn of events that soon found her flying to Montreal to record with a number of de Sela’s former collaborators and several local musicians (guitarists Joe Grass and Warren Spicer, percussionist Robbie Kuster, harpist Sarah Pagé, bassist Rémi-Jean LeBlanc, and drummer Tommy Crane). “We spent five days rehearsing at a lakeside cabin [Lost River Studios] in the middle of summer, and it was one of the happiest timesof my life,” says Estrada. “They gave me the most generous gift I’ve ever received, which was the space to be myself and share my ideas without being judged. Everything felt so colorful again.”After cutting a handful of songs in Montreal and heading toBarcelona to cut an additional track, Estrada returned to Mexico City and recorded the rest of the album live with her band. From there, she gathered all the material she’d created over the past few years and spent months editing and mixing with a trio ofher closest collaborators (her longtime front-of-house engineer Leonel Carmona, Marchita engineer Daniel Bitrán, and her manager Edwin Erazo)—finally bringing Vendrán Suaves Lluviasto full and glorious life.An exquisite vessel for Estrada’s endlessly enchanting vocals, Vendrán Suaves Lluvias reveals the pure impact of her unbridled self-expression on songs like “Dime” (“Tell Me”): a wistful yet exultant track that perfectly encapsulates the album’s emotional complexity. “I was in a toxic relationship and didn’t know what to do with the rage I was feeling, because I viewed anger as a negative emotion,” she explains. “‘Dime’ was my first attempt at channeling my anger into something positive, and it turned into a sort of liberation.” One of several songs made with Pallett and recorded with a North Macedonia-based orchestra, “Dime” embodies both a piercing intimacy and all-consuming grandeur, unfolding in lavish strings, luminous horns, and sprawling acoustic-guitar work (courtesy of five-time Grammy-winningmusician Michael League of Snarky Puppy, Estrada’s longtime friend and collaborator). “I tried with all my strength to cover this song in joy,” she points out. “The lyrics take you into the dull ache of a painful relationship, but the music gradually begins to celebrate the change.”An inimitable songwriter with the soul of a poet, Estrada mines inspiration from the ineffable beauty of the natural world onsongs like “Lila Alelí” (“Lilac Wallflower”)—a dazzling piece of jazz-pop born from a bout of homesickness and threaded with warm recollections of the Veracruz countryside. “So many times in my life I’ve felt like my world was falling apart, but there’s always been a part of me that stays calm, knowing that nature is stronger than everything,” she says. Another song suffused with lush and vibrant imagery, “Flores” (“Flowers”) builds to a majestic crescendo as Estrada documents a sublime moment of personal transformation.“I was at a point in a relationship where I felt so empty and felt a deep desire for emotional abundance,” she says. “‘Flores’ is my way of saying that I can be my own gardener and grow my own flowers, and I love how the orchestra captures that feeling of a structure being completely destroyed and creating space for rebirth.” One of the most tender tracks on Vendrán Suaves Lluvias, “Como un Pájaro” (“Like a Bird”) presents a bittersweet portrait of the many sleepless nights Estrada spent while living on her own in the early days of lockdown, adorning her lonesome contemplation with lilting whistling and a delicate string arrangement supplied by Verástegui.On the gently revelatory “No Te Vayas Sin Saber” (“Don’t Leave Without Knowing”), Estrada inhabits both immense sensitivity and undeniable strength as she surrenders to the heartbreak of a relationship’s end. “I think in order to say goodbye, you need to put your ego aside and give yourself over to love and sweetness and care,” she says. “It’s so painful but also so beautiful when you’re able to get to that kind of grace.” Elsewhere on Vendrán Suaves Lluvias, Estrada brings her boundless imagination to such eclectic offerings as the magnificently theatrical “Good Luck, Good Night” (a piece she conceptualized as “drenched in smoke and alcohol, something that sounds like the clientele of a cantina slowly losing their minds”) and the minimalist but mesmerizing “Un Rayo De Luz” (or “A Ray of Light,” a song she began on piano while grieving her best friend). Informed by her time at an artist residency at the home of iconic ranchera singer ChavelaVargas, the latter track emerged as Estrada meditated on words of wisdom once uttered by Vargas: “How beautiful death must be, if no one has ever come back from there.”Even in its most understated moments, Vendrán Suaves Lluvias spotlights the kaleidoscopic musicality Estrada has cultivated since her earliest days in the tiny mountain town of Coatepec. As the daughter of luthiers (i.e., makers of stringed instruments), she got her start playing a Venezuelan cuatro guitar handcrafted by her father and grew up singing both baroque choir music and son jarocho (a regional form of Mexican folk music), then began performing in local bars at just 13-years-old. Also trained in jazz, she crossed paths with esteemed guitarist Charlie Hunter (D’Angelo, Norah Jones) while attending a jazz seminar in Guadalajara and soon joined forces with Hunter for the 2017 collaborative album Lo Sagrado. Over the coming years, Estrada made her solo debut with the 2019 EP Primeras Cancionesand began touring relentlessly, soon earning early support from the likes of Mon Lafertand Julieta Venegas and then inking her deal with Glassnote Records in 2020. Since the release of Marchita, she’s achieved such milestones as earning a Grammy nomination for Best Global Music Performance (for her 2023 single “Milagro y Desastre”), appearing on NPR’s Tiny Desk series and The Kelly Clarkson Show, receiving the Trailblazer Award from National Sawdust and the GRAMMY Museum, performing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as partof its “Canto en Resistencia” series at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and—most recently—curating a stage at Pitchfork Music Festival in Mexico City festival that featured Bedouine, Tim Bernardes, and Rodrigo Amarante.Looking back on the often-grueling process of creating Vendrán Suaves Lluvias, Estrada expresses a certain pride in staying true to her uncompromising vision.“I’ve never devoted so much energy and attention and effort to anything in my life,” she says. “When I listen back now, I know that the process had to happen this way, because all these songs came from a special place in my heart that I’d never really accessed before.” And in sharing the album with the world, she hopes that others might experiencea metamorphosis of their own. “One of my greatest hopes is for people to listen to the album all the way through, and then feel different by the time it ends,” says Estrada. “I want to give people a space to face their sorrow and their scars and then make peace with them—and to know that there can be beauty in every single thing you experience, as long as you open your heart enough to receive it.