Rain from Heaven gets paid the moment you buy her music on Catalog.
From ashes to ashes, between each atom and every star, the same life force animates all things: deer eyeing the fireworks, cells dancing within us, embers leapfrogging riverbanks, winged creatures in the subways, Rain from Heaven onstage and on record. The Mahicannituck-raised artist sings in ripples that swell into waves on her debut album, petra-coeur. Its expressions of defiance and decay, a universal tug-of-war, feel miraculous to me.
"Why would I be perfection… When I could be divine, walking on earth / Concrete can’t hear my pulse" — Rain from Heaven, “perfection”
After 10+ hours and counting with its survival tales, teardrops, grunge rock, birdsongs, jammed mechanics, goosebumps, late-stage crescendos and chromatic songcraft, I only become more floored by petra-coeur. Lines will start featherlight then end with an anvil’s gravity or float upwards, like snow lifted off an arête by the wind. 1:08 and 3:29 on “HowDoULikeIt,” 2:40 on “all i do is think of you,” 2:56 on “abalone honey,” and 3:30 of “red light glow” are just a handful of moments that seem to liquify setbacks into catharsis, raging against the machine.
Conceived seven years ago and completed over the last five, petra-coeur arrives in a moment of intensified censorship and ecological warfare. Native suicide rates are trending the wrong way, and there’s something (lots of plastic) in the water. #Landback seems to only apply, for now, to Sam Altman’s and Elon Musk’s gigasized dataplants. And yet Rain from Heaven’s still here — buoyed through the wicked fissures of merciless, compounding violence by a promise to finish what she started, by the operatic example set by her mom, by the immaculate matcha at Kijitora. By frescos in Italian castles, stints with British healthcare, the ghosts of the Hudson Valley, Sufi traditions, and Björk being Björk. That’s at least one major mission accomplished. More to come. Stay safe and inspired out there <3
Keep reading for the full petra-coeur interview with Rain from Heaven. To reach the Hope For Wellness helpline for North American Indigenous peoples, call or text 1-855-242-3310.
Siber: Hiya!
Rain from Heaven: Hi, what’s your star sign? I’m curious.
Siber: I’m a Scorpio. Pleaseee don’t hold it against me. What about you?
Rain from Heaven: Why would I? [Laughs]
Siber: Well, Drake’s a Scoprio. A few years ago, before I learned how big the stigma was, I thought I was becoming friends with someone at this show. I told them I was a Scorpio and they immediately walked away. [Laughs]
Rain from Heaven: I know it’s not uncommon for people to have bad experiences with Scorpios, but, Björk’s a Scorpio! I’m a Taurus with a Mars and Taurus, but my chart’s Pisces dominant, so I tend to come across that way. There’s a famous internet image of a cow standing on the beach, staring into the ocean. That’s me. [Laughs] I’m a fishy cow.
Siber: Not fishy in the sus sense. Literally fishlike, a marine creature…
Rain from Heaven: Yes. Quite straightforward. Not very mysterious.
Siber: Very Italian, also! Okay, so, to start, I had to ask about the album title itself, petra-coeur, which feels like a maze of layers in and of itself. Petra Collins, Petra in Jordan, petrified, petroleum. I read the full thing almost like a version of “anthropocene” — this epoch of disaster and acceleration and endurance. How did that come to be?
Rain from Heaven: The name is meant to be pronounced like “petrichor,” which is the smell that lingers after rain. I speak Italian, so to me “petra” means “stone” from ancient Latin/Greek. In this case, it also means something that endures, or something from the Earth. “Coeur” is just “heart” in French. (I don’t speak French.) This is an album about surviving the psychological warfare of colonialism and capitalism so it all made sense together.
Siber: You’ve mentioned to me that every song you write is a scene, making each arrangement a score. Do you see something accompanying what you hear and play?
Rain from Heaven: Yes. Colors, textures, and sometimes images. “Ricky” is like speeding through an empty parking lot. Big, open, wide spaciousness. And desaturation. Gray-scaled.
Siber: What do you envision with your song “perfection”?
Rain from Heaven: I see pale green and gold. Walking through a big city and looking up between the buildings at the gaps of sunlight. “perfection” is interesting because lots of the musical ideas are almost political choices. It’s very much, for me, this cognitive dissonance of existing in an environment that’s not meant to see you succeed or survive. I wanted to make a song with drums that sounded like rattles, because for Southern California peoples, our music’s rooted in rattles and voices. There’s this sense that nonstandard percussion is inferior, but I wanted to warp standard drums into the kind of sound that’s standard to me. Some of the vocals have a pitchiness that’s a rejection of this idea of ‘perfect pitch’...
Siber: In the context of the western scale? Versus the maqamat system, ragas…
Rain from Heaven: Yes. There are notes I sing on “abalone honey,” too — these in-between notes. I have memories of studying music in school, writing songs with notes that are not ‘in tune’ and being told it’s ‘wrong’ by teachers. That whole system is racist. All across the world, people of different cultures have different concepts of scales and tones. The songmaking process itself also felt me giving a finger to super-structured, rushed studio timelines. Every instrument on “perfection” was recorded in a different place, then conglomerated. I did the vocals standing in a regular room with a dynamic mic, and recorded electronic drums in multiple spaces. My friend Ayman Sinada, an amazing jazz drummer, did live drums in a UK session, along with bass in a different session. I did the main guitar in New York. Van Hoen did the guitar solo in Montreal. We’ve also got this spacey, ambient guitar layer by seth cardinal dodginghorse. I did the last vocal session in a medieval Italian church I was living in last summer. It was perfect for backing tracks. Before I went there for a residency, I’d been living in Canada. I had this dream of going to Italy to look for my great-grandmother’s house, then I saw this opportunity posted online and applied. The castle had a fresco that was like 800 years old; it was in the room with me when I recorded. The building’s energy was crazy, but not cursed.
Siber: My dad likes to say there are good ghosts, too.
Rain from Heaven: He’s right. That’s wise.
Siber: On “perfection,” you have this jawdropper moment: “Why would I be perfection… / When I could be divine, walking on earth? / Concrete can’t hear my pulse.”
Rain from Heaven: I don’t like walking on concrete because I grew up walking on dirt. It cuts off one of my key senses. For most of my life, I could just walk out of my house and into the woods. I don’t drive, so that was pretty much it. Also, I love the river I grew up alongside, the Mahicannituck, so much. Anywhere near the river is a great place to be.
Siber: You have another set of lyrics on back-to-back songs, “abalone honey” and “red light glow,” that also struck me: “All I want is all I need,” on the former, and “Burn all the things / Return all the things” on the latter. It felt, to me, like you could be speaking about resetting several things at once: nature, family, your relationship with your self.
Rain from Heaven: “All I want is all I need” comes from the beliefs I was raised with: that Creator is everywhere, in everything. We are all part of Creator, and Creator is with me at all times. Most of “abalone honey” grapples with environmental catastrophe, feeling suicidal and fetishized as a Native person, but then this bridge offers an uplifting affirmation. “red light glow” draws this line between Native women in my family facing violence, and many of us ending up in patterns of self-abuse, self-destruction, to free ourselves of what we’ve endured while we watch out lands share the same fate. Wildfires were once a natural process of death and rebirth that’s been thrown completely out of whack. The desire for destruction, whether it’s ending my life or the fires, comes down to a desire to return to a state of balance. We are all Creator’s children, and we’re not as isolated from consequence as we think we are. To us, the Creator is the universe, existing within and between all things, versus the Judeo-Christan concept of God as some dude.
Siber: Thank you for being open to discussing this. That relationship to Creator reminds me a little bit of Sufism, the true understanding of Allah in Islam, even Daoism.
Rain from Heaven: I’ve been reading the Masnavi, a Sufi book, and there’s quite a few similarities between how I was raised and Islamic philosophies of God. Amna’a is our word for Great Spirit, and it literally means that the spirit is everywhere.
Siber: There’s no border, no boundary, nothing’s exempt.
Rain from Heaven: Exactly. And there’s no agenda. It’s almost more like quantum physics to me than this linear discernment that’s coming from some place of favor, judgment, or vengeance.
Siber: Most of what we hear on petra-coeur is solely by you, crafted over a half-decade. Were there skills you didn’t have at the start that you’ve learned since?
Rain from Heaven: I learned guitar, from zero. I still don’t have full command of it; it’s a bit trickier for me than keys. I’m not sure I’ll be able to master it in this lifetime, in part because — this is stupid — I have small hands. [Laughs] I have carpal tunnel or some pre-arthritic bullshit, so I can only do so much with them. I was lucky to have my ex-partner play a lot of the guitar parts I wrote but couldn’t play as well as he did. The guitar on “just tell me when you wanna ride” is all me. “perfection” has that guitar solo I didn’t write from Van Hoen, who goes by Animal Noir. He’s really gifted with the finger-tapping style.
Siber: You played through the pains. If it is arthritis, I hope it’s not rheumatoid. That runs in my family and it’s got brutal deforming power. Did it worsen while working on this?
Rain from Heaven: In the past year, it’s gotten to a point where I can’t put weight on my left wrist for months at a time. It’s probably connected to the inflammation from being on my phone and computer all the time, radiating myself. The same goes for my eyes; I already had vision troubles, migraines. Even as a little kid, I’d get headaches within 20 or 30 minutes of being put in front of a screen. I try to step away but I use the computer to make my music.
Siber: I honestly think it’s important to acknowledge these things. There’s an inherent clash between what 2025 expects of us, at least here, and our natural purposes.
Rain from Heaven: I hate being a fragile bitch! I’m just not built for this era.
Siber: Something in your bones just knew where all this would lead us.
Rain from Heaven: I do fantasize about getting a fliphone and saying bye to everyone. If you need me, call me. I’m getting there slowly. I have an iPhone 6S and I refuse to trade it in for a new one. A lot of my apps have shut down because they can't update anymore. Fuck Big Tech.
Siber: I’m glad you brought that up, because in addition to all the other concerns about AI bio weapons, there’s the energy intensity, the land requirements for the data centers.
Rain from Heaven: This is a worthwhile rabbithole. Originally, the name of my album was gonna be The Valley, in reference to both where I grew up and the uncanny valley. Before AI stood for artificial intelligence, it stood for American Indian. I know a lot of us aren’t comfortable with that term, but I’m from a family of California Native people; on the documents, it lists us as “Indian” with a corresponding number. Like livestock. Let’s focus on changing the legal language first. Much of this project is about having a hard time as a reconnecting Native person. You realize you come from a people that were — and are — supposed to disappear, cut off from so many of our natural support systems. I studied intergenerational trauma, the data behind that concept, and the shockingly high rates of addiction and suicide among Indigenous peoples are connected not just to the past, but to how our current society is organized.
Siber: This hyper-alienation on your land. Internal exile.
Rain from Heaven: Yes. This is the uncanny valley of American Indians, of Native Americans. I’m not even on ‘my’ land. I don’t speak my language. Everyone in the whole world knows this place my people have been for 1000s of years, ‘The United States,’ but not who we are.
Siber: Following the decades of military interventions and covert C.I.A. operations in Latin America during the Cold War, which was very much hot for the periphery, and in part revealed to us all thanks to the Church Committee. I’ll link to a place to learn more. But rewinding: why did you change the album name from The Valley to petra-coeur?
Rain from Heaven: It felt too dense, and too rooted in victimhood. I didn’t want that to be my main message to people. I wanted it to resonate beyond that. I’m a reconnecting Native person, and I hope people understand that when I’m speaking on Indigenous identity, I’m just talking about me. But just because I’m from a family that’s only experienced certain processes of removal, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t speak at all. I’m also very aware that in this industry, Indigenous artists are a rarity. Not that they don’t exist, but that they’re not often recognized by non-Indigenous media. I want people to support my music because they enjoy it. I don’t want the energy of guilt anywhere near my work. It’s scary, to me, that I can put out this album so full of stories, layers, influences, and ideas, and people will only want to talk about how I’m Native. I’m also Mexican. And Italian! [Laughs] I grew up speaking Italian. I’m lucky enough to know all sides of my heritage.
Siber: No, you’re not the singular representative, and repeat listens to petra-coeur reveals something infinite. Of all those layers, are there any influences behind this body of work that you’d like discuss, to wear on your sleeve? And what draws you to them?
Rain from Heaven: I would definitely want to make note of this one Indigenous vocal group I grew up listening to, Ulali. There’s a strong vocal influence from my favorite rock singer of all time, Skin from the band Skunk Anansie. She’s just phenomenal, so dynamic. I think of a song like “Weak,” from their first album Paranoid & Sunburnt, where she starts with this gentle, vulnerable tone then hits these power high notes in the hook. As a soprano! How fucking badass to sing like that, you know? And there’s Björk. Always Björk. I started making music because of her. When I was 11, when I first started feeling like I didn’t want to be here anymore, my dad, in his infinite wisdom, said it was because of the pop music I was listening to on the radio. He showed me a video of Björk performing at some festival in the 90s. I was struck by how free she sounded. She writes songs like she’s talking to you, and her vocal production inspires me. There’s Massive Attack, Portishead, other 90s UK music. The Russian artist Inna Zhelannaya is top three all time for me. Just a tremendous influence. Cyndi Lauper, too. I’ve got a Italian-American mom who loves her. I made “ricky” with my London friend Scott Bowley, using parts of a beat we had started for something else. I was at a house party — in my house — and I went upstairs, sat on my bed, and wrote that song. You can hear the Aaliyah and Timbaland influences on that. It’s the most R&B-indebted. I grew up listening to a lot of 70s R&B/Soul music, and I’ll still listen to different eras. Right now it’s Naomi Sharon and Thee Sacred Souls for me. I’ll always listen to The Isley Brothers and Minnie Riperton. ABRA is another one. I think her music’s quite different from how that song turned out, but I’m such a fan of hers.
Siber: Awful Records-era ABRA?
Rain from Heaven: Like ROSE era Abra. M.I.A. as well, with those industrial noises. I’m thinking of her album Maya especially, the songs “Steppin’ Up” and “Teqkilla” that have these environmental sounds shaping the beat. I was dreaming of a song that felt like smashed metal, gravel, sneaker squeaks, so all that just went into it. M.I.A.’s production.
Siber: On the seventh song, ‘all i do is think of you,” you sing the lyric, “dreaming of my homeland.” You first shared the song as a fundraiser for Palestinians in Gaza alongside BDS advocacy. What’s behind that line?
Rain from Heaven: I actually wrote this song when I first moved to London, England. I was alone and very homesick and thinking about how my family members who had fled conflict at different points in history must have felt. Being in a city alone is so exhausting if you’re used to living in nature. I went to England because I believed I was going to have an easier time in the music industry over there, and I was right. I had this, like, ‘survivor’s guilt,’ like, “What the fuck, why can’t it be like this in the US? Why can’t all Native artists experience this kind of support?” Being in Europe, having free healthcare, affordable and healthy food, feeling safe and supported like that, it was such a trip compared to what I was accustomed to.
Siber: When I lived out there, I couldn’t stop myself from half-jokingly telling British people how wonderful it was to watch a movie without worrying about a mass shooting. Not that the UK is devoid of significant issues, but there’s a lot to love. You’ve been so generous with your time and energy, so I’d love to wrap things up with this: what’s a memory you treasure from the making of petra-coeur, what’s an obstacle you’re proud of overcoming, and what’s an example of the industry picking you up or letting you down?
Rain from Heaven: A lot of the process of making this album was just me trying to retrieve myself from a very difficult mental place. I had the idea to make petra-coeur seven years ago, but at the time I was homeless and recovering from a violent relationship so I didn’t really have the resources. It took two years to really begin. I tried to kill myself several times, but I didn’t succeed and I’m very grateful for that failure now. Like we talked about earlier, most people outside of the Indigenous community don’t know that we have the highest rates of suicide in this country. There have been a few people who’ve passed that way in my family. So there’s the main obstacle.
The last song on the album, “baby,” is about talking to my younger self (or my younger self talking to me), and it’s really just a suicide prevention song. I wrote it to this drum loop from Tanya Tagaq’s “Caribou” and then spent two years trying to beg her label to let me use it. I finally got a chance to ask Tanya directly after seeing her perform last winter. I waited until everyone had left the hall and someone saw me standing there and brought me backstage. I almost started crying when I met her because she treated me with such incredible warmth. When I told her about the song she immediately gave me permission to use the drums. I felt very honored because she is an artist of such integrity, but she saw the value of what I was trying to create without having even heard the music. I’ll always treasure that experience.
I think it’s been very healing to have moments of seeing how my music resonates with people, especially other Indigenous women. I went through most of the process of making this project not thinking about any metric of success other than staying well enough to finish it. But now that I have, and it’s been released, so many people reach out and tell me that they are having these profound experiences with these songs. To me that is a tremendous success. I actually don’t feel too let down by the music industry in this particular case because I didn’t make this project with the intention of making money from it, and I knew that I was doing this mostly on my own. To me, it’s just a piece of art from the purest depths of my heart and I’m grateful that people are enjoying it.
