Informed by multiple recent griefs, the Mexican singer-songwriter’s album grapples with heartbreak, mourning, and the desperate necessity of forward motion.
Chavela Vargas, the great Costa Rican-Mexican ranchera singer, once asked, “¿Cómo será de bella la muerte que nadie ha vuelto de allá?” (“How beautiful must death be that no one has returned from it?”) At a 2024 residency at the home of Vargas, one of the greatest musicians ever to speak on the subject, Silvana Estrada watched interviews with the late singer and wrote to understand her own grief.
For a musician so thoughtful about her words — and Estrada’s signature songwriting is, as ever, full of thoughtful words — the Mexican singer-songwriter’s latest album, Vendrán Suaves Lluvias, is often searching for them, doubling back, or abandoning them altogether. On 2022’s Marchita, Estrada introduced herself — the daughter of luthiers from the mountains of Veracruz — and her cuatro venezolano with a considered quiet that, in her nimble voice that balances power and softness, has allowed her poetry to speak loudest.
Vendrán Suaves Lluvias is the product of several years Estrada spent navigating multiple griefs: the tedious chaos of romantic heartbreak and the senselessness of violence after her close friends were killed in 2022. There are plenty of quiet moments, long nights of lighting velitas in prayer as life goes on outside, as she sings on “Como Un Pájaro”: “Se entrelazarán las piernas por cariño y por piedad” (“Legs will intertwine for love and pity”). The album finds its way through grief’s paralysis with music that even at its stillest never stays still, moving and changing its mind, like people do.
To ground it lyrically, Estrada situates herself in the natural world, where those losses intertwine and live together with her signature gentle touch. “El viento arrastra sus nubes/Así arrastro yo mis penas” (“The wind drags its clouds/The way I drag my sorrows”), she sings on opener “Cada Día Te Extraño Menos,” a confessional about the way time causes the hurt to change, but not disappear. Such ceaseless forward motion, like the contradictions it brings, is written directly into the song: At the end of one chorus, where another verse should arrive, she instead punctuates the song with a laugh.
