On a Friday night in Oklahoma City, everyone is air guitaring to Paramore and sipping toxic concoctions of Patrón and iced tea out of red solo cups. Leading the singalong is Claire Cottrill, who clutches a plastic water bottle like a microphone as she shouts “Why do we like to hurt so much?” and whips her dyed orange hair to the beat. On the other side of the room, near a table stacked with chips and watermelon gummies, two of her friends pull off a trick where one throws a lemon across the room and the other spears it on a knife. Someone switches the music to Beyoncé, and everyone cheers in approval. The scene could be happening at any college campus nationwide, and Cottrill looks like any 20-year-old.
Except the party is taking place in the bowels of the Chesapeake Energy Arena, and minutes earlier, Cottrill was singing her homespun songs about romance—blooming, unrequited, and everything in between—in front of thousands of people. As Clairo, Cottrill performed tracks off her eclectic, guileless debut album, Immunity, exuding an unruffled chillness. Though she confidently handled her opening set for the chart-topping pop singer Khalid, her mannerisms were small, partly because of an autoimmune disease that can make it hard for her to move, and partly because the power of her music—a blend of polished melodies and indie rock introspection—comes from the heart, not the body. After the show, she is pleasantly surprised with her performance: “Oh my god, that was so much fun!”
It’s my first night traveling with Cottrill and her band as they make their way from Oklahoma to Chicago, and the Claire commanding a massive stage and belting Beyoncé is tough to square with the Claire that I interviewed a year and a half ago, when she had first become a viral phenomenon. That Claire was friendly, but also insular and guarded. She had been thrust into the spotlight after uploading a makeshift webcam video for a plinking synth-pop song called “Pretty Girl” to her YouTube page; the video has since collected more than 36 million views. But back then, at the very end of 2017, she had just played a show with Tyler, the Creator in which she struggled to emit much of a presence, singing quietly over instrumentals playing from her laptop, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else.
A few months later, she followed up the “Pretty Girl” video with a glossy, high-budget clip for her song “Flaming Hot Cheetos” that switched out her unassuming charm for a squad of dancers dressed as limp red cheese puffs and a life-size bag of “Clairitos.” Some more so-so new songs trickled out. Around that time, it seemed like Cottrill might become another viral casualty—a one-trick pony who gets rolled over by the same insatiable internet culture that brought her a brief flush of fame. As former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij, who co-produced Immunity alongside Cottrill and speaks of her with the reverence of a proud older brother, puts it to me on the phone, “If the stuff that I made when I was 17 suddenly reached 40 million people, I would probably have a meltdown.”
But Claire Cottrill did not melt down. She leveled up. With a fanatical focus, she began to improve her live shows by rehearsing intensely with her band, recruiting a vocal coach and, she confesses with a cringe, watching videos of herself performing, like a football player looking to improve their tackle. After realizing she wasn’t comfortable with that regrettable “Flaming Hot Cheetos” video, she removed it from her YouTube channel. She started writing music that she really believed in.
“All those things were in front of me: You suck at performing, you suck at interviews, you need to make music that’s good, and you need to stop being a crybaby,” she bluntly ticks off, thinking back to those early days. “It was a very low point, but it was one of the best low points because it was like, Damn. You need to work, honey.”
The day after the Oklahoma City concert, we wake up in the sun-beaten parking lot of a Sheraton on the outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri. There’s no show today, and Cottrill, her band, managers, and crew each do their own thing: sleep, laundry, scam a local hot yoga studio for a free class. Despite the city’s legendary barbecue offerings, Cottrill wants to eat someplace familiar, so we head to Panera Bread. The subterranean lunch spot is mostly empty, aside from a Guy Fieri look-alike who wanders around offering blessings. With our soup and sandwich specials ordered, we crawl into a booth to discuss the unlikely moment that put Cottrill on arena stages, playing to teens who look up to her with starry-eyed reverence.
Originally recorded on GarageBand for a cassette compilation that was limited to 250 copies, “Pretty Girl” is a song about changing for a relationship and losing yourself along the way. “I could be a pretty girl, shut up when you want me to,” Cottrill vacantly murmurs atop a stuttering drum machine. And yet, she remains strong in the face of teenage heartbreak—she could try to diminish herself while conforming to gendered expectations, but she won’t. “I’m alone now, but it’s better for me,” she eventually decides. “I don’t need all your negativity.”
In the summer of 2017, Cottrill filmed the “Pretty Girl” video with her computer’s camera. It shows her sitting on her bed and lip syncing alongside various knick knacks—including a figurine of Gizmo from Gremlins—and a Dunkin coffee. As she boogies in baggy sweatshirts, with a constellation of red acne dots spread across her forehead, she looks like just another girl in her room, goofing around. It was all so simple, so impromptu, that she thought nothing of it. Over its first few days online, the video gained a few hundred views, then a couple thousand, then “it just… kept going,” Cottrill recalls, her voice trailing off. She still has no idea how “Pretty Girl” became a runaway success.
A few weeks later, on her first day of classes at Syracuse University’s Bandier Program, a specialized school for music business, the video hit a million views. “By the time I got to school for orientation, people already knew who I was,” she says, poking at her grilled cheese. Classmates began asking her why she was even in college. Once, she caught a student in her astronomy class filming her just existing.
Soon the press came knocking, wanting to know all about this mumbling voice of Generation Z. Then the record labels started reaching out. Except these weren’t the scrappy, independent ones that Cottrill once dreamed of signing with, like Father/Daughter and Bayonet, but big ones like RCA and Columbia. Their attention took her by surprise. “I only recently understood that labels really do sign people because they’re being talked about, not necessarily because they believe in the music,” she tells me.
Though Cottrill admits that she was wooed for a bit by the majors, she ended up signing with FADER Label, the boutique New York imprint whose roster includes cheerful pop-rock acts like Matt and Kim. FADER co-founder Jon Cohen is a family friend of the Cottrills and, as “Pretty Girl” continued to spiral upward, he offered Claire a 12-song deal. Knowing that she was being guided by people she trusted, she accepted.
Around this time, a post appeared on Reddit accusing Cottrill of being an “industry plant”—a phrase sometimes lobbed at young, almost-always-female musicians in an effort to undermine their talent. The supposed evidence behind the claim involved the fact that her father, Geoff, a former chief marketing officer at Converse, had worked with the agency Cornerstone, for which Cohen is the co-CEO. As Cottrill she sees it, she was given the opportunity to sign a deal that would allow her to grow as an artist more than as a commodity; many others are not so lucky. So, at the end of her freshman year of college, she packed up her dorm room, donated half of her closet, put the rest in a suitcase, and flew to Texas for her first tour, supporting pop star Dua Lipa.
In terms of viral success stories, Clairo’s is a particularly unusual case. She wasn’t busking for tourists or yodelling in Walmarts. Her breakout song wasn’t a gigantic bop nor was it danceable meme bait. She wasn’t Lana Del Rey, tragically glamorous, or Azealia Banks, delightfully sex-positive. She was an awkward teenage girl in her room trying to turn her insecurities about feminine beauty ideals into something manageable. Yes, Cottrill posted “Pretty Girl” online, where it could be seen by anyone. But nothing about the video seems to covet validation. When every YouTube video seems to be selling something, there is power in humble autonomy. If anything, the ensuing backlash proves that, to some, it’s easier to find a nefarious motive behind a girl singing in her bedroom than it is to believe in her authenticity.
Given the whirlwind and the naysayers, I ask her if she’s ever regretted uploading “Pretty Girl” in the first place. She vehemently shakes her head no. “Because everything happened overnight, I have this irrational fear that it will go away just as quickly,” she explains. “I just want people to stick around long enough for them to know who I really am.”
After spending her earliest years in Georgia and Washington, Cottrill came of age in Carlisle, Massachusetts, a quaint town of about 5,000 outside of Boston. As she excitedly describes it, Carlisle sounds idyllic, the sort of storybook New England hamlet where the school is located on School Street, and children traipse to a family-run ice cream stand in the summer.
“Music was always in our lives,” Claire’s older sister Abby tells me. “There’s home videos of us singing Shania Twain’s ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman’—we would get really into it.” Though the only artist the whole family could agree on during car trips was surfer-songwriter Jack Johnson, the Cottrill parents instilled their daughters with a diverse musical education. Claire’s father favored Al Green and contemporary indie bands like the Shins, while her mother leaned towards ’80s alternative acts like Cocteau Twins and New Order.
“Claire’s knowledge of music is, in a lot of respects, deeper than mine,” insists the 35-year-old Batmanglij. “By the time she was 14, she had access to every album on Spotify, and naturally processed all of this music. She hears it and feels it very deeply.”
After abandoning proper guitar lessons in favor of YouTube tutorials, Cottrill dedicated herself to covers of indie-folk bands like Mumford & Sons, which she posted on Facebook. As she grew more confident with her abilities, she would sit on the floor of her room and record her own songs of regret and desire, written and sung in the understated vein of one of her bedroom-pop heroes, Frankie Cosmos. She uploaded these originals to her Bandcamp and SoundCloud pages, thinking of them like a diary. “It was just a private thing, a space for me to express myself,” she says. “It wasn’t until ‘Pretty Girl’ that I really understood that it wasn’t so private.”
Outside the bedroom, she began performing and attending DIY shows around Philadelphia and Boston. The smattering of freckles across her nose crinkles with laughter as she remembers a certain ill-fated gig. “My mom would drive me to the shows,” she says, “and one time she found out that there might be drinking, so she turned around, and I had to post on the Facebook group that I couldn’t perform anymore.”
About a year before “Pretty Girl,” Cottrill was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a condition marked by swelling and inflammation of the joints. In Cottrill’s case, her knees were affected most, and when she would work on music in her bedroom, her legs would lock into stiff planks as she waited for her drum machine to record. At school, she was excused from gym and given an elevator pass that she always felt guilty using. Instead, she would struggle up the stairs, sobbing, telling herself that since her illness was invisible, it wasn’t “real” enough. Right now, as she tours throughout the country, she still doesn’t have 100 percent mobility back—don’t even get her started on her knees—but she says she’s doing a lot better.
As an adolescent, Cottrill had a difficult time fitting in and maintaining friendships, perpetually feeling like an outsider. “I felt like I was trapped, like no one understood me—and maybe I didn’t understand them either?” she says. “A big theme on Immunity is me going back and telling myself things I wish eighth-grade me had known.”
The album begins with a stark account of a particularly dark adolescent moment, on a song called “Alewife.” In quietly poetic terms, it describes a time when eighth-grade Claire considered taking her own life. “There was a night where I didn’t see any worth in myself,” she cautiously explains. “I was on the verge of going around the house and trying to figure out what I could do. I never left my bed, but in my mind I was going insane.” Cottrill describes the track as a love song to her friend Alexa, who she called that evening when she was at her lowest, and who was so worried that she called the police. “Alewife” candidly outlines what happened next: “They showed up to my door/My parents didn’t know what for/Swear I could have done it/If you weren’t there when I hit the floor.”
“It’s important for me to talk about it,” says Cottrill. “It’s a part of me that really was there, and it terrifies me that that could have happened. But now I can confidently say that I’m living the life I really wanted to live when I was in eighth grade, so it feels good that I held out.”
Following her initial success, Cottrill tried working with various collaborators on everything from clubby dance-pop to bilingual breakup anthems, with mixed results. But she found a compatible creative partner in Batmanglij, who was intrigued by Cottrill’s willingness to excavate herself in her music. In April of last year, they had dinner together in Los Angeles before going to Batmanglij’s studio and writing the wistful Immunity cut “Feel Something” in just three hours.
The pair met again in November, under the impression that they were working on songs for an EP, but the partnership became so fruitful so quickly that an album started to take form. For Cottrill, their creative relationship flourished in part due to their shared experiences. “He understood so many of my struggles, whether it was being a new artist and figuring out how to make my first record the way I wanted to, or dealing with learning about my sexuality,” she says. While the pair didn’t necessarily talk about Batmanglij’s own experience of coming out in the public eye about a decade ago, he says he understood Cottrill’s intention to explore her sexual identity. “We talked about making ‘gay bops,’” he tells me with a chuckle.
In May 2018, Cottrill came out in a truly modern manner: with a tweet. “‘B.O.M.D.’ is also ‘G.O.M.D.’ for ur information,” she wrote, in reference to one of her songs that describes meeting the titular boy (or girl) of her dreams. When I bring up this up, she covers her face in embarrassment and moans, “It’s the dumbest tweet I’ve ever sent in my life, but it’s fine.” As a teenager from a small town, Cottrill was often afraid of admitting her queerness because of unintentionally dismissive comments classmates would make about how certain girls “dressed like a lesbian.” It wasn’t until after she graduated high school that she began to come to terms with her sexual identity. “When I went to college and my two best friends were gay, I had my first real conversations with people who were also figuring it out,” she says. “It was so necessary for me.”
She still doesn’t know what she identifies as exactly, if she has to identify as anything, and Immunity indulges in the nervous energy of self-discovery. “Tell you how I felt/Sugar coated melting in your mouth,” Cottrill ventures on “Bags,” the record’s twinkling first single, before letting her vulnerability bring her back to reality. “Pardon my emotions, I should probably keep it all to myself/Know you’d make fun of me.” The song is based on the limitless potential of a real-life crush, but when I ask her about what happened next, she simply says, “We’ve talked. Things are good.”
Even at their most lo-fi, Cottrill’s songs have always turned inward, but on Immunity, she plumbs new personal depths alongside production that feels spontaneous and sophisticated at the same time. “Sinking” is about wanting to be fully capable in intimate scenarios, an insecurity that was very much on Cottrill’s mind during the album’s writing sessions, when her arthritis flares were so excruciating that she had trouble making it to the studio. With its loose, neo-soul-type beat, the song may sound sensual, but that’s something of a feint. “If you really pay attention to what’s going on, you can tell that it’s about someone dealing with pain,” Cottrill explains. “That’s how arthritis works: You don’t understand it until you look closely enough.”
Even though the internet has been both Cottrill’s strongest platform and her toughest agitator, she continues to give herself over to it, responding to fans’ comments, explaining the stories and processes behind her songs.
“The world has already seen my diary from my whole teen life, what else do they want to know?” she says when I ask how she manages to stay vulnerable. “A cool part of what I’m going through is the fact that everyone’s getting the chance to see me fuck up, but then also watch me improve. I don’t mind that they know about what I’m going through—it’s the least I can do, really. It’s like my job now.”
At a recent show, a girl in the front row sang along to “Bags,” weeping. Afterward, the fan and her friends were brought backstage to meet their hero. “When I see who’s standing outside at my shows, it’s young girls who may or may not be dealing with similar feelings,” Cottrill says. “I want to tell them that it will be fine if you’re in eighth grade and you like girls and you think they’re pretty—that’s something that should be celebrated.”
As I tuck into my bunk for the night, and we begin to roll through the middle of America, I search #Clairo on Instagram and start to scroll. There are worshipful accounts with names like @clairoheaven, @flamingclaire, and even @clairoaroundtheworld, which plops cut-out images of its idol in front of various international landmarks: a digital sea of fans who look to Claire Cottrill, and see themselves.
