Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

The art of storytelling in any artistic endeavour is to find the smallest moment that you observed and give it credence, to make it larger, impress upon it the sense of the familiar and cherished, to exaggerate on the belief that binds it. Fiction is a lie well told, a story is that lie given a soul; and if that story is greeted with pleasure and is valued, then it is an epic of an esteemed nature.

To Be Clear, recall in art is important, being grounded, embracing heartache, portraying truth all play their part with justice and insight, and for the Canadian songwriter Mia Kelly, that sense of the narrative is one of multifaceted and involved allusions, direct questioning, and the composite of various characters having their time to relate to the listener of their struggles and honest metaphor.

Mia Kelly inhabits all with a fortune of experience as she takes the reigns of this her sophomore recording, To Be Clear; one which blurs the intimate with investigation and the subtly of relationships with an embrace of the Folk charm and the drama of Americana in full view.

Whether in her own form or in those hardy characters to which Mia Kelly places trust with her tales, the weaving of memory is to be congratulated, the finesse on which she portrays the story of the individual’s search for justice and integrity.

To be soothed by a voice that is reliable in her outlook is to take each track at face value, to see the fiction, but work with it as if it the absolute honour of a person’s life; and across tracks such as South Went The Bird, Watercolour Girl, the tense Rideau Tombe, Bonefish Boys, and the excellent Oleander, the sense of calm, relieved by time, is nobility in a sacred cause of musicianship and story-telling within a musical frame.

To Be Clear is an honourable successor to her 2022 debut Garden Through The War, the same rawness of expression and flexible imagination; one that offers the vulnerable feelings space to be understood and flexed.

Ian D. Hall