SPOTLIGHT: Staying Grounded With ratvibes.only
“FIRM GROUND” IS THE AIM — in the third single, “Tierra Firme,” by ratvibes.only, or Sarah Perez. We’ve been following ratvibes.only since her debut, and each release seems to bring a new side of originality because each track is rooted in Perez’s individual worldview.
Her third single, “Tierra Firme,” releases on March 22, 2024, and Perez tells me she wrote it “when the ground beneath [her] crumbled due to the overwhelming amounts of loss, grief, uncertainty, and chaos [she] was experiencing all at once.
At first listen, it’s a love song. The first word sung is “love,” after all. But as the song progresses, Perez’s lyrics reveal contradictions. Perez says she wrote the track “longing to feel grounded amidst all the chaos” around her. This opposing experience of cultivating stability from disorder is demonstrated through her lyrics: “But I love you anyway / And I’ll always have nothing but love for you to stay / And I’ll love you in every way / Even though you caused us not to see another day / Not to see another day / But for you, I’ll always stay.”
“Tierra Firme” is more than a love song—it’s a reflection on uncertainty. One of the inspirations for the song was researcher Brené Brown. Perez shares that she found comfort in an episode of Brown’s podcast Unlocking Us titled “Life, Loss, and All Kinds of Love” which covers similar ideas of contradictions that “Tierra Firme” considers. Similarly, while her lyrics contemplate both the joyous and distressing sides of love, the song is sonically, with its soft ukulele, nothing but gentle on the ear.
“The ukulele is a staple of my home, Hawai’i,” Perez describes. “Having written many of my first poems with my ukulele, songwriting has always served as my biggest source of comfort. Songwriting is more than a documentation of my feelings, rather it’s the only thing in my life that has ever consistently been there for me. Unless I were to abandon who I am, I could never lose the comfort of my writing since it’s embedded into the vocation of my identity. The sound landscape of ‘Tierra Firme’ was cultivated to be deeply intertwined with the auditory components of my past that have given me a sense of groundedness.”
One of Perez’s greatest strengths is reflecting on sorrow through beauty. Her voice sounds soft-hearted—part of this comes from Perez’s compassionate character itself which, through our correspondence since her debut, I’ve learned is genuine. Like her own outlook, her voice is gentle toward the experiences it vocalizes, whether positive or negative. Her harmonies achieve this sense of reflection and growth through their echoes. With “Tierra Firme,” they are accompanied by whistling which captures the listener’s attention right away.
“As a child, the first songs I wrote were short poems to process my emotions,” Perez tells me. “Since I’ve always found it difficult to share my feelings, I developed a fear of singing in front of others at a young age. I used to be so shy about this, that even when writing songs within the safety of my bedroom, I would quietly whistle or hum them out of fear of being heard in my own house. In other words, I was so afraid of being heard for how I felt, that I silenced myself altogether. With this, the whistling in ‘Tierra Firme’ is essentially a composition of [these] feelings.”
The last time we connected, Perez told me that one of her goals as a writer is to make music that mirrors “how it feels like for [her] to experience the world.” When I asked her what “Tierra Firme” expresses about her, she shared the song was her “realization that the way to love anything is to understand that it might be lost one day. Through those growing pains, I felt waves of infinite contradictions. With that, ‘Tierra Firme’ is the paradoxical essence of feeling grounded when forever falls apart.”
