Saint Avageline – Rain Dance
Today, ethereal singer-songwriter Saint Avangeline released her new single + video, “Rain Dance.”
Saint Avangeline brings her mesmerizing vocals to a melancholy reverie, layering the track with luminous melodies and hypnotically gauzy guitar tones. “‘Rain Dance’ is my actual first love song,” she says, noting that she visualized the track in lush and vivid greens. “It’s about me and my current partner finding each other and connecting, and healing each other’s inner child.”
Saint Avangeline expands, “I have been blessed with the gift of tender, genuine love; one that makes you see the child in your lover and in yourself again. This song is dedicated to my partner, and it explores healing from the trauma we carry from our childhoods, alone and wounded. I often feel this nostalgic longing or even a sense of melancholy over not getting to have known them when we were much younger. Both of us would often retreat into the woods or the water alone as children, surrounding ourselves in nature and silence. It’s something we do together now, retreating into nature, and I always manage to find traces of the sweet child left in them every time we go. I named this song after a move from one of my favorite video games in my childhood – we play those games together now. Life is whimsical again. It is a magical thing to love so deeply.”
Following a mesmerizing performance in Los Angeles last weekend, Saint Avangeline will be taking the stage in New York City this Sunday, October 26 at The Meadows and in Atlanta on November 1 at The Masquerade.
For Saint Avangeline, making music is a conduit for self-salvation—a divine catharsis she refers to as “sucking the poison out of my soul.” The 23-year-old lesbian, Atlanta-based independent artist brings a lavish originality to that process of transmutation, endlessly channeling her most unbearable feelings into songs steeped in a raw ethereal beauty. In the latest manifestation of her extravagant vision, Saint Avangeline now shares a selection of songs that drift from ethereal dream-pop to dark wave to a wildly enchanted genre all her own—ultimately charting a path from painful delusion to the sublime awakening of true love.
At a young age, Saint Avangeline became fascinated with music from other lands. Her mother was born in Japan and her family’s Syrian lineage dates back nearly 700 years to the small mountain town of Al-Nabek. Despite her immense vocal talents, the young artist felt incredibly self-conscious about her voice and hid her passion for singing for most of her childhood. “For about ten years I’d only ever sing in my closet when no one else was home, and only in Japanese,” she recalls. “There was this cognitive dissonance where I told myself I could never be a singer, even though I was secretly singing all the time.”
As she began sharing her voice with the world, Saint Avangeline posted a personalized cover of Lana Del Rey’s “Million Dollar Man” in 2020 and quickly drew a rapturous response, soon amassing a devoted following by putting a sapphic spin on other pop songs. Saint Avangeline applied the popular themes to a queer perspective, offering representation to her new fans. Within a year she’d penned her first original piece and instantly discovered the transformative power of songwriting. “‘Lilith’ was the first song I ever wrote, and it’s about a sexual assault by one of my previous partners,” she reveals. “I wrote it to try to cope and heal, and since then my inspiration has mostly come from a desperate place of trying to get everything out of my system.”
As she looks back on her work to date, Saint Avangeline speaks to the singular joy she’s discovered in communing with those who find solace in her music. “Sometimes queer women will reach out and tell me how it feels good that there’s someone creating my style of music but talking about the lesbian experience,” she points out. “I also hear from people who’ve gone through abuse or assault, and who tell me I expressed something that they couldn’t put into words on their own. At the end of the day I wrote all of these songs to save myself—so the idea that they could end up helping someone else really means so much to me.”
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