When you see San Francisco musician Chloe Makes Music (CMM) live, the second thing you notice, after her lovely voice and haunting lyrics, is the audience: rapt and silent. Her performances intoxicate and entrance, swiftly subduing even the loudest audience with her soft, rich voice, sparse composition, and heartbreakingly vivid songs about memory, nature, family, art, mourning, loss, and hope. CMM’s music is both timeless and modern. Her lush multiple-part harmonies pay homage to Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Simon & Garfunkel, while her melodies balance the classic simplicity of the Carter Family with the brave experimentation of her contemporaries.
CMM marries her melodic sensibility, finger-style guitar, and cello accompaniment with nothing less than sung poetry. Borrowing imagery from her upbringing on the coasts of California and the tropics and farmland of Kauai, her lyrics are magical realism, weaving the tangible with the ethereal, science with mythology, anatomy with existentialism, nature with the mundane. Her daringly honest lyrics are self-revelatory in a way that speaks to a large audience; a combination of autobiographical vignettes and tall tales, her songs are specific and personal yet accessible and relatable. The result of a gifted wordsmith, each of CMM’s tunes is a tongue-twisting feat of poetic acrobatics, a lesson in inventive syntax and rhyme, and a protest against forgetting.
