Clairo reveals her new muses: the Beach Boys, Twiggy and Full-On Silliness

“I’m never on the West Coast,” Claire Cottrill, says the 26-year-old singer-songwriter known as Clairo when I reach her in a sunny Los Angeles hotel room. She has been there for a few days, rehearsing for her upcoming tour in support of her third album, Charm, which came out in July.

Cottrill will perform across the country over the next few months before heading to Europe in March. First, though, she's making two guest appearances: five nights at the legendary Fonda Theater in Los Angeles and five nights at Webster Hall in New York City. “I love going to those places because they're tight and humid and intimate and fun and loud,” she says, adding that she hopes to recreate the experiences she had there for her fans. “I just want to see people having a really good time in one of those rooms. I've only had good times there.”

You could say Cottrill's career started at home. As a teenager in Carlisle, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, she recorded covers on her computer. Her fame exploded in 2017 when a music video for her song “Pretty Girl,” shot in her childhood bedroom using Photo Booth, went viral. It now has more than 105 million views on YouTube. When I tell her that statistic, she can barely explain how it makes her feel. “I think the one thing I've always been really grateful for in my career is people's openness to me changing and releasing new songs,” she says. “I've never felt any resistance from my audience when it came to trying something new with an album.”

Charm, with its lush, '70s-inspired grooves is a far cry from the dreamy bedroom pop of her previous releases, but her fanbase has stayed loyal. Earlier this summer, “Juna” had a moment on TikTok, and today there are 1.3 million videos linked to it. One clip even inspired Cottrill to put together her first music video in six years. “I had stumbled upon this TikTok of this meme where someone was like, 'I hope she plays Juna.' And the other person was like, 'This is indie wrestling in Worcester, Massachusetts.' And then it shows wrestlers in slow motion just going at each other. I thought it was extremely funny, but I also thought the slow-motion wrestlers [set] to this song, which is incredibly beautiful. It felt like ballet to me.” The following week, she shot the music video, an experience she describes as “life-changing” and which she credits with helping her overcome her long-held aversion to creating visuals for her songs.

Cottrill began producing demos for charm while she was touring with her second album, Loop. “I think we were in Denmark or something. We were in an airport and I bought a Moleskine and wrote album notes in it. And then I just put [“Charm”] on the front of the book and I never really changed it.” Then she moved to upstate New York, met the producer Leon Michels—best known as the leader of the soul cinema group El Michels Affair—and got to work. “I wrote for three years straight, which was the longest it's ever taken me,” she says.

Working with a single producer is Cottrill’s modus operandi. Her 2019 debut, Immunity, was conceived with the founding member of Vampire Weekend Rostam, and for follow-up measures, Loop, She struggled with frequent Taylor Swift And Lana Del Rey Employees Jack Antonoff. “I like the consistency that comes with [working with] just one person,” she says. “The way I like to work, I have to really know a person to get to a point where I really feel comfortable trying new things and discovering a new sound.”