Some love stories read like they’re straight out of the silver screen, sweeping, bittersweet, and lingering long after the credits roll. JILIAAN’s debut single, “Love Like a Movie,” conjures that feeling perfectly: the ache of love in transit, half in devotion, half a world away.
With an intro rooted in a Chopin Nocturne and a subsequent reworking as a modern pop ballad, “Love Like a Movie” mingles classical poise with contemporary emotion. JILIAAN’s spare but authoritative piano melodies braid with lugubrious strings, and together, they create a cushion for her cavernous, spirit-quaking vocal lines. Each line aches with uncertainty: “If I say goodbye, would that be the end of you and I?” It’s a question that haunts me, that knows the fear of love escaping through the cracks of time and space.
Written while she was moving from London to Berlin, the track acts as a farewell and a love letter to a person from the past and to that version of herself. Its simplicity is raw, its pauses weighted so that you can’t help but feel every note.
JILIAAN enters as an artist who does not merely mix genres; she contorts time, weaving together what’s old and new, traditional and contemporary, despair and redemption. And if this is just an introductory taste of what’s to come on her debut EP, we’re in for something unique.