Video for Cecile Savant’s Oh Snap! (2025)

“I can totally relate to these lyrics. I heard this on the local radio and put this on my huge YouTube playlist, haven’t heard this in a couple months. I’m studying math right now, cramming two weeks into 24 hrs. This came on the shuffle, and my mouth dropped open, my brain and body is on fire; ASMR. I forgot about the feeling this song gave me the first time heard it. Holy %$#^ this is PURE GOLD, and perfect to loop for the rest of my studying. Who the #%*& did this amazing work?! And can you perform in Reno, NV or Lake Tahoe please!!!” One of many comments on YouTube to the video for Cécile McLorin Salvant’s latest “Oh Snap” album of 2025.

Powerful to me hearing this piece for the first time. And then over and over. Reflecting on the incredible lyrics of it. (Printed below). More than anything else, this is a powerful song for any person thinking about involving themselves in a relationship. One person considering whether to connect to a person she is in love with. The worry, though, of protecting her past. What she has accomplished for herself.

It presents the question of getting consumed by another person in a relationship. Like one theory or thesis, confronting an anti-thesis. This song is about this idea originally expressed by the German philosopher FW Hegel. Cecile is doing some of the most creative work in jazz today and I’ve been following her for a few years.

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Cécile McLorin Salvant (born August 28, 1989) is a French-American jazz vocalist.  Salvant is one of the most highly regarded jazz vocalists of her generation, often winning Downbeat annual critics polls. She has released eight albums since 2010, six of which have been nominated for Grammy Awards. She is a 3-time winner of the Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy Award for her 2015 album For One to Love,  her 2017 album Dreams and Daggers and her 2018 album The Window.  Each released on the Mack Avenue label. Salvant’s most recent album is Oh Snap, released in 2025 by onesuch Records. Salvant primarily sings in English or French, her first language. She has also recorded songs in Occitan and Haitian Kreyol.

Cecile McLorin Salvant 

She was born in Miami, Florida in 1989. Her father, who is Haitian, is a doctor and her mother, who is French, is the founder and president of a French immersion school in Miami. Salvant began studies in classical piano at the age of five, and began singing in the Miami Choral Society when she was eight. She subsequently developed an interest in classical voice and began studying with private instructors, and later with Edward Walker, vocal teacher at the University of Miami. She said in 2015: “I was lucky enough to grow up in a house where we listened to all kinds of music. We listened to Haitian, hip hop, soul, classical jazz, gospel and Cuban music, to name a few. When you have access to that as a child, it just opens up your world.”

In 2007, Salvant moved to Aix-en-Provence, France, to study law as well as classical and baroque voice at the Darius Milhaud Conservatory. It was in Aix-en-Provence, with reedist and teacher Jean-Francois Bonne that she studied improvisation, instrumental and vocal repertoire, and sang with her first band.

In a four-star review of her sold-out engagement at Ronnie Scott’s Club in London in June 2015, John Fordham wrote in The Gurardian: “She brings ideas from unexpected angles to the familiar art of standards-singing, and she applies a mischievous intelligence to well-worn lyrics in ways that transform them.”

Yes, a “mischievous intelligence” is a good way of describing Cecile. True artists are always mischievous!

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Lyrics to Oh Snap

[Verse 1]
Oh snap, I think I love you
I think I want to devote my whole entire existence to you
I feel so brand new, but I don’t want to lose myself
I just don’t want to lose the things that I had before I met you

[Verse 2]
My world revolves around you
My lips were made to devote their whole entire existence to you
All I wanna do is get lost inside of you
But I don’t want to lose the person I was before I met you

[Bridge]
Before I met you, I built a towеr (Castle), I built it for myself
With my own two hands
Bleeding as I placed еach stone
And planted every seed, I planted every single seed
I used the water from my tears
I watched it grow slowly

[Verse 3]
Oh snap, I think you love me
I think you want to devote your whole entire existence to me
Never in my life has a guy cared so much for me
And shown it with actions rather than empty grandiose words

[Verse 4]
I think you love me
I think I’ve shown you all of the cruel and nasty parts of me
But you still haven’t left, is it abject fidelity?
Or could it be that love is more than just fantasy to you?

[Verse 5]
Oh snap, what has the time done?
We used to have fun, but now I can’t even bear talking to you
I feel so run down and I don’t know what to do
With all the resentment I built up inside over the years

[Verse 6]
I know I tried to change you
I tried to mold you into my own creation, I’m ashamed
I wasted so much time, I’m so sorry I hurt you
I just hope there’s a way for me to repair the damage I’ve done

[Verse 7]
Oh snap, I think I love you
But love is different, it’s not at all what I had fantasized
All I want to do is to sit here beside you
Put my nose in your neck
Is to feel the warmth of your hand as it holds mine