“If Ever” by Paula Fuga with Jack Johnson (featuring Ben Harper)

The album cover for Rain on Sunday, which includes the song “If Ever”

In “If Ever,” Hawaiian singer Paula Fuga’s throaty vocals and trademark ukulele blend with Jack Johnson’s laid-back style to create a palpable sense of nostalgia. While the song elicits the mournful nature of loss, it’s nevertheless tinged with the warmth of fond memories:

If ever, if ever I could see you again, mmm-hmm
If ever, if ever I could see you again, mmm-hmm
Won’t you take me back to where we used to play?
Hang on every word, hang on every moment
I know you’re in between now and I know you can’t stay
Give me one more rising sun, just one more setting moment

Credit: paulafugahawaii.com

The song — available on Fuga’s recent album “Rain on Sunday” — is the latest of her ongoing collaborations with singer/surfer/songwriter Jack Johnson, who released it on his label, Brushfire Records. Fuga has come a long way from her childhood living in homelessness on a Hawaiian beach to collaborate with the likes of Johnson, Ben Harper and Ziggy Marley. “I knew I was going to be somebody, and be different,” she said of her youthful dream of musical stardom in a TEDx Maui talk titled “Believe in Yourself.” “You can be anything you want to be as long as you determine that for yourself and you work towards it.”

Believing in our loved ones, too, enables us to treasure the memories we’ve shared, as Fuga’s “If Ever” makes clear.

Handmade mornings, trails we walked on
Pain that shapes us like rain on rocks now
Changing faces are woven in my
Future I see, don’t say it out loud
Shaped from too much, I miss you most times
Or the ideals of you fall through my mind

You can view the official music video for Fuga’s “If Ever” below.