Wordless moments are often those that come closest to the sublime. (At the end of the album, language itself dissolves: in the final minute of the closing “El Alma Mía,” she abandons words in favor of a hummed melody.) Before the Venezuelan cuatro enters, “Dime” begins with plaintive clarinets and trumpets, and then Estrada’s own supplication, pleading for certainty of a lover who could stay or go. A dynamic string arrangement by Owen Pallett expands the first riff into a backdrop to which the words are only incidental. Movement is the only constant; Within it, a new movement begins in the music, and Estrada finds action: “For all the flowers you plucked/And all the verses to save/Let me at least get away/That I love you and I want to forget you.”
Sadness transforms into slow-burning anger on “Good Luck, Good Night,” a simmering bolero that revels in the cabaret drama of the moment you decide you’re angry, too. “I thought that your song/It was a storm/It was flowers/It was a party/Melodies of an orchestra…/That makes you cry,” he sings about a fickle companion (“I thought that your song/It was a storm/It was flowers/It was a celebration/The melodies of an orchestra…/That brings tears”). Anger is a profound way to feel less alone, and Estrada’s languid “cry” almost demands to be sung by a room full of accomplices, in the style of “cry and cry” that always echoes Vicente Fernández’s “cry and cry.”The King”, and of so many other rancheras and boleros that have spilled blood in crowded bars.
Pain often keeps the room empty. In “A Ray of Light,” Estrada combines leftover motifs like a Hopper paint—a ray of light entering an empty room, night falling, the sea wrapped in sighs—with the same conclusion: “Give me back my friends.” Vargas’ words return as a reminder: “How beautiful will death be when no one has returned from there?” Estrada responds: “How fragile will the luck that we always choose to love be?” (“How fragile must our luck be if we always choose to love?”)
Well how? At a recent album listening event, Estrada explained his invocation of the Sara Teasdale poem “Light rains will come” in the album title and on the record itself (and, in translation, with a more confident, solid verb). She describes it as “this realistic feeling of hope,” “a superreal promise” that “softness will come somehow.” It just does.
There is no shortage of writings about death or loss. Part of what makes people like Chavela Vargas canonized guardians of the subject in Latin America, composers who transcend time and space in cultural memory, is not knowledge, but a powerful ability to listen. We are not smarter, faster or more eloquent than their silence.
And yet, a few words are worth repeating. “Don’t leave without knowing/That I love you and I will always love you,” Estrada sings in the song of the same title (“Don’t leave without knowing/That I love you and always will”). It is an intuitive hope that in an unknowable universe there are things we do know and our mission is to say them out loud.
