Ava Claire Bares Her Soul on Debut EP Single “Honestly”
A Nashville newcomer turns intrusive thoughts into a haunting confession. Omnichord textures meet unfiltered songwriting on her most vulnerable release yet. The title track sets the tone for a five-song story of guilt, love, and growing up.
Nashville singer-songwriter Ava Claire has a gift for saying the things most people only think. Her debut EP, Honestly, is proof of that, and its title track distills everything the project stands for into four unflinching minutes. This is a song about knowing you’re going to hurt someone before you’ve even done it, and choosing to write about it anyway rather than looking away.
Written entirely by Ava Claire and produced by Eric Arjes, “Honestly” is built around haunting omnichord textures that give the track an eerie, almost hypnotic pulse. The instrumentation never overwhelms the vocal; instead it lingers underneath, like the low hum of a thought you can’t shake. That restraint is deliberate. Ava Claire isn’t interested in dressing up her guilt in metaphor or softening it for easier listening. She wants the listener sitting inside the discomfort with her, and the production makes sure that happens.
The song opens with the narrator flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, caught in a memory that used to mean something entirely different than it does now. It’s a quiet, almost cinematic image, one that immediately signals this isn’t a song about a relationship in progress. It’s a song about looking back at one and realizing the meaning has shifted underneath her. She admits she’s naked with her demons, and that admission alone tells you where the rest of the track is headed. This isn’t going to be a love song in any conventional sense. It’s a reckoning.
What makes “Honestly” so striking is how it handles the idea of inevitability. The narrator repeatedly insists she was never supposed to happen to this person, that whatever unfolded between them was doomed before it started. There’s a haunting callback to being told she was a pretender at just seventeen, and the way she ties that memory to blood on her hands and on her knees creates an unsettling, almost confessional physicality. It doesn’t read as literal so much as emotional shorthand for guilt so heavy it feels like an injury. That’s the kind of lyrical choice that separates a good songwriter from a great one: turning an abstract feeling into something you can almost touch.
The chorus is where the song’s thesis lives. She admits she never found what she was looking for in this relationship, that whatever was bleeding out between them eventually dried up and disappeared into the floor. She couldn’t love the other person with the same intensity they loved her, and rather than dressing that up or apologizing endlessly for it, she simply states it. It’s harsh, she says, but she’s just speaking honestly. That phrase becomes the emotional backbone of the entire EP, not just this single track. Ava Claire isn’t asking for forgiveness here. She’s asking to be heard clearly, even when what she’s saying is unflattering to herself.
The second verse shifts the perspective slightly, showing a narrator who tried to read her partner’s pain even when words failed. She couldn’t always find the language for what was happening between them, but she could see it in the way he moved, in the things left unspoken. There’s a quiet tenderness in her offer to fix what hurts, undercut almost immediately by the recognition that she was the one who put them in this position to begin with. It’s a rare kind of songwriting honesty, acknowledging both the impulse to care for someone and the awareness that the damage was already done by her own hand.
By the bridge, the song strips down to something closer to plainspoken confession. References to wooden floors and backseats, torn clothing and a partner who wasn’t fully listening, paint a scene that’s left intentionally open to interpretation, but the emotional weight is unmistakable. She never could have imagined it was the wrong thing at the time, and that delayed realization, understanding the damage only in hindsight, is one of the most human elements of the entire song. Growth rarely comes with a warning label. Sometimes you only recognize you’ve hurt someone once the moment has already passed.
The closing section leans into repetition in a way that feels almost like circular thinking, the kind that keeps you up at night. She never should have done it, they never should have done it, but if they hadn’t, it would linger in her head instead of him. It’s a strange, complicated kind of honesty: acknowledging that even regret has a selfish undercurrent, that sometimes we make choices not out of love but to avoid being haunted ourselves. Few songwriters are willing to admit that out loud. Ava Claire does it without flinching.
The final lines pull back the curtain even further, referencing different cities and time zones but the same recurring pattern, the same mistake dressed up differently each time. There’s a pointed acknowledgment that she could play the victim in this story, but doing so would mean becoming exactly what her partner shaped her into. It’s a sharp, self-aware close to a song that never once asks for sympathy. Instead, it asks for understanding, and maybe forgiveness for being human.
“Honestly” works because it refuses easy resolution. There’s no tidy redemption arc, no moment where the narrator absolves herself. What there is instead is a young songwriter willing to sit with her own contradictions and put them into words most people would rather keep private. That kind of vulnerability is rare, and it’s exactly what caught the attention of Billboard, which recently featured Ava Claire in its A Look At The New Acts For Q3, Q4 roundup, describing her as sonically unpredictable. It’s a fitting description for an artist who clearly isn’t interested in following a formula.
As the centerpiece of an EP that also includes “The Sound,” “New York,” “Salt Mine,” and “The Cliff,” “Honestly” sets the emotional tone for the rest of the collection: uncertainty, guilt, and the messy, unglamorous process of growing up in real time. Ava Claire isn’t interested in performing perfection. She’s interested in telling the truth, even when it’s unflattering, even when it’s harsh. With Honestly, she introduces herself as a songwriter with the courage to do exactly that, and Nashville would be wise to pay attention.
