How Clairo found herself

Taken from the spring 25 issue of THE FACE. Get your copy here

Claire Cottrill is sitting by two psychedelic explorers, riding down a rainbow bridge through the cosmos. In 1970, these space travellers were painted with vivid colour on the walls inside Manhattan’s Electric Lady Studios by artist Lance Jost, who’d been commissioned by the recording space’s founder, Jimi Hendrix. ​“I love coming here so much,” Cottrill says, perching on a red-and-gold-patterned sofa beneath the mural. She has a cream-coloured electric organ to her left, a rare-looking Fender bass to her right and a Persian rug beneath her well-worn Dr Martens. ​“It’s very easy to pretend that you’re from a different era.”

The lore of Electric Lady runs deep. This is the studio where Bowie and Lennon cooked up Bowie’s searing ​’75 single Fame. It’s where Patti prophesied punk on Horses and it’s where Stevie summoned the funk for Superstition. In more recent years, the likes of Taylor, Lorde, Lana, Frank and Sabrina have all struck gold in here.

Electric Lady is also one of the places where Claire Cottrill – AKA Clairo – feels the most safe and inspired, hence why she often books it for mixing, recording and jamming. It’s intimidating for any young musician to look up and see all the autographed classic album covers in the studio’s corridors, but Cottrill’s millions of fans consider the 26-year-old an era-defining songwriter. She’s an old soul who, paradoxically, can articulate the desires and anxieties of her chronically-online generation.

Cottrill is part of the furniture at Electric Lady. She’s well acquainted with the staff, as well as the menu of the old-school diner across the road. When she finds out I’m visiting New York with my fiancée, she kindly hits up co-owner and general manager Lee Foster to hook me up with a reservation at her favourite restaurant The Waverly Inn – a sought-after, dimly lit West Village eatery a short walk from the studio. As we talk, she grabs a Juul from her bag every now and then and takes a single puff before swiftly putting it back, as if she’s nervous about polluting Electric Lady’s magical aura with the vapour.

It’s a frosty Sunday in January and Cottrill has had a full-on week playing in other musicians’ studio sessions, preparing for tour dates and doing press ahead of the Grammys. She was nominated for the Best Alternative Album category for last year’s Charm, her third album, the title of which she has tattooed across the fingers of her left hand. Dressed casually in a scarlet red sweater and bootcut jeans, she’s focused and relaxed, choosing her words carefully to describe her music and getting audibly excited when talking pop culture: her favourite David Lynch movie (Mullholland Drive), the novel she’s currently reading (Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick) and her go-to karaoke track (she likes to sing Donny Osmond’s Puppy Love to impress the elders at the bar). Just the other night, she hit up a Brooklyn karaoke bar with Ayo Edebiri and Phoebe Bridgers. One of her friends, she reveals, was brave enough to belt out Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights.

Charm is the most sophisticated Clairo album. Indulging the Georgia-born, Massachusetts-and Seattle-raised musician’s deep love for records from the ​’60s and ​’70s – from soul and folk to songwriters such as Joni Mitchell and Harry Nilsson, who made history in Los Angeles’ mythologised Laurel Canyon scene – it’s a classy collection of slinky, sensual jams that crackle with the feel of a treasured piece of vinyl.

The album was written and recorded in upstate New York and Electric Lady with renowned soul revivalist Leon Michels, who assembled an A‑team of players from his various bands, such as El Michels Affair and the Dap-Kings, for the sessions. Charm rewards repeated listens – lean in and marvel at the sparkling details: the fluttering woodwind, the plinking pianos, the glassy slide guitars, the tender intimacy of the lyrics.

There have been concerns that today’s internet culture doesn’t create demand for such intricately crafted bodies of work. Streaming services have made music like air conditioning and social media platforms thrive off restless scrolling. Are young listeners today taking the time to appreciate the crisp texture of that crash cymbal or the surprising key change in that middle eight?

Cottrill, who has more than 19 million monthly listeners on Spotify, is quick to back her young fanbase. ​“The most well-versed person in music you know – there is a 19-year-old out there who knows a little bit more,” she says. ​“Kids are actually very curious. A lot of them really do love albums and time spent on records. If anything, they care more about quality than ever. But also, with the world and technology right now, it makes it very difficult to choose that first.”

A few days before our interview, TikTok was briefly banned over concerns about its connection to the Chinese government by the outgoing US president, before it was given a 90-day extension to find a new American buyer by the Trump administration. The whole fiasco provoked squabbles about whether or not TikTok, a key source of music discovery for Gen Z, has revolutionised modern music… Or sort of ruined it. Cottrill argues that no one in the music industry, herself included, is above social media, but that ​“there are things that are completely out of an average music listener’s control as to why their attention span is shortened. It’s about these systems that are being created around them. I wish there were slightly different ways for people to interact with musicians, especially with the way in which a lot of these platforms treat musicians. But I would never blame the listener.”

When I suggest that Charm has a good shot at winning that Grammy, Cottrill’s eyes light up for a second, before she politely insists she wants to see the award go to Kim Gordon for her sardonic experimental album The Collective (the award goes to St. Vincent’s All Born Screaming in the end, although Cottrill doesn’t let the Claire Sullivan-designed white polka-dot dress she wore to the ceremony go unnoticed, posting a photo on Instagram of her clutching a pistol in her hotel room, Lana Del Rey-style).

The day after the Grammys, Cottrill and her band will travel to New Zealand and Australia for the next leg of the Charm tour, which continues with sold-out dates in Europe and the UK in March. The tour’s stage design, which she described on Insta as a “’70s television dream”, was conceptualised with her creative director and longtime collaborator Imogene Strauss, who also works with Charli xcx and Troye Sivan.

Last night, Cottrill watched a movie starring the Anglo-French film, music and fashion icon Jane Birkin, a prominent figure on the Charm mood board. ​“Jane would wear a T‑shirt and jeans, [but also] have makeup on and have her hair done – which is kind of the same amount of glam I’m willing to do on a daily basis,” she says. ​“When I was going in for styling [for the tour], we were [also] thinking about sweet ​’60s TV performances and dresses, and things that felt cute, feminine and maybe sexy at the same time. But it’s this grey area in which you can’t decide if it’s sweet or cute or sexy – which I really liked. That’s how I describe Charm as well.”

As for the stage set-up, it was inspired by a television appearance by the English-born Spanish singer Jeanette performing her 1974 pop hit Porque te vas. “[She’s] in this purple dress, in the middle of this white stage that is shaped as a circle, and the band is all these guys sitting and standing around her in a semicircle, playing their instruments. I was like: ​‘Wow, that’s just so sweet.’ If I’m going to delve into a more feminine world and figure out where I land, this type of femininity is really cool. I like how she’s commanding the room by being in the middle of it.”

Long before she’d manifested her expansive vintage dream world, Cottrill emerged online as a singer and musician at the age of 13, uploading acoustic covers of Maroon 5, Frank Ocean and Mumford & Sons tracks to YouTube before sharing her own songs. Her talent caught the attention of the editors at Rookie, Tavi Gevinson’s much-loved teen culture magazine, who interviewed her around the release of the self-titled EP Claire Cottrill in 2015.

Around the latter half of the 2010s, ​“bedroom pop” was the music press’ buzz term for a new generation of net-savvy solo musicians making lo-fi anthems crafted under the glow of their laptop screens. Like fellow bedroom pop stars Beabadoobee and Rex Orange County, Cottrill eventually shook off the tag by fleshing out her sound onstage and in the studio. But with her 2017 breakthrough track Pretty Girl, the description was literal. She filmed the carefree video in her room in small-town Massachusetts with a webcam, lip-syncing the synth-pop song’s sharply sarcastic lyrics (​“I could be a pretty girl /​Shut up when you want me to”) while holding up a Gremlins figurine and sipping a Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee, a map of France and a poster of indie rock band The Shins in the blurry background.

“The song is about a relationship I had where I felt I needed to be the perfect girl for another person,” she wrote in the video’s YouTube description. ​“I felt that the only way I could make this video was to have a lot of fun looking disgusting and not caring at all!”

Cottrill might have not cared about what people thought of the video, but for reasons she didn’t quite understand, it blew up. A few weeks after she uploaded the song to YouTube, she began a music business course at Syracuse University in upstate New York. On the day of her first class, she noticed it had reached a million views. The track had initially been released on a cassette compilation with a run of just 250 copies, with proceeds going to the Transgender Law Center. Now Cottrill was a minor celeb on campus, and the record labels soon came calling.

She eventually chose The Fader​’s in-house label, a deal which was facilitated with help from her father, who knew the magazine’s co-founder Jon Cohen (there was some salty ​“industry plant” discourse around this time; Cottrill pointed out that some of it was sexist, acknowledged her privilege and everyone moved on). In 2018, she released her debut Clairo EP, Diary 001, which featured collabs with British hyperpop producer Danny L Harle and Irish rapper Rejjie Snow. She accepted an offer to support Dua Lipa on tour and dropped out of Syracuse after a year.

For her 2019 debut album Immunity, Cottrill teamed up with in-demand producer and former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij to craft breezy indie-pop sound with subtle elements of contemporary rap and R&B production. Her breathy vocals were laced with melancholia, as she delivered vulnerable lyrics about unrequited love, lust, queerness (she’d come out as bi the year before), friendship and depression. On the opening song, Alewife, she expressed gratitude to a friend who saved her from a suicide attempt in eighth grade. The album’s title nods to rheumatoid arthritis, the autoimmune condition which she was diagnosed with at the age of 17, and which has had a debilitating impact on her day-to-day life and her career as a touring musician.

Immunity was a critical success, minting her as a breakout star and spawning countless obsessive Clairo fan accounts. She appeared in the pages of cool magazines, performed on major US TV shows such as Ellen and Jimmy Kimmel, and supported Khalid on his 2019 arena tour.

In a lot of the early press about Cottrill, much was made about her coy stage presence. It wasn’t an act. Behind the scenes, the pressure of sudden internet fame and the gruelling touring lifestyle was triggering anxiety, depression, arthritic pain and alarming weight loss. ​“There were a lot of things that rocked my world around Immunity,” she tells me. ​“This was one of the most jarring experiences you can have – becoming something, people coming to see you and being interested in you. I think it can be overwhelming. It is mainly positive, but it’s not always positive.”

Reflecting on this era in 2022, she told Rolling Stone that she had intended to quit her music career. But in 2020, during lockdown, Cottrill began to mend herself and embarked on the musical journey which has eventually led her to Charm. She’d always loved music from the ​’60s and ​’70s, having been raised with likes of The Beach Boys, Todd Rundgren and Carole King in her musical diet, and at this point she sought solace in soul music, a genre she describes as the most beautiful thing she’s ever heard (although she modestly claims she ​“can’t write soul music. I can only appreciate soul music, and I can only take inspiration from soul songs I really love”.) Quarantining in Atlanta with her parents and older sister, she began pondering her adult life, at which point the wisdom of the great women songwriters of the 20^th century became even more resonant.

​“I was going through a lot and people like Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Linda Ronstadt, Carly Simon, Nina Simone, they were really holding me in a lot of these weird feelings I was having – just completely existential woman problems of just, like, needing to know if I’m gonna get pregnant. What does that feel like? When is that gonna happen? Am I gonna get married? I don’t know where I’m gonna live. Should I get a house?” Just before Covid hit, Cottrill met Jack Antonoff – then riding high off the back of producing blockbuster albums by Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift and Lorde – for ramen in LA. After initially turning down his pitch to produce her next record due to a lack of confidence in her music, Cottrill convinced herself she was good enough after writing her song Reaper. To record her second album Sling, they headed to Allaire Studios, which is nestled on a mountain — top outside of Woodstock in upstate New York, with views of Ashokan Reservoir and the Catskill Mountains, before finishing the album off at Electric Lady.

Sling​’s only single, the drumless and downbeat Blouse, was an uncompromising move which marked a shift from the Immunity era, stripping Cottrill’s sound of modern electronic gloss. With whispery, Elliott Smith-esque vocals, a finger-picked acoustic guitar, light orchestral flourishes and backing vocals from Lorde, Cottrill sang about being objectified by lechy men in the music industry.

The experience of making Sling was a breakthrough in another way. It reminded Cottrill of how much she thrives in nature. She bought a five-acre property in the countryside between the Berkshires and the Catskills. She has an apartment in New York City, but mostly she values the solitary time she spends upstate. ​“I go by myself. It’s a real test, like not going on my phone and really being present with myself,” she says. ​“And I think that is probably the hardest relationship to be OK with.”

She’s not entirely alone up there with her log fire, though: there’s a strong music community, including Leon Michels, and she’s always joined by Joanie, her beloved mixed-breed dog, who she describes as ​“sassy”, ​“spunky” and ​“very loving”. In her infancy, Joanie appeared on the cover of Sling and the album features a tempo-shifting track that mimics the pup’s moods throughout the day. Joanie stays with Cottrill’s parents while she’s on tour, and she describes their reunions as ​“one of the best feelings in the world. She runs up and curls into the tiniest ball, shaking and squealing, so cute. She remembers everything and anyone she’s met before and greets them like she just saw them or missed them – which I think is the sweetest thing, imagining your dog really missing you.”

While previous tours have been painful for Cottrill for the most part, she’s been enjoying the Charm shows. It helps that the album’s songs are so fun. Sexy to Someone is an upbeat fan favourite about the (not uncomplicated) desire to be reassured someone fancies you, while on Juna she mimics the sound of a trumpet solo with her mouth – although there’s no longer much need to do that on stage, because the audience loves doing it for her.

Cottrill has finally found confidence in being a calm performer. “[I’ve been asking myself], ​‘How do I command a room?’ Or ​‘how do I learn how to become a diferent type of performer without dancing and jumping around and doing things that feel unnatural for me?’” she says, citing the inspiration of powerful-yet-restrained front people such as early-era Alex Turner and Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval. ​“My restraint becomes part of the show,” she says, ​“which then, in turn, makes this mysterious thing happen where people do watch instead of looking at their phones.”

It’s not been easy for Cottrill to grow up in public, to struggle with her physical and mental health while gaining millions of Instagram followers before she was legally allowed to buy a beer. So revisiting the songs in her back catalogue has opened some wounds. ​“It’s interesting to constantly be faced with the 19-year-old version of yourself,” she says. ​“I don’t think that’s a natural thing.” Her solution has been to Charm-ify the old stuff, to soup them up with her more mature sound, making them feel more representative of the person she really is today.

​“Growing and morphing and changing is so natural, so much a part of growing up. And so it’s been really cool to – over the course of time – be slowly finding myself, becoming very aware of the things that are sticking. Charm was a really good example of something that stuck with me.” She hits the Juul, and her eyes light up again. ​“I’m really happy about it.”

HAIR Miyuki Goto MAKEUP Allie Smith at MA+ using Lisa Eldridge NAILS Mei Kawajiri at Red Represents SET DESIGNER Javier Irigoyen at Lalaland Artists PRODUCTION No Inc. LIGHTING Tristan Oliveira PHOTOGRAPHER’S ASSISTANTS Sterling Smith and Larry Gu STYLIST’S ASSISTANTS Amilia Howells and India Reed SET DESIGN ASSISTANTS Chazz Foggie and Snake Garcia