In 2017, when the singer and songwriter Claire Cottrill was nineteen, she uploaded a song called “Pretty Girl” to YouTube, under the nom de plume Clairo. Cottrill had recorded the clip from atop her bed, in front of a taped-up map of France, a poster for the indie-rock band the Shins, and a sagging stretch of Christmas lights—a classic American teen-age tableau. She periodically held up a plastic Funko-Pop toy in the shape of Gizmo, the furry protagonist of “Gremlins,” or fussed with a pair of pink cat’s-eye sunglasses. Everything about the clip felt unpretentious, easy, and magnetic. “Pretty Girl” is about resisting the urge to dissemble and reinvent oneself in service of love: “And I could be a pretty girl / Shut up when you want me to,” Cottrill sang, making a face that suggested she could not, in fact, ever let herself be quite so subsumed by romance. Cottrill’s voice is limber and sweet, and, unlike much of her bedroom-pop cohort, it has some swing, evoking Diana Ross as much as Joni Mitchell. Her vocals were accompanied by a simple beat and a wonky-sounding synthesizer line. It was not yet completely rare to find something pure on the Internet, but “Pretty Girl” still felt like an extraordinary début.
Cottrill was soon offered a deal with The Fader’s record label; she released an EP, “Diary 001,” in 2018, followed by her first full-length, “Immunity,” in 2019. The winsome single “Bags,” which features Danielle Haim on drums and was co-produced by Rostam Batmanglij, is about being impatient in a love affair—wanting more, wanting everything, but growing frustrated when the other person doesn’t express the same urgency. “Can you see me using everything to hold back? / I guess this could be worse / Walkin’ out the door with your bags,” Cottrill sings, her voice resigned. Maybe a little bit of love is better than nothing at all. In 2021, she released “Sling,” her second album, which was co-produced by Jack Antonoff. The songs on “Sling” were quiet, tender, and spare, recalling Elliott Smith, Karen Dalton, Vashti Bunyan, and Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” It was bold for an artist so beloved for winking, Zeitgeisty synth pop to make a flinty singer-songwriter record, but “Sling” was sophisticated and deeply felt. It was also Clairo’s first release to make the Top Twenty on the Billboard album chart.
This month, Cottrill will put out her third album, “Charm,” a rich and seductive collection of groovy pop songs that feel indebted to Motown, Hall & Oates, Northern soul, and the sorts of long-gone regional record companies whose releases are now dotingly preserved by reissue labels such as the Numero Group and Light in the Attic. Cottrill made some of “Charm” at Electric Lady, in the West Village, and at Allaire Studio, which is situated on a mountaintop near Woodstock, New York, overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir and the Catskill Mountains. It was produced by Leon Michels, a founding member of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and the leader of El Michels Affair, a psychedelic-soul band that has backed the rappers Raekwon, Black Thought, and Freddie Gibbs. Cottrill wanted the record to feel playful, buoyant, and a little out of time. “I was really inspired by the silliness of Harry Nilsson, and the vocals of Margo Guryan and Blossom Dearie. Those three people are all really great songwriters, and their music is very touching, but it also never feels like they’re taking themselves too seriously,” she told me recently.
Cottrill was also interested in making something that sounded idiosyncratic, maybe slightly broken. “There was a recurring theme throughout the recording process where Claire would say, ‘It’s not weird enough,’ ” Michels said. “We bonded over records where there’s something kinda off about them. The tambourine is way too loud, or the piano is incredibly out of tune, or there’s some tape edit that’s completely fucked and obviously a mistake, but they had to leave it. Those are my favorite production choices.” He and Cottrill were both fans of the Innovations’ 1977 cover of the Alessi Brothers’ “Seabird,” a hazy, wobbling Peruvian yacht-rock tune (“Like a lonely seabird / You’ve been away from land too long”), and of Laurene LaVallis’s “Key to Our Love,” an R. & B. single from 1984 that sounds as though it were recorded on tape that was stored under the passenger seat of a Buick LeSabre on a ninety-five-degree day. It seems wrong to describe “Charm” as retro—it doesn’t possess that sort of self-consciousness—but many of its songs feel as if they should be pressed to 45 r.p.m. and snuck into moldering Midwestern basements, ready to be excavated by the intrepid d.j.s of the future, out scouring estate sales for weird, undiscovered tunes.
“Claire has a really strong sense of what her musical identity is,” Michels said. “I get in the habit of moving really quickly and getting impatient if a song isn’t working instantly. I’ll bludgeon it until it works. She has this very patient, even-keeled energy that allows songs to show themselves over the course of time. She always knew what she wanted and what the record was supposed to sound like.”
One morning this past spring, Cottrill visited my home, in the Hudson Valley. She is twenty-five now, and was wearing jeans and a red vintage sweatshirt. She has the word “charm” tattooed in black ink across her knuckles. Though she still rents an apartment in the city, Cottrill recently bought a place in upstate New York, and lately she has found herself in a more domestic headspace. I told her that, since moving out of the city, I had anthropomorphized my house to the extent that I now consider it a member of my immediate family. “I definitely understand that,” she said, laughing. “My mom just visited me, and every time we’d leave and come back to the house she would say, ‘Bye, house!’ ‘Hi, house!’ You have to acknowledge her.” Cottrill’s design sensibility veers toward vintage and handmade. “I like things to be comfortable,” she said. “Lots of wood. Lots of color. I really like collecting things that people make.” We discussed the cognitive and emotional dissonance of leaving New York City for a more rural place: the fruitful isolation, the dark and hermetic winter nights. “Oh, it’s the loneliest thing ever, for sure,” she said. “I do find it very cool that I’m doing it, though,” she added. “I want to be self-reliant. I think it’s valuable when someone can bring that into a relationship. So it’s been really cool to watch me kind of turn into someone who runs a home.”
We sat on my patio for a while, drinking coffee and discussing the perils and glories of gardening. The region was in the midst of a gnarly spongy-moth infestation; caterpillars were gobbling up oak leaves at a horrifying rate, showering the landscape with frass. At one point, my toddler sprinted outside, clutching a tiny crayon drawing she’d made for Cottrill. When she started dancing—no music—Cottrill warmly cheered her on: “Heck yeah, girl!” Cottrill said she liked living in a place where digital culture was not yet fully integrated into every last moment of the day. Having an assortment of quotidian chores to complete—planting flowers, fussing with the plumbing, chopping vegetables—inhibits the sort of passive scrolling that can leave a person glazed over and neurotic. “I’m tending to something that’s physical and tangible, where my phone has to be in my back pocket,” she said. “I need both hands to be driving, I need both hands to be cooking, I need both hands to be cleaning. I’m pouring myself more into those experiences. What if I took pottery classes? I need both hands for that.”
But Cottrill also said that her social-media usage doesn’t feel especially fraught or baneful. She was “a consumer of the Internet for the majority of my life,” she said, right up until the moment that “Pretty Girl” went viral. “Then I had to change my relationship to the Internet, because now people were consuming me. That was a really hard shift, because I was still nineteen—I was the most chronically online age you could be. I have taken a little space, but I still love the Internet so much.” I asked her if it was ever disorienting that a significant amount of her young adulthood is archived online. “It’s definitely hilarious to be able to look back at every stage of myself, and have it all be so public,” she said. “Maybe I think it’s funny now because I feel closer to the person I’m turning into, so I’m able to look back and not cringe—it’s more ‘Aw, look at her!’ ”
Cottrill was brought up in Carlisle, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. From an early age, songs felt crucial to her emotional development. “Music has always been the most important thing to me,” she said. “I gravitated toward it and used it to feel. I wasn’t really making music of my own until seventh or eighth grade, when I started to write. But listening to music has always been more important to me than making it. Making music is very cathartic, and I like the things I’m making. But listening to music is always better.”
Cottrill said that many of the songs on “Charm” started with a feeling, and then an idea about the production. Lyrics generally came later. She’d been sitting on the word “charm”—as an aesthetic and spiritual principle, an idea to build a record around—for three years. “I had this notebook full of notes about what that word meant to me, what I could do with that word, what lives in that word,” she said. She was interested in the wallop and jolt of romantic connection, and the intoxication that follows—the alchemical experience of attraction, of finding a kindred heart in the wild. “I came to the conclusion that, to me, charm is the moment when two people meet, and they have separate life experiences, all their own stories and feelings, and then they tell each other the first layer. ‘I’m from blank, and I do blank.’ There’s this beautiful haze and buzz when you’re still imagining the rest of it. That feeling is so good.”
She found herself writing through those early moments of love, lust, whatever, who knows. “It was an interesting concept for me, to write songs that felt like I only had part of the information, and then a lot of yearning, a lot of making up the rest in my head,” she explained. “That’s dating in your twenties—it feels so promising, and then it’s a question mark. There’s this cyclical energy that you’re constantly pumping out and experiencing through each person you date, whether it is a four-month casual thing or, like, a two-day love story,” she said. “It completely takes over.”
On the song “Nomad,” which opens “Charm,” Cottrill’s voice sounds vulnerable, feathery. Over upright bass and swooning Wurlitzer, she sings of a willingness to put it all on the line: “I’d run the risk of losing everything / Sell all my things, become nomadic.” Sometimes, the song suggests, it’s satisfying, maybe even necessary, to give in to our desires, no matter how impractical or dangerous it may be. Love is always a gamble:
“Twenty-five is very interesting, because I’m meeting a lot of wonderful people. But I’m realizing that everyone, including me, has no idea what the fuck they’re doing,” Cottrill told me. “That can be really comforting, and also really annoying. This record has so much yearning, so much of me shaking the other person and being, like, ‘Why not? Why can’t we?’ Growing up, I always looked at relationships that ended because of circumstances like ‘What are you doing? Just make it happen.’ ”
On “Sexy to Someone,” the first single from “Charm,” Cottrill writes of requiring a little affirmation from time to time—“Oh, I need a reason to get out of the house,” as she puts it, over Mellotron, synths, piano, and slide guitar. It’s a dreamy and beguiling song. I told Cottrill that I found the premise deeply relatable: needing someone to hold your gaze a moment longer than necessary, or touch your forearm, or buy you a drink with intention. “It’s that thing where you’re, like, I don’t want to be hit on, and I don’t want you to cross the line with me—I just want to know that you think I’m hot, and then I can go home,” Cottrill said, laughing. “Because sometimes that’s really it. There’s this feeling that you get every so often, which is loneliness, and the quick fix is just someone being, like, ‘Are you an actress?’ ” Cottrill’s vocals are breathy but without affectation. “Sexy to someone, I think about it all / Checkin’ out of the hotel, or moments at a bar / Ask if I’m in a movie, no, I didn’t get the part,” she sings.
Later that afternoon, Cottrill and I decided to visit a local garden center. We strolled among hanging baskets of petunias, verbena, calibrachoa. We admired bushy potted tomatoes. Cottrill picked out something called a spike plant and a large trailing lantana, with tiny, exquisite clusters of pink and yellow flowers. The whole idea of gardening is to commit to something and tend to it through good and bad weather—it’s hard not to see the practice as a metaphor. Afterward, we walked to a local butcher shop and ordered sandwiches, then sat at a picnic table outside. I told Cottrill that, because I was born and brought up in the Hudson Valley, I felt entitled to both gripe about the arrival of fussy artisanal markets and also to frequent them constantly. Upstate New York, as anything north of New York City is now errantly called, can feel like a place in eternal transition—gentrifying, in a sense, as the city bleeds further and further into the countryside, but still a little feral. Nature isn’t always so easily displaced. Earlier in the day, I had shown Cottrill a video of an enormous wild turkey pecking so aggressively at my glass-paned door that I’d thought he would surely shatter it. I had simply stood there in my pajamas, in the soft post-dawn light, dumbly watching. Later that night, Cottrill texted me footage of a black bear pawing through her trash before bounding off with a cardboard pizza box.
Mostly, Cottrill has found living upstate to be generative. “In a weird way, I get closer to songs by being in nature,” she said. “I can devote a lot more time to what inspires me and why. I can listen to something really loud on a walk and be able to feel the entire song through my whole body. I also feel that way when I’m walking around New York, but there’s something really cool about being solo—being really alone—with music.” In the end, she has found that solitude has accelerated a kind of crucial self-knowledge: “I think I’ve arrived at something that’s more uniquely me by being alone.” ♦
