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Photo: Jesse Deflorio

Prodigious, precocious artists are gifted with talents that beguile you and delightfully fool you with sage-like lyrics draped in mellifluous melodies that seem cloaked in a lifetime of expression. Cloe Wilder, already an album deep with her 2021 release of Teenage Lullabies, has a songwriting flair that is akin to a lullaby, lulling you into forgetting her short number of years in life’s whirlpool of bruised thoughts, feelings, and skin.

Startlingly capable at the age of 16, her musical virtuosity started like most of her wunderkind peers, at the piano, classically trained but with a want to write with her own voice, an intuition realized by an experience at a songwriting camp while she was 12, which pivoted her career from recitals to records. Supported by her family, Wilder began to turn on the songwriting circuit before fatefully aligning with her principal collaborator, veteran Sam Nicolosi, who uncluttered her sound, allowing her to be both herself and more nuanced in her compositions. 

That less is more collaboration is most evident in her most recent single “Remember Me,” where Wilder pulls out more of her gifted peculiarity, conjuring an oceanic wave of depth from a shallow pool, mirroring one of her idols Lana Del Rey in crafting an operatic amount of sentiment over a bare-bones arrangement, resulting in a song begging for repeated plays. The simplicity of "Remember Me" is almost arrogant, but what for others might result in cloyingly simple pop dreck, the raw family turmoil Wilder builds into the song's lyrics and gives it a profundity shimmering in the whimsical strumming of the chorus. The results are memorable, and if you haven’t come across Wilder's work by now, this will be a reason to keep returning, a worthy petition for future success and fandom. 

Listen to "Remember Me" below: