Project: A new era

11 A SUMMER STORM

I was gasping in the summer heat,
Even thoughts grew sparse and incomplete;
Then, as if by magic, skies grew grey,
One-eighty degrees, the world swung the other way.
I knew well the heat could never stay;
Sweat ran from my head down all the way.
Then, without a warning, charge filled the air,
And a cloudburst mixed the colours everywhere.
Fierce and sensual in every way,
You are water washing sins away;
With a single movement, you shake me awake,
Letting all of your clothes slip away.
You burst into my life without a warning sign,
With all the devastating force of a storm in summertime.
I found no place to hide, and so I yielded to

Your sheer exuberance, your warm skin, your smile breaking through.
Just as it began, so it must end;
Rain subsides and fragrances ascend.
Breathing is no longer pain to bear,
But a surge of music, sounds alive within the air.
Now the people start to reappear,
Flowers, citrus, fragrance everywhere;
Traffic slowly wakes and starts to flow,
Cars and pedestrians weave to and fro.

You are water washing sins away,
(Fierce and sensual in every way)
With a single movement, you shake me awake,
(Letting all of your clothes slip away).

The air is still, the heat bears down, thoughts grow sparse. Then, without warning, everything changes.

A Summer Storm tells of the sudden arrival of a woman capable of overturning the atmosphere, the body and the mood of the person she encounters. She does not enter on tiptoe: she bursts in, shakes everything, sweeps it away. She is desire, freshness, upheaval. Like a downpour after oppressive heat, she brings relief and disorder, washing away inertia and blending all the colours together.

The song plays upon this simple, powerful image: a female presence experienced as a natural event—violent and sensual, impossible to predict and pointless to resist. One can only surrender to her exuberance, her warm skin, her smile.

The story is carried by a jazz pulse, weightless and physical at once: perfectly suited to conveying the almost delirious torpor of the heat, the electricity of anticipation, and then the scented stillness that lingers immediately after the rain, when everything begins to move again, yet seems to do so more slowly.

Then, like every summer storm, the enchantment itself appears destined to pass. The rain subsides, the air changes, life resumes. Yet something remains: a more intense fragrance, a new vibration, the sensation of having been crossed, for one instant, by a force greater than oneself.