An Important Message Presented In Art - A Review of Nanseera’s ‘Purple Rain’
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
‘Poison Rain’ opens with the kind of quiet that feels deliberate, the sound of a song built to sit with you rather than rush past you…
Nanseera, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter raised between London, Uganda and Ethiopia, has crafted a track that wears its politics openly without ever losing its intimacy.
WEBSITE | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | APPLE MUSIC | BANDCAMP
Written after the US Supreme Court’s ruling to significantly weaken the Voting Rights Act, the song sat unfinished for weeks before Nanseera worked it out alone at the Song Suffragettes House on Music Row in Nashville. That solitary breakthrough shows in the finished product. The instrumentation, acoustic guitar, dobro, banjo, upright bass and drums, gives the track its back porch gothic character, a sound Nanseera has described as apocalyptic yet hopeful.
The comparison points are clear. Fans of Rhiannon Giddens, Jesse Welles, Gillian Welch, Allison Russell and Joy Oladokun will find familiar ground here, though Nanseera’s own perspective, shaped by a childhood spent across three continents, gives the track its own distinct edge. Her argument, that the world has never fully reckoned with the racism embedded in its systems, arrives with clarity rather than lecture.
“This change isn’t getting the media attention it merits, especially given how central the Voting Rights Act was to the Civil Rights Movement,” Nanseera says. “We do not yet live in a racism free world, and our systems need to reflect that. Without protections in place to compensate for our learned biases, we are sure to repeat the mistakes of the past.”
An accompanying visualiser gives the single a visual companion, extending the mood of the track into a second medium. Recorded across just three sessions, the fastest turnaround of Nanseera’s career so far, ‘Poison Rain’ proves that urgency and craft aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s a striking, necessary listen.
Comments