Ethereal singer-songwriter Saint Avangeline released her new single + video, “Rain Dance”, bringing 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.”
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.
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.”
