American singer-songwriter Claire Cottrill was born in Atlanta, Georgia on August 18th, 1998, and was raised in Carlisle, Massachusetts, the daughter of marketing executive Geoff Cottrill. From the age of 3 on Clairo displayed a distinct gift for writing songs, and by the time she was a teenager had taught herself Pro Tools, a digital audio home workstation cum music studio, recording, editing, and mastering the songs she had written in her bedroom — not to mention, creating the videos to accompany her songs.
Clairo first drew widespread attention in late 2017 when the video for her feminist song Pretty Girl went viral on YouTube. The song was later recorded for an indie rock compilation benefiting the Transgender Law Centre. At the time, Clairo drew the attention of filmmaker Crystal Moselle — best known for her award-winning documentary The Wolfpack, the tale of six cloistered brothers and their unusual upbringing, raised in near-total isolation in a public housing complex on New York’s Lower East Side.
On the subway riding into New York one day, Moselle ran across a group of skater girls heading into the city, and opened a conversation with them. Within the year, Moselle began work on her début fiction film, Skate Kitchen, an empowering coming-of-age portrait of six young women on wheels, and a touching ode to the rewards and challenges of female friendship — asking Clairo to score and record the soundtrack for the film, as well as write and record a song for both the film, and the film’s trailer.
Clairo, her song Heaven, recorded for Crystal Moselle’s Skate Kitchen film soundtrack
And now Clairo has a new album, Sling, the second full-length release for the pop chanteuse, a luminous and devastatingly intimate lo-fi portrait and pandemic-induced exercise in reflection, the new record finding the singer-songwriter meditating on her own self-growth, and the quiet frustration of living in isolation. Expanding her sound with grace and subtlety, employing an instrumental palette including flutes, saxophones and a string section — with the support of co-producer Jack Antonoff — the concluding, gut punch coda on the album has the 23-year-old making a winking joke, and a dead-serious personal statement on aging, and feeling older than you ought to.
The coda to Clairo’s new album, Sling, the song Management, a dead-serious personal reflection on “aging”, and the meaning behind becoming an adult in our troubled world.
Cat Zhang writes in her review of Sling, in Pitchfork magazine online …
“On Blouse, the hushed lead single of Clairo’s new album, Sling, the little thrills of adolescence are gone. “Why do I tell you how I feel/When you’re just looking down the blouse?” she sings, the dewy sincerity she once radiated now hardened into bitterness. Here is another young woman whose trust has been abused by an older man, and who is so hungry to be validated that she’ll risk being sexualized again: “If touch could make them hear, then touch me now.” It’s brutal to realize when you’re young that the ogling curiosity older people regard you with is not the same as respect, and getting attention does not mean having real agency.”
Since she stumbled into fame in 2017, and not entirely of her own volition, Clairo has been narrowly interpreted through the prism of her generation — keywords: viral, YouTube, bedroom pop, bisexuality — as an avatar for sensitive youths more comfortable online than outside, and who speak frankly about their feelings. On Sling, you feel her sense of exhaustion.
The song Blouse, from Clairo’s sophomore July 2021 album release, Sling.
Harbor, a short film edited by Clairo, from Noah Baumbach’s film, Marriage Story.
Clairo, in concert in Vancouver Monday, March 28, 2022, at the Orpheum.
