Pamela Claire delivers a love letter to music with her diverse debut album Lonely Sets Me Free — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
A skilful blend of genres, Lonely Sets Me Free showcases the retro-pop artist’s subtle mastery of a range of sounds and styles. Songs are soulful, sad, groovy and danceable, and sometimes all at once; Claire makes music for grown-ups. There’s the jazzy title track, the disco groove of Real Love, and the witty country/alt-folk of Choir and Let’s Stay Miserable Together. Claire explores a rock feel on the hard-edged Naked and Blue and Little Shadow, dips into blues on Let the Love In and turns soulful on the dancey Directing Traffic and Breakthrough. Both Thin Air and End of Days demonstrate Claire’s delicate gifts in words, music and voice, delivering a pair of heartrending tunes that tear away at raw emotional truths with characteristic warmth and a disarming honesty.
Lonely Sets Me Free is entwined with light and dark, tears and humour, with a twinge of nostalgia and a heart-on-sleeve creative attack that confronts, soothes, affirms and gets you moving; Claire creates a captivating chanteuse vocal style across a truly eclectic set of tunes that music lovers who know their stuff will find irresistible. At times confessional, always deeply personal, Claire’s songwriting explores love and loss, shedding the pain of the past and staking a claim on hopes for the future.
For her latest single Thin Air, Claire produced a hauntingly beautiful black-and-white video that perfectly captures the song’s sweeping sadness and uplifting afterglow. “Thin Air is a piano ballad that explores, in a deeply personal way, the sadness and despair felt when important relationships suspend without, rhyme, reason or resolve,” she says. Claire’s storytelling leaves you emotionally shipwrecked as the haunting piano figure and trumpet chorus herald something ethereal and timeless. Thin Air masterfully pulls the listener in and washes them up on shore, delivering them into her diverse world.
Timeless and on track to be a modern classic, the album in its completion has been wrung dry and pegged on the line threadbare by the talented producer and arranger, Justin Ossher. “We created something real and special with a lot of love, depth and integrity,” Ossher explains. “Like a glass black rose on a pillow of gossamer diamonds in the sky, the album was an opportunity to work with a dedicated songwriter and singer and to include some fine Melbourne musicians in a creation that is timeless and fun.”
Listen to Lonely Sets Me Free below, watch Thin Air above, and find out more about Pamela Claire on her website, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
