There are two pairs of high-top sneakers resting on the floor. One is glittery and color-blocked, the other is ratty and worn, straight out of a Ramones album cover. Both belong to Claire Cottrill, who is rifling through a batch of bright outfits inside a Brooklyn photo studio. While applying glitter eyeshadow, the 19-year-old explains that her preferred style is all about contrasts: a short vinyl skirt beneath a long baggy coat, or her boyfriend’s little league uniform paired with fun platform shoes, or a giant sweatshirt and tiny sunglasses. Her life is full of this type of divergent harmony too. She’s a goofy burgeoning pop star who has to be careful not to dance too hard because of her juvenile arthritis. “I’m low-key, a little awkward,” she half-apologizes during the shoot, but it’s this exact quality that makes her music so relatable.
In between sticking her tongue out and pretending to karate kick the camera, Cottrill talks about the show she played the previous night, opening for Tyler, the Creator at a sold-out, 7,000-capacity venue in Los Angeles. It was her biggest gig yet—by at least 6,000 people.
Whatever this strange new reality is, it’s a world away from where Cottrill was a year ago. Back then, she was a high schooler in the Boston suburbs worrying about college applications and making songs about crushes in her bedroom. Now she is a YouTube phenomenon who is managed by the same man who helped guide Chance the Rapper to superstardom.
For the most part, this whirlwind arose from an unassuming song called “Pretty Girl.” Originally released last summer as part of an annual cassette compilation by The Le Sigh, a blog highlighting female and non-binary artists, the song is a dreamy synth ditty about changing for a someone else and losing yourself along the way. “Pretty Girl” is the sound of a young woman realizing her own worth, and if you don’t find that even slightly moving, to paraphrase The Virgin Suicides, you’ve obviously never been a teenage girl.
The song’s video is a simple, webcam-style clip that shows Cottrill in her “I woke up like this” best, complete with greasy hair, oily skin, and lazy-day clothes, singing and dancing along to her song in her bedroom. It’s an endearing rejection of Instagram flawlessness, a zits-and-all testament to the enduring power of simply being yourself. In no time, the video exploded. After only five months, it currently has nearly 7 million views and even spawned its own viral #challenge, with fans around the world recreating the clip.
Though the video’s runaway success came as a shock to Cottrill, she has been eagerly anticipating a moment like this since she was a girl. She began recording songs at 13, first singing into her phone’s voicemail app and later filming photobooth covers of songs by Maroon 5 and man-bunned folk troubadours Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. After a brief foray into proper guitar lessons proved to be less than enthralling—“My teacher wanted me to do ‘Hot Cross Buns,’ but all I wanted to learn was ‘Island in the Sun’ by Weezer”—Cottrill taught herself crude chords from internet tutorials. Around this time, MTV noticed one of her covers and invited her to record a generic pop song to be used as background music for their shows. Nothing came of it—the track is still locked away in the network’s archives—but the experience introduced her to a real studio space and made the life of a musician seem like more than just a distant fantasy.
Once she began high school and acquired a proper microphone, Cottrill began experimenting under her full name on Bandcamp, using an acoustic guitar and a flea market drum machine. A little later, she hopped to SoundCloud, where she started uploading loosies and covers of songs by the likes of twee OGs Beat Happening and psych-rock heroes Broadcast under the name Clairo. At the same time, she began making monthly rap mixes as DJ Baby Benz, which sample everything from Sade interviews to a random SoundCloud producer named Icytwat. Listening to her minimal and unobtrusive work online over the last few years can feel like watching a picture slowly but surely come into focus. “Flamin’ Hot Cheetos,” a track released around the same time as “Pretty Girl,” is built around a simple synth tingle and a distant drum beat. “I’m such a romantic/I never remember/How things really happen/I guess you’re attractive/Or something,” Cottrill murmurs. It’s a K Records lyric in a Lil Uzi Vert world.
Currently a freshman at Syracuse University, Cottrill plans to drop a six-song EP this year that features production by PC Music’s Danny L. Harle as well as a collaboration with Irish rapper Rejjie Snow. “I’m hoping this EP can close off the bedroom-pop era of Clairo, and I can move on to some other things,” she tells me. “I like the songs that I’ve put out, but I never want to be the same as I was a few years ago.”
Clairo: Honestly, it was very hard to do well in school and deal with crazy internet viral videos at the same time. I felt like I was living a double life—my life itself didn’t really change, but people started recognizing me, which I was totally not prepared for. I ended this semester with a 3.0. Got a C in econ. That was the hardest class of my life, whatever. But I like going to school while I’m doing music. It keeps me from getting too overwhelmed about the industry when I can just do my math homework.
I had a moment where I was doing a bunch of things that I don’t usually do to make myself feel like I was pleasing another person. But then I realized that I’m totally fine with myself without those things. At the time I wrote it, I was like, “I’m OK with what I am and how I do things and how I look.”
Making music has always made me happy. When I go through a situation, the best way for me to get over it is to bundle up all of my emotions about it, put it in a little shell, create something, and then let it go. Making a song is the ideal way to do that. I’m someone that needs to talk about my problems. I call my mom every single day at school just to vent about random stuff. Singing is the same thing.
Yeah, it’s like how your friends will come to you for advice, but you don’t follow your own advice. When I find myself in a screwed-up relationship situation, my friends are like, “Why didn’t you just do what you said I should do?”
Frankie Cosmos has definitely been a huge inspiration to me. She’s helped me be really honest lyrically and to not be afraid to say exactly how I feel, regardless of how it might make me look. I’m not hiding anything. I want my music to be as raw as possible. And that’s what I love so much about her. I also grew up on Norah Jones and I still love her—I seriously would name my child after her. I love talking about love and relationships, and those two artists have really shown me that it’s totally fine to write a million songs about that.
I saw one of the Haim sisters on a plane one time. She was listening to SOPHIE, and I was like, “She’s so cool.” I was going to say something to her, but I ended up not doing it. I also remember meeting the Jonas Brothers at a meet-and-greet. I wanted to talk to Nick Jonas so bad, but nothing would come out.
I was actually on Rookie when I was 16! At that age, I had no idea who I was and was just figuring it out. It was so awesome to be able to go on that website and see boys in makeup and be exposed to completely new perspectives, because I lived in a super small town where there was no diversity whatsoever. So being able to hear other people’s stories gave me hope that once I got out of the town, there was an entire world out there.
I’ve looked up to PC Music for such a long time, since my sophomore year of high school. I think if anyone pushes pop, it’s them, just because you can see that they’re artists outside music as well. They’re able to zoom out and take all these different aspects of pop and mimic it. Talking to them and seeing what they’re doing has definitely changed my perspective and made me realize you can do anything with pop.
