We Speak Music
Sonnet Finds Strength in Stillness on ‘Wishing for Rain’
Sonnet’s latest single, “Wishing for Rain,” stands as both a musical achievement and a deeply personal confession. Known for her vocal prowess and electrifying stage presence, the singer here turns inward, offering a ballad that speaks more softly than her past anthems but cuts with even greater precision. It is a song that seems less designed for spectacle than for reflection—a quiet dialogue between artist and listener.
The track opens with a delicate piano motif that lingers in the air like mist before the storm. Against this fragile backdrop, Son’s voice emerges, controlled yet brimming with restraint, as though she is holding back a torrent of emotion. One can hear in her delivery a deliberate fragility, a willingness to expose the raw edges of sorrow.
What elevates the song beyond standard balladry is the lyrical conception. Inspired by her mother’s observation on a rainy day, the idea of rain as both a metaphor and a cleansing force becomes the central thread. Rather than offering easy catharsis, Son explores the paradox of desiring a flood powerful enough to erase pain, while knowing that such healing is neither instant nor absolute.
Her chorus—“If it’s not the rain, but if it were you, could I forget you?”—carries a devastating duality: hope and futility intertwined. Son does not seek to resolve heartbreak but to sit with its persistence, giving voice to the human impulse to want an impossible remedy. The effect is haunting yet profoundly relatable.
In “Wishing for Rain,” Sonnet Son reminds us why she is one of Korea’s most compelling vocalists. By pairing technical brilliance with vulnerability, she achieves something rare: a song that feels both intimate and universal, a rainstorm listeners may willingly step into.
Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.
‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.
The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:
Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.”
About the track, Michele says, “I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.
We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.”
The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.
Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.
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