Each Measure Feature: Claire Tonna
FEATURE
Claire Tonna is a multi-talented singer-songwriter from the island of Malta. She is known around the world for being a voice of hope to the traumatized, downcast, and marginalized. She has achieved this status not by pacifying her audiences with diluted, feel-good anthems but by acknowledging both the cruel hardships of life and the healing that can take place when we band together under the banner of honest reflection and progress.
“No currency will tell me why this pain grows,” sings Claire Tonna on Awake, the second song on her new Held EP. This line is powerful because it acknowledges that many questions don’t have easy answers. Questions like the one posed in Awake—why does pain grow continuously inside me?—may not have simple explanations, but we can seek to understand them better through artistic expression. That’s the type of deep, excavational work Claire Tonna is doing with the Held EP. By mining the emotional depths of her pain, she presents listeners with an opportunity to locate themselves within her writing.
Awake is the project’s centerpiece. It finds hope first through its acknowledgment of the futility of materialism, stating that “the craving doesn’t stop.” She admits we live “in a world dying fast,” but rather than letting this drive us to despair, we ought to resist by learning to “make love slow.” She goes on to offer a reminder that “Holy is the journey / Where you choose love.” The message here stands in stark contrast to the values presented to us by a frenetically paced society, where we are consistently shown that the way to achieve happiness is through the accumulation of wealth and materials. Claire Tonna would tell her listeners that the road to peace is marked by difficulty and the daily decision to wake up and choose love.
The Held EP begins with the title track. Here, a listener who is new to Tonna’s work will find themselves genuinely taken aback by the power and gravity in her voice as she begins the project with a powerfully humble admission:
“I wake to the temptation / To let the darkness win / I fought those shadows as a girl / But now I rise again.”
The project’s second track, Awake, takes on greater depth when considered alongside the title track. The testimony of Held’s opening lines reminds us that to be “Awake” is to go to battle with your demons, making Tonna’s insistence upon choosing love all the more powerful.
The project closes with A Woman I Love, where this ambitious collection of songs finds its touching resolution. It’s a testimony of love for the woman she sees in the mirror. It’s an affirmation of pride in all her own intricacies. “I love the lines in your face,” she sings in one of the EP’s most powerful lyrics. In the EP’s closing couplet, Tonna ties the whole project together. Just as, in Awake, she encourages her listeners to learn to love in a world that is dying fast, here in The Held EP’s final lines, she sings, “When the world is falling apart / I fall in love with me and her.” Tonna is leading by example here, reminding her listeners that in order to move forward in a world where the cards are often stacked against you, one must learn to defiantly love the world and themselves.
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