ON THE RISE
For an artist who has put out one album per year since 2017, fans of Sam Welch will not be surprised by a new release for 2025. They may be surprised, however, by the struggles Welch overcame in releasing the eight songs on The Attic.
Subtitled “Songs of Faith and Healing,” the album reflects a difficult year, including an ear injury and a sick pet. Releasing The Attic required real healing. What helped to get the longstanding Unitarian through the pain? Plenty of faith.
The album’s opener, title track “The Attic,” lays out Welch’s point of view with this release—both musically and lyrically. The song begins sparsely, with upbeat drums underneath organ chords, reminiscent of a church service or sixties rock like Procol Harum. It soon kicks into high gear with multiple guitars and Welch’s signature layered vocal harmonies.
The message is one of listening, perseverance, and the cyclical nature of life:
Life is just another yard sale: it’s a long, long tale
A Bible with a broken body held together by a nail
When you’re living in the attic, you’ve gotta listen to the static
Life ain’t automatic, and you gotta be pragmatic
The album emerged from a difficult year, marked by an audiological injury in Welch’s home studio. A burst of feedback left him with tinnitus, making it painful to write and record music, an ordeal that tested his resolve and shaped the album’s core themes of healing and resilience.
Inspiration also came from a more joyful source: the complete transformation of his cat, who recovered from lifelong health problems after starting with a new vet. This experience was so profound that it inspired a track on the album, a song fittingly titled “Cat on the Mend.”
Welch’s main collaborator on The Attic was audio engineer and co-writer Dan Searl, who helped shape the album's sound. While Welch plans his tracks in his home studio using Logic, Searl introduced a polished and organic sound production, filling out the tracks with rich pianos, interesting guitars, and tight mixes.
Sam Welch may be the country’s most prominent Unitarian singer, evidenced by a discography that includes his 2005 album, Unitarian Hymns. His spiritual themes have other sources as well. For example, Welch cites the work of Robbie Robertson and The Band with their motifs of acknowledging a lost past while maintaining hope for the future.
Moving forward, Welch plans to continue exploring personal themes in his songwriting. He says, “I hope to continue to use my music as a channel, a way to channel the feelings that I have about whatever's going on in my life.”
Fans are encouraged to visit SamWelchBoston.com. There, listeners can also stream Welch’s entire 180-song catalog, including 15 albums over a 25-year recording history. They can also sign up for his newsletter, keep track of his performance schedule (including weekly performances at historic venues like Club Passim in Cambridge), and learn more about his creative process.
Listen to The Attic now, and follow Sam Welch at the links below:
Sam Welch’s Official Website
YouTube
Soundcloud
Spotify
Apple Music
Instagram
TikTok
ON THE RISE
Even more than 6,000km away from her hometown of Santurce, Puerto Rico, RaiNao still manages to keep a piece of home with her. It’s Monday morning in Madrid, and the 32-year-old, born Naomi Ramírez Rivera, is calmly sipping on a cup of black coffee surrounded by fan palms and chestnut trees inside the terrace of her hotel. Coffee is her morning ritual back home, and things don’t change even if mere hours ago she was performing in front of 70,000 people as a guest on Bad Bunny’s ‘Debí Tirar Más Fotos’ residency in the city.
“I think it was the biggest venue I’ve ever performed at, or maybe it was Brazil,” RaiNao gushes, referring to her February appearance on the tour in São Paulo. Ultimately, the numbers don’t matter; for her, it’s all about the experience. “Even if I had done it 10 times over, it’s always beautiful and a different surprise.”
Music has always been a constant in RaiNao’s life. She began playing the saxophone at 11, but she never thought it would be the way she would make a living. “It’s all Wiso Rivera’s fault,” she says with a laugh. During the pandemic, her then-boyfriend and now creative partner and go-to co-producer encouraged her to go for it. She was stuck in a rut, juggling part-time jobs, when she realised that was not the life she wanted to lead.
“I felt overwhelmed that I thought, ‘Am I really going to spend the rest of my life working inside a bank?’ Wiso told me, ‘We have the tools, the studio is right there. Let’s just do it.’ And we did it.” Her stage name followed naturally. The moniker, a play on her nickname “Nao” with the creolisation of “right now,” is her own carpe diem. “It’s become a mantra for me,” she explains. “I’m in the moment all the time now. It’s a goal and a way of life.”
That now is what has taken RaiNao to global stages, performing ‘PERFuMITO NUEVO’ across the world, on US television, and gaining new listeners along the way. The song is what has put her on the map, and she’s more than grateful to Bad Bunny for the exposure. “He’s an artist who knows what he wants but also gives you your space to create,” she says, adding that their collaboration flowed as smoothly as a hot knife through butter. “I had a lot of freedom, and I’m always going to be thankful for that. I love that type of creative connection; it’s intuitive. We listen to each other. It’s great when anyone connects with your music, but he’s obviously a very important artist for Puerto Rico. Knowing he appreciates my music and my art, and that he says it every time he gets the chance, is incredible.”
She believes it’s precisely this type of interdependent local network that makes the Puerto Rican music scene as special as it is. “The support between artists has been key in careers that blow up,” she says. “We really do rely on each other and uplift each other constantly. It’s beautiful.”
The same way she got the cosign from Bad Bunny, RaiNao is also sharing the spotlight with Puerto Rican talent on her latest project, her second studio album, ‘Marcría’, a play on words that refers to both the PR slang for “spoiled brat” and “sea-raised”. In the 16-track album, RaiNao lends the mic to up-and-coming local musician Frido Vargas, who released his first song, ‘Mareo’, as part of the project.
“I’ll always make space to draw attention to the talent coming from my island, which I know goes hard and deserves as many ears and eyes as I do,” she says. Her debut studio album, ‘Capicú’, followed a similar pattern with the inclusion of Gyanma’s ‘Bajo Candau’.
“I’ll always make space to draw attention to the talent coming from my island, which I know deserves as many ears and eyes as I do”
“Puerto Rico’s indie scene is bustling, and you need to be on the island, soaking it up, to know [local artists],” RaiNao shares. Her label was “sweating” when she proposed including ‘Mareo,’ but when Vargas played the song for her, she knew it belonged in ‘Marcría’.
That’s not to say the project isn’t entirely RaiNao’s. Though it borrows its name from the sea, her ultimate “safe space”, ‘Marcría’ is born from RaiNao’s experience at 10, when her mother enrolled her in a school for the visually impaired. The album is a sensory journey accompanied by guided meditation, colour visualizers, and more to tell the full picture. You’ll notice green is a predominant theme. Emerald is RaiNao’s birthstone and the central piece of a ring she received in sixth grade, when she graduated from said school. As such, the hue has tinged the entire album, manifesting in music videos and in the small orb featured on the cover art.
On YouTube, she has microstories for each song that complement the sensory experience. “Not everyone has seen those, and they form a little story that I wrote based on the sensorial treatments,” she explains. “That came first, and then came the songs. It was an experiment.”
Only two tracks were created before the overarching theme was set: ‘Chamberí’ and the single ‘Gris’, which the artist initially intended to give to someone else. Legendary producer Tainy reached out and asked her to send over a few songs for his repertoire, and RaiNao obliged. “I sent him a few, but I kept going back to ‘Gris’ and thinking it was my song; someone else might like it, but they aren’t going to like it as much as I do.” It wasn’t until she was already structuring the project’s concept that she felt she needed to ask for it back. “I felt no other song exemplified water as much as ‘Gris’ did.”
Another emotional crux on the album is ‘Cántaro’, featuring salsa legend Andy Montañez, one of many remarkable collaborations alongside the likes of Omara Portuondo and Cultura Profética. The song marked the first time RaiNao recorded her own sax in her career. “I know that there are better sax players in Puerto Rico whose sound is way better than mine, and I always tap them to record,” she explains, “but this was a very personal song, and it needed to be me even if the result is not the best.”
The melody for the track was born from a sample of her voice and was later re-envisioned and reworked into a brass comp. Her sax is complemented by a bassoon, played by her best friend, who sent in recordings from Jacksonville, Florida. The result is her take on the “Death of the Author” literary theory and, in a way, her own eulogy. “Once you put out a project, it dies for you,” RaiNao explains, “but with that death comes another birth, another interpretation.”
‘Marcría’ comes to a close with the track that lends it its name, which sees RaiNao reciting a poem by the late Puerto Rican artist Ángelamaría Dávila, included in the 1966 poemario ‘Homenaje al ombligo’. RaiNao serendipitously came across Dávila’s work while working on the album. Upon reading this poem, she was stunned. It perfectly encapsulated the project. “It’s remarkable that this poem was born years ago from the mind of another Puerto Rican woman who’s no longer with us.”
RaiNao toyed with the idea of borrowing from the poem and playing around with vocal layering to use it as an interlude in a song that she’d call ‘Garabato’ (slang for “scribble”). “I wanted something simple that’d bridge the project from its more danceable side to its darker side,” she recalls. Ultimately, she felt the poem, as it was, was the perfect summary, a bio to ‘Marcría’.
Throughout the process of working on this album and the accolades it’s brought her, including a spot in YouTube’s Foundry Class, RaiNao feels “blessed and happy”, but she knows the final word no longer belongs to her; it belongs to the world. “For me, art is very spiritual. I knew I came into this world to leave it a better place with my art,” she says. “I’m always going to try not to dehumanise myself, not to stray too far away from myself to create.”
RaiNao’s ‘Marcría’ is out now via Rimas Entertainment.
