Imagine mourning someone who never existed. That is the quiet, devastating premise of “Sienna,” the closing track of The Marías’ 2024 album Submarine. Rather than singing about a person lost, the song grieves a future lost: a child who might have been born if the relationship at the heart of the band had survived. It is tender, eerie, and almost unbearably intimate. Slow to find its audience, it has since become one of the group’s most beloved songs. What makes it so powerful isn’t spectacle but honesty, and the way it turns a private heartbreak into something strangely universal. Let’s step inside it.
The Story Behind the Song
The Marías, a Los Angeles band fronted by Puerto Rico-born singer María Zardoya, were formed around her creative and romantic partnership with drummer and producer Josh Conway. When that relationship ended around 2022, the two chose to keep making music together, and Submarine became the document of that complicated process. The record is steeped in blue moods, from grief to solitude to tentative rebirth. “Sienna” appears at the very end, like a final whispered thought before sleep. Zardoya has explained that the song imagines the daughter the couple might have had, named Sienna, and that the loss of that imagined life felt as real as the loss of the relationship itself.
Grieving a Future
Most breakup songs mourn the past. They replay old arguments, cherished memories, or the moment everything fell apart. “Sienna” does something rarer. It mourns what never happened. Zardoya has described the feeling as watching a future you wanted vanish out of nowhere, and that image captures the song’s emotional logic perfectly. When a long relationship ends, people often grieve the version of life they had silently planned: the home, the holidays, the children. Those imagined scenes disappear without ceremony, and there’s no funeral for them. By naming the child and giving her a presence in the song, The Marías offer a small, aching ritual of remembrance for something that cannot be buried because it was never born.
Why the Name Sienna?
The choice of name matters. According to Zardoya, it was her own private thought, the name she would have chosen if she ever had a daughter with this particular person. It wasn’t a joint decision or a shared plan, which makes the song feel even more vulnerable. It is a secret she is finally saying aloud. The name has a warm, earthy sound, evoking the rich color of burnt clay and sunset light, and that sensory quality fits the track’s wistful tone. Sienna becomes a symbol rather than a literal character, a glowing figure of what could have been. Naming her turns an abstract regret into a vivid, human presence that listeners can almost see.
A Child Drawn From Two Parents
The imagined girl is painted with affection. She carries traits from both parents, a mix of softness and curiosity, imagination and sensitivity. This is where the song becomes most affecting, because the narrator isn’t angry or bitter. She is tender toward the life that won’t exist, and toward the person she once loved. The song holds both love and loss in the same breath. It acknowledges that two people can create something beautiful in their imagination and still not be able to make it real. There is no blame assigned, only a sorrowful acceptance. That emotional generosity is rare, and it makes the track feel less like a complaint and more like a lullaby sung into empty air.
The Sound of Dreaming
Musically, “Sienna” floats rather than drives. The arrangement is hazy and dreamlike, built from soft textures, gentle rhythms, and Zardoya’s airy, hushed vocals. The effect is like hearing a memory through a thin wall, close but just out of reach. As the song progresses, it swells, adding layers that feel like emotion rising in the throat, and then it ends abruptly, leaving silence behind. That sudden stop can feel almost cruel, but it’s also perfectly fitting. The future the song imagines doesn’t fade gracefully; it simply isn’t there anymore. The production choices turn the track into a kind of sonic hallucination, where tenderness and absence share the same space.
Submarine and the Color Blue
The song works best as the final chapter of its album. Submarine was conceived as a deliberate contrast to the band’s earlier work, which was often associated with passionate reds. This time, Zardoya spoke of deep blue as a color of grief and loneliness but also of rebirth and exploration. The album cover, with Zardoya floating underwater, gazes toward a distant surface of light. “Sienna” is the moment when the swimmer surfaces and exhales. It doesn’t promise happiness, but it hints at acceptance. After an entire record of drifting through pain, this closing track gives the listener a place to rest, and its quiet ache lingers long after the music stops, like the last light on a dark water surface that you are not quite ready to leave behind.
A Slow-Burning Success
Interestingly, the song’s popularity grew gradually. Its reach expanded after The Marías performed it on late-night television, in a staging that featured a young girl representing Sienna and a group of children providing delicate backing harmonies. The performance was haunting and dreamlike, and it pushed the track onto the Billboard Hot 100 more than a year after the album’s release. That late bloom is a reminder that emotional songs often find audiences on their own schedule. People don’t always discover music when it’s new; they find it when they need it. For many listeners, “Sienna” arrived at exactly the right moment in their lives.
Why Listeners Connect
You don’t have to be a parent, or even to have lost a partner, to feel the song’s pull. Everyone carries imagined futures that never materialized: careers not pursued, friendships that faded, versions of ourselves that didn’t happen. The song gives those ghosts a gentle language. It says that mourning what might have been is valid, even if no one else can see it. In an age when grief is often measured by visible loss, that validation is powerful. Listeners have shared stories online of their own unborn dreams, and the song has become a quiet gathering place for people carrying invisible sorrows. In that sense, it works as both a personal diary entry and a shared act of remembrance, offering comfort without asking anyone to explain themselves.
Final Thoughts
“Sienna” is a love song for a life that never came to be. The Marías took a deeply personal heartbreak and shaped it into something delicate and universal, using a single imagined name to hold an ocean of feeling. Its dreamy sound, its closing silence, and its tenderness toward both past and future make it one of the most moving songs of its era. If you’ve ever missed something that never happened, this song will understand. It doesn’t try to fix your sadness, only to sit beside it, softly, until the music fades. And when the silence returns, you may find that you feel a little lighter, and a little less alone.