walking upstream…
Clairo
sourcesRolling Stone — Clairo's Wide-Open Spaces (Joanie/Joni Mitchell, family influences) · The New Yorker — Clairo Believes in Charm as an Aesthetic and Spiritual Principle (Charm/Leon Michels, 'Bags' credit) · Honeycombers Hong Kong — Clairo discusses her biggest musical influences (direct Al Green quote)
In the summer of 2017, Claire Cottrill filmed a bedroom-pop song called 'Pretty Girl' on her laptop camera and uploaded it without much thought. The view count climbed "a few hundred, then a couple thousand," she recalls, "then it just… kept going." What followed was a career shaped less by genre than by producers: Rostam Batmanglij's glossy Auto-Tune on Immunity (2019), Jack Antonoff's hushed '70s folk-rock frame for Sling (2021), and Leon Michels's vintage soul on Charm (2024). Each record peeled back a little more lo-fi haze to reveal the record collection she grew up on — her father's soul singles, her mother's alternative records — until the bedroom-pop prodigy sounded, unmistakably, like a soul singer's daughter.
the sound in question
2017
Pretty GirlClairo
walk the tributaries ↓
Joni Mitchell1970s · Folk / Folk rock / Jazz
Clairo named her dog Joanie, after Joni Mitchell, and when she talks about Mitchell she drops the polite interview voice: "I think that she is absolutely one of the most brilliant songwriters ever," she says. "The intricate songwriting and the weird chords, the experimentation… She's an icon." She names 'Coyote,' the self-invented-tuning highlight of Mitchell's 1976 album Hejira, as her favorite Mitchell song, and credits it with giving her the confidence to write her own 'Blouse' — a spare character study, like Mitchell's, about being looked at rather than seen.
listen: upstream & heresource: NME — Clairo on Sling (Joni Mitchell / 'Coyote' and 'Blouse' quote) ↗
1976
CoyoteJoni Mitchell
2021
BlouseClairo
listen forPlay Mitchell's 'Coyote' from 1976: a talky, syncopated vocal riding a guitar tuned to her own private logic, more recitation than melody. 'Blouse' works the same way — it opens spare, Clairo's voice low and unhurried over just a piano, before letting phrases run long and conversational rather than building toward a hook. Both songs also share a lyrical move: singing about being watched, sized up, reduced to a body, from inside that gaze rather than protesting it from outside.
Vampire Weekend2010s · Indie rock / Baroque pop / Afropop-influenced indie
The jolt is still vivid for Clairo: "I remember listening to 'California English' for the first time and being like, Whaaaat?!" she says of the 2010 Vampire Weekend song. "That whole era was so important for music and so important for my upbringing with music." Years later she got to work with that song's co-writer, band member Rostam Batmanglij, who co-produced her 2019 debut Immunity, including the single 'Bags' — a fan's dream collaboration made real, on her own record, with the producer who first floored her.
listen: upstream & heresource: NME — The Big Read ↗
2010
California EnglishVampire Weekend
2019
BagsClairo
listen forListen for the deliberate wobble: on 'California English,' Vampire Weekend singer Ezra Koenig's voice runs through Auto-Tune until it warbles rather than corrects, an artificiality chosen over a breezy calypso bounce. 'Bags' doesn't Auto-Tune Clairo's voice, but it borrows the same impulse — the track builds to a peak of deliberately warped, pitch-bent guitar and piano, the studio's fingerprints left audible instead of smoothed away.
Al Green1970s · Soul / R&B / Gospel
Asked point-blank who her biggest musical influence was, Clairo didn't hedge: "My dad introduced me to soul music like Al Green, Brenton Wood, Billy Paul," she said, "my mom introduced me to alternative music like Cocteau Twins… I would say that I fall somewhere in between." That soul half of the ledger surfaces plainest on Charm (2024), the record she made with Leon Michels, a former member of the soul revivalist band Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, chasing the horn-driven warmth of Memphis's Hi Records, the label that built Green's early-70s sound.
listen: upstream & heresource: Pitchfork — Clairo Has Something to Prove (Immunity profile, Al Green/family background, Rostam collaboration) ↗
1972
Let's Stay TogetherAl Green
2024
JunaClairo
listen forGreen's 'Let's Stay Together' opens on a horn line — a clipped, off-beat brass hook riding over strings — before he ever sings, and his vocal, when it lands, stays smooth and understated rather than pushing. 'Juna' does its own version of that entrance: a mouth-trumpet hook that gives way to a real horn, with Clairo's voice held at the same conversational, unhurried register even as the rhythm section gets playful underneath her.