With XIII, Cloves has made a stunning debut EP that mesmerizes with its beautiful melodies and stark piano ballads. There’s a magic in this — maybe it’s just the reverb-soaked vocals, but I think there’s something more — that makes XIII sound like it was recorded by somebody much older than Cloves actually is.
I think Cloves is pulling off the greatest challenge in music: while she’s writing original music as a singer-songwriter, she’s also writing songs that sound like something we’ve always known. That’s not to say that they sound familiar, but to say that these songs feel like they’ve always been within us.
The world’s best songwriters aren’t called such because they made something starkly original — at least, not in my estimation. It’s my belief that we love some musicians because they play songs that we recognize immediately with our hearts, as something we innately know.
I’m drifting off topic, but the blues are powerful because we all know the blues. We’ve all been blue. And it was originally powerful with a black audience because it has roots in slavery. Eventually, as the blues became more mainstream, the genre grew to encompass much more than the black man’s struggles. And eventually, it became the genre of the everyman. And the world’s best blues songs hit us below the belt because we know them, deep down, as our own.
That’s ultimately how XIII makes me feel. I know Cloves is new, and I know that the odds are stacked against her as a traditional singer-songwriter in an era dominated by the Adelles and Taylor Swifts of the world, but it hits me below the belt. I haven’t heard these songs before, but I’ve sang them before in my heart. And that says worlds about how this music makes me feel.