Lyrics Page
Pearls
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Sep 30, 2026 updated
Canvas - EP album
Verified editorial review
Song Meaning
Audrey Assad builds this one around a single, specific image — "a woman in Somalia, scraping for pearls on the roadside" — rather than staying abstract about global poverty. "She cries to the heaven above, there is a storm in my heart" pictures the kind of lament Psalm 18:6 describes: "in my distress I called on Yahweh, and cried to my God... he heard my voice."
The repeated "Hallelujah," set against a description of grinding, dignity-stripping labor, isn't triumphant in the usual sense — it reads closer to Psalm 34:18's promise that "Yahweh is near to those who have a broken heart," nearness offered in the middle of suffering rather than only after it ends. Assad doesn't resolve the woman's circumstances by the song's close; the "Hallelujah" sits right alongside the hardship, unexplained, which is closer to how lament actually works in scripture than a tidy ending would be.
Lyrics Verified by Editorial Team
There is a woman in Somalia
Scraping for pearls on the roadside
There's a force stronger than nature
Keeps her will alive
This is how she's dying
Dying to survive
I don't know what she's made of
But I would like to be that brave
She cries to the heaven above
There is a storm in my heart
She lives a life she didn't choose
Hurts like brand-new shoes
Hurts like brand-new shoes
There is a woman in Somalia
The sun gives her no mercy
The same sky we lay under
Burns her to the bone
Long as afternoon shadows
It's gonna take her to get home
Each grain carefully wrapped up
Pearls for her little girl
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
She cries to the heaven above
There is a storm in my heart
She lives in a world she didn't choose
And it hurts like brand-new shoes
It hurts like brand-new shoes