Drawn just so

Image: Takashi Iwasaki

Rain Will Come - Castanets

So, it starts. So. So is a story in the middle that already knows its end.

So, rain will come.

It's a cracked china-heart declaration sung stolid as steel. It hums prophetic in Ray Raposa's taut rubber-band throat, is exhaled with biblical authority through his ruddy wind-rubbed nose. And his fingers pluck notes that prick sharp like cactus needles, that hit heavy like bricks and hard labor and universal laws of physics.

And it will. Eventually, rain will come--in all its costumes. As regular trouble, sad and long. As Dylan's hard rain of repercussion. As lens cleanser. As new start. And literally, meterologically, rain will fall, even on the thick crust of desert drawn vividly chalk-brown and desolate with these words and those instruments. (Even on trialed-by-fire Southern California scorched earth, it will rain.)

We already know the end of the song.

No, not true. The song's second half is everything that's dreamed, imagined, up-for-grabs, open to interpretation--the arable land between so and sound. A drought tipped sideways that's a flood. A machine mulching metal that's also the groan of earth easing into nightfall. Lost transmissions sprinting through space, fleeting and fragile like ricepaper-winged fireflies. Just reach out and grab them.

From In the Vines (Amazon, eMusic), Myspace