We compare everyone to the 70s and 80s. We compare everyone to the early 2000s, to Y2K pop, to the era of crop tops and low-rise jeans and whatever decade TikTok has decided to resurrect this week. I get it, the nostalgia is addictive as hell, and some of us have extremely complicated feelings about Donna Summer and Madonna and Britney and Destiny’s Child. But we almost never go back further, to the decade where pop music actually figured out what a woman’s voice could do to a room. I’m talking the 60s when Motown was basically running the emotional lives of an entire generation. Diana Ross stepping up to a mic and dismantling everyone in her general vicinity. The Supremes. The Ronettes over on Philles Records doing their own kind of damage. Girl groups who basically built the entire emotional architecture of today’s pop music, who understood that desire and longing sounded better over a warm, swelling melody than over anything else. Those women invented something. They understood that a song about a feeling could make you feel it in your whole body, and that a great chorus was basically foreplay with a backbeat. Cheyenne Pohl has clearly been studying that particular curriculum, because “Over The Rain” sounds like she found the original blueprint and walked straight into the fucking room with it.
The production is alive in a way that a lot of retro-leaning pop forgets to be, and that is completely by design. Cheyenne has been open about drawing directly from The Ronettes and the Motown girl groups of that era for this one, and you can feel that in the bones of the arrangement. It doesn’t modernize the palette or blend eras or make it fresh for the algorithm. It just sits in that golden 60s sound and stays there with complete confidence. Which is a damn choice in 2026, and it’s the right one. The song is about love working quietly, making the ordinary stuff feel elevated, and the production backs that up sonically. It’s the musical equivalent of someone pulling you in close and not saying anything because they don’t need to.
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Cheyenne describes the whole image of the song as “sitting right above the rain, all the bad stuff, all the negatives, the dark days.” She’s clear that she’s not trying to fix them or erase them. She’s hovering above them because of one specific person, and that distinction is what gives the song its pull. She opens with “Babe, I knew it from the start / when you held me in your arms / yeah, I swear I’m seeing stars” and delivers it with such ease that the certainty in those lines doesn’t feel performed. It feels remembered. That’s a whole different energy than falling in love. That’s a woman who walked into something with her eyes open and chose it anyway. Personally that kind of quiet certainty does more for me than any grand romantic gesture ever could.
The verse details are where I completely lost my composure, not gonna lie. The morning kiss goodbye, reading it in his eyes that everything’s going to be alright, the shit that feels small but accumulates into something you can’t function without. I’ve dated someone who looked at me like that once and the day he stopped was genuinely the most disorienting Tuesday of my adult life. Pohl gets into the specifics with “yeah, your smile makes me come undone” and delivers it with this soft almost resigned quality – the way you sound when someone affects you so thoroughly that you’ve stopped fighting it. That line does a lot of work in very few words and she trusts it enough to leave it alone.
The chorus is where the 60s DNA really takes over the whole thing. “Every night and every day / you make me feel like I am flying / right over the rain” over that full, swelling production is the kind of moment Diana Ross would have understood immediately. It’s not complicated. The image does everything: floating above the bad days, above the weight of all of it, because of one person who stays. What deepens that feeling is how fucking small the evidence is. Dancing in June. Being held tight. Nothing she would change. The quiet accumulation of ordinary moments into something that makes the hard stuff bearable, that’s the whole emotional argument of the song, and she makes it feel inevitable rather than earned.
Cheyenne Pohl is a 24-year-old singer-songwriter out of central Pennsylvania who built her whole career the unglamorous way – working her ass off logging serious stage hours with her cover band Clockwork while writing original music during the week and figuring out her sound by throwing The Beatles, Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, and Motown into a blender until something genuinely hers came out the other side. That sound lands somewhere between 1960s soul and indie pop – confessional enough to feel like she’s reading your fucking diary and catchy enough to make a chorus feel like a shared secret. She took that to TikTok and racked up 7.8 million likes not by dancing or doing trends but by leading with actual music and the authenticity hit so hard that Netflix, Hulu, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, and YSL Beauty all came knocking. The Central Pennsylvania Music Awards have her up for Best Pop Artist in 2026 and honestly the industry is just catching up to what her audience has known for a while – this woman can turn a quiet room electric and she hasn’t even gotten started yet.
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These women, the girl groups who owned the 60s pop landscape, were singing about desire and longing and being held while the civil rights movement was erupting in the streets around them. Think about that for a second. Black women navigating a world actively working to deny their right to be seen as desirable and to want someone and say it out loud with their whole voice. And Diana Ross walked onto a stage and made every single person in that room feel it anyway. That is a radical fucking act dressed up in a pleated skirt and a three-part harmony. Cheyenne Pohl is singing about floating above the bad days in 2026 and the context is obviously different, but the impulse is the same damn one: claim your joy out loud, say this feeling is mine and I am not shrinking it for anyone. The Motown girls figured that out first. This song knows it.
Diana Ross made you feel things before your brain had a chance to process what was happening. So did Martha Reeves, belting from somewhere so deep it felt like a dare. So did Mary Wells, who could make wanting someone sound like the most dignified thing a woman had ever done. So did Gladys Knight, who sang with the kind of authority that made you understand she had already survived whatever was coming. That was the whole gift of that era, that specific alchemy of production and voice and pure feminine knowing that didn’t ask for permission and didn’t explain itself. It didn’t disappear. It just went quiet for a while, waiting for someone to remember what the hell it was actually built for. Cheyenne remembered.
