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.
The wordless moments are often the ones that come closest to touching the sublime. (At album’s end, language itself dissolves: In the final minute of the closing “El Alma Mía,” she abandons words in favor of a hummed melody.) Before the cuatro venezolano comes in, “Dime” begins with plaintive clarinets and horns, and then Estrada’s own plea, begging certainty of a lover who might stay or go. A dynamic string arrangement from Owen Pallett expands the first riff into a backdrop against which words are only incidental. Motion is the only constant; within it, a new movement begins in the music, and Estrada finds action: “Por todas las flores que arrancaste/Y todos los versos por salvar/Déjame al menos alejarme/Que yo te quiero y te quiero olvidar” (“For all the flowers you uprooted/And all the verses yet to save/At least let me turn away/For I love you and would love to forget you”).
The sadness shifts into a slow-burning anger on “Good Luck, Good Night,” a simmering bolero that luxuriates in the cabaret drama of the moment you decide you also get to be mad. “Pensé que tu cantar/Era tormenta/Era flores/Era fiesta/Melodías de una orquesta…/Que hace llorar,” she sings of a fickle partner (“I thought your song/Was a storm/Was flowers/Was celebration/The melodies of an orchestra…/That draws tears”). Anger is a profound way to feel less alone, and Estrada’s languorous “llorar” almost demands to be sung back by a roomful of accomplices—in the mode of the “lloraaar y llorar” that always echoes Vicente Fernández’s “El Rey,” and of so many other rancheras and boleros that have drawn blood in crowded bars.
The grief often keeps the room empty. In “Un Rayo de Luz,” Estrada couples spare motifs like a Hopper painting—a ray of light entering an empty room, night falling, the sea wrapped in sighs—with the same conclusion: “Devuélvanme a mis amigos” (“Give me back my friends”). Vargas’ words return in reminder: “¿Cómo será de hermosa la muerte que nadie ha vuelto de allá?” Estrada replies: “¿Cómo será de frágil la suerte que siempre elegimos amar?” (“How fragile must our luck be that we always choose to love?”)
Well, how? At a recent album listening event, Estrada explained her invocation of Sara Teasdale’s poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” in the album title and in the record itself (and, in translation, with a surer, more solid verb). She describes it as “this realistic feeling of hope”—“a superreal promise” that “softness is going to come somehow.” It just does.
There is no shortage of writing about death or loss. Part of what makes people like Chavela Vargas canonized keepers of the subject in Latin America, songwriters that transcend time and space in cultural memory, isn’t knowledge, but a powerful capacity to listen. We are not smarter, faster, or more eloquent than its silence.
And yet some words are still worth repeating. “No te vayas sin saber/Que yo te quiero y siempre te querré,” Estrada sings on the song of the same title (“Don’t leave without knowing/That I love you and I always will”). It’s an intuitive hope that in an unknowable universe, there are things we do know, and it is our mission to say them out loud.
