Clairo on Her First Grammy Nomination, ‘Clairo Shade,’ and the Song Her Mom Wasn’t Sure About

Mom has since grown to love Charm, like any fan acclimating to a favorite artist’s new direction. Every Clairo release has tacked away from what she’s done before—the largely acoustic Sling, recorded on vintage equipment and inspired by the Carpenters and Pet Sounds, was entirely unlike her 2019 debut Immunity, the sound of a teenager with a MacBook grappling with her identity and processing the emotional swells of adolescence. Charm, released this past July, was an even bigger departure. Recorded mostly live—with help from Leon Michels, a founding member of the Dap-Kings who Clairo hit up on Instagram—it takes cues from Harry Nilsson and ‘70s soul music. The Beach Boys, whose Pet Sounds was among the touchstones for Sling, are still on the moodboard, but this time the specific references were the band’s more singer-songwriterly mid-period albums Smiley Smile and Sunflower.

“I don’t want to get bored, for sure,” Clairo says. “It’s like a fun exercise or challenge as well, to see what else you’re capable of. If you’re a lover of music like I am, there’s so many different types of music that influence you, and it’s fun to tap into different parts of that inspiration.”

Even the cover reflects the internal progress she’s made and the maturation—both personal and artistic—she’s undergone. While her face has appeared on the cover of every Clairo release since her first EP, diary 001, this is the first time she’s used a photograph of herself staring directly at the camera, as if to say, Here I am. This is me.

“You let life breathe a little bit, and then you just find yourself listening to X, Y, or Z, and now you want to make something that feels like that,” she says. “The goal is to paint a large picture of the person I am, the things that ground me, and the songs that inspire me. I’m only three albums in, so it’s sort of hard for me to fill an entire painting of who I am, what makes sense to me, what was intentional, and what I’m capable of. That’s hard to fully express in a few albums. I’m going to need a lifetime! But it is fun to see now that Charm is out, that I am capable of new things. It provides this bigger picture for me, and maybe listeners, that I have many sides to myself.”

To that chameleonic point, Clairo popped up in a somewhat unlikely place this autumn and adapted seamlessly. In October, she joined Freddie Gibbs on stage for the rapper’s ten-year anniversary performance of his beloved album Piñata, lending her voice to songs like “Crime Pays” and “Robes” at the Greek Theater. “They asked me to play. I was like, ‘Oh, I’d love to play tambourine.’ I wasn’t too bad at it,” she shrugs. “That kind of morphed into background vocals. It was hilarious and maybe unexpected to some, but I love rap music, and it was a really fun time. I am really happy it happened.”