Sienna
Song Meaning
“Sienna” imagines the daughter María Zardoya and Josh Conway would have had together, using that unborn child as a stand-in for the shared future the two lost when their relationship and creative partnership ended.
“Sienna” is about a hypothetical daughter María Zardoya of The Marías pictures having with her former partner and bandmate Josh Conway, a name she’d privately settled on for a child of theirs even though it was never a decision the couple made together 1. The song imagines this daughter inheriting traits from both parents (Conway’s looks and temperament, Zardoya’s sensitivity and love of animals), a life that felt real enough to picture in detail 1 2. Because Zardoya and Conway broke up, that imagined child, and the future she represents, can never actually happen 1.
The meaning
“Sienna” closes out The Marías’ album Submarine as an extended piece of imagination: what if María Zardoya and Josh Conway, the band’s founding couple, had stayed together long enough to raise a child? The song grew out of a private thought Zardoya kept to herself rather than a plan the couple discussed. “I was like, but if I did have a child with this person, I would name her Sienna,” she said 1, and by her own account, “it wasn’t a jointly agreed-upon name, just a quiet, private thought that became the seed for the song” 1.
The chorus, “Ooh, Sienna / Would’ve been cute / Ooh, Sienna / Would look just like you,” keeps that daydream simple and tender, imagining a child who would physically resemble Conway. One writeup describes the song as considering “the prospect of having a child and seeing familiar characteristics within them” 2, treating the fantasy almost like a way of holding onto Conway through someone who doesn’t exist.
The bridge goes further, sketching out a personality: “With a temper like you, run around like you / Jumpin’ in the pool like you / Sing to all her pets in the way I did / Be sensitive like you.” Zardoya described this imagined child in nearly identical terms: “Sienna would have acted like you, she would have jumped in the pool just like you, and she would have sang to all her pets like I do” 1. It’s been called a “bittersweet alternate reality, a life where love endured, where the couple built a life together, and perhaps had a daughter named Sienna with qualities drawn from both parents: free-spirited, sensitive, and imaginative” 1.
The song’s emotional turn comes when that fantasy collides with reality. Zardoya put it plainly: “but because we broke up, Sienna will never exist” 1. The outro line “See her face in the forest, then it disappears” captures that loss directly. As Zardoya explained, “it’s like seeing the future you wanted just completely vanish” 1.
Read against the rest of Submarine, “Sienna” works as a quiet coda to the breakup narrative running through the record, described as “a meditation on futures imagined and then lost” 1. Rather than dwelling on the relationship’s end directly, the song mourns everything that relationship’s continuation would have made possible, crystallized in the invented, unreachable figure of a daughter named Sienna.
Sources
Last updated 2026-08-22