How the Beach Boys and Harry Nilsson Shaped Clairo’s Charm

Since 2020, Clairo has hosted a show on the internet radio platform NTS, where she fills her sets with folk and soul deep cuts. It’s become one of her favorite projects, and she takes it just as seriously as making her own music. “At times I feel like I’m a better listener than creator,” she says. “That used to bother me a lot, and now I feel totally fine with it. Putting those shows together, hopefully, over time, makes me a better artist.”

Clairo, the stage name of 25-year-old Claire Cottrill, has the ear of an old soul now, but she didn’t quite fit the part in 2017, when her cute, lo-fi song “Pretty Girl” broke out as a viral hit, fitting right into the era’s burgeoning bedroom-pop sound. Her 2019 debut Immunity gave a further glimpse into her tastes, taking after 21st-century rockers like Tame Impala and the Strokes along with turn-of-the-century R&B acts like SWV and D’Angelo. But she pivoted on her sophomore album, Sling, pursuing a softer sound inspired by the Laurel Canyon artists she’d long loved — Carole King, Harry Nilsson, the Carpenters — with help from producer Jack Antonoff.

On her latest album, Charm, Clairo pushes the sound of Sling somewhere richer and brighter. Though she used some of the same artists for inspiration (Blossom Dearie, the Beach Boys), this time she focused on the quirks in their catalogues, like Nilsson’s concept album turned animated soundtrack The Point! If these skilled musicians could make such whimsical records, Clairo could loosen up too. She went on to name the album Charm after a quality that many of her touch points had in common, one she realized she was going for too. “It’s a mixture of sweet and sexy and strong and soft and feminine and masculine.”

Harry Nilsson’s music is a little bit off-kilter, which I really appreciate. This record is the soundtrack to a movie,and I loved its animation style, the stories, the music. It just felt so playful and fun. I was always into it. Harry Nilsson has the capacity to make really hard-hitting, beautiful, heart-wrenching music, but also doesn’t take it that seriously. And that is what I was going for with Charm. I felt like Sling was a good exercise in being serious. I enjoyed that, but when I think about what I listen to or what I’m inspired by on a normal basis, it’s usually more upbeat and more playful. So it was time for me to let the pendulum go the other way.

I was put onto that record by some friends in high school, and it was so alien to me in terms of what I recognized the Beach Boys as. When you think of the Beach Boys, you think about “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Good Vibrations.” But then you delve into Smiley Smile — I mean, “Vegetables” and “Little Pad,” those songs are amazing. The laughing in “Little Pad” was so iconic to me. It confused me too, these people who I consider to be geniuses making music that seemed so silly. But the more that I listen to it and the more years I have with it, the more I realize that it’s an extension of the genius. It’s not a waste of time to be silly.

I played saxophone in middle school, but I never really thought much about it until I was making Sling. We had talked a lot about Disney soundtracks, like Bambi, and the arrangements themselves, which were so whimsical. I was obsessed with merging that with the Carpenters and having these wild arrangements with some structure of pop music.

Then working with Leon Michels on Charm, he has flutes and clarinets just lying around the studio, and if you want those on the song, he can do it in five minutes. Which is part of the reason I wanted to pick those up and be able to play them myself, because how fun is it to be able to immediately put clarinet or flute or saxophone onto a song you’re working on? It was always in the moment. I don’t think it was ever thought out too much.

On tour, we had gone to Salt Lake City, and my drummer and I were walking around town, and we spotted this Scottish-themed store. We walked in and there was an entire wall of tin whistles, and I just picked one. That whistle ended up on so many demos. I’ve had friends give me more tin whistles and now I have this large box of them, which I’m very proud of. But they didn’t make it onto the record until this one song called “Add Up My Love.” I’m happy it was immortalized there.

His solo work in El Michels Affair, like Adult Themes and Yeti Season, is incredible. They’re so otherworldly, the sounds he was able to create and the types of structures he was putting in his music. Then looking further back into what he’s worked on, like Lana’s Ultraviolence, but also making a whole record with Black Thought — I appreciated his versatility as a producer and artist. Working with Leon changed my perspective and changed my world so much, especially because we were doing so much of the album live. We focused a lot on performance and the energy in the room.

There’s a song called “Slow Dance.” I had done the vocals within minutes of them creating the arrangement. I rerecorded them about three times, but we decided that the first ones were better, even if they weren’t technically the best. The performance that mattered was there. I then started to think more about how imperfections might translate the feeling in the room or the feeling that I was really feeling. When I make demos on my own, I’m very militant about getting the right vocal and making sure the double track sounds the exact same and just making sure they’re the tightest, best takes I could have. The M.O. of what Leon was always trying to get across was, “Play what you want, and do what you want to do.”

I don’t even know if I can put into words how much that place means to me. There’s something really special about it. It makes me feel happy and normal. It takes three days to set up the room, and it’s not perfect-sounding, but it’s perfect to me. We work in the studio all day and then we break for lunch, or we all have dinner together and we go back in the studio and write more. Everyone can come in and out of the room and it feels like this very natural, creative space. It doesn’t necessarily feel like you have to make music. You can peel off and make a meal or call somebody or go for a walk and come back when you feel like it. The moment I’m in a room where it feels like the only thing to do is make music, I don’t want to do it. I’m essentially just living and making music on the side, even if the entire point of the trip is to make music.

Her album Take a Picture is incredible, and so many of those songs are perfect, but there’s something so intriguing about the way that they’re on 27 Demos. I prefer that record to the official one. Her vocals feel close and they’re so whispery, but they’re also kind of sensual without trying, which I find charming. I wrote down her name very early on in the process of making this record, because she has one of those voices that draws you in and feels sensual without her ever really addressing it. Also, her silliness and playfulness on some of those songs, like “I’d Like to See the Bad Guys Win,” which is so funny and really weird. I also love how complex those arrangements are. They’re impossible to play. I tried covering one of them with Leon, and we were so shocked about how many chords there were, even when it didn’t feel like it because it’s so breezy when you’re listening.

I love Sly Stone so much. Again, an incredible example of a person that is so moving in his songs, but also is not a stranger to fun and humor. I think his narration style is hilarious. I was always afraid that if I consumed too much about a band that maybe it would take the magic away, but his memoir was fun. And reading it in his voice was a nice way to go back to those records and be like, Wow, they had no idea what was going to happen when Fresh came out. One chapter starts with him talking about how they’re working on Fresh, and you’re like, Holy shit. It’s such an exciting feeling.

Also, when I read further into people’s discographies, you see how much effort it took for them to find their groove and to fall into a thing that they’re known for. Sly’s run of albums between There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Fresh, and Small Talk is insane. You can feel the shift from There’s a Riot Goin’ On to Small Talk, in terms of them figuring something out. I have no idea when I figured something out in my own life. I won’t know until a lot later. But it’s really cool to look at other people’s lives and see that it took a few times, or that they figured something else out later on. It makes me feel better about dedication. You just have to keep moving, because you genuinely won’t know until later that something shifted. I can get in my head about how every record sounds different or about how I’m constantly pivoting. There are times where I can be like, Am I not seeing something through fully? But I’m moving in the direction that I want to move in at that moment in my life.

When I started thinking about what all these influences had in common — the Beach Boys, Harry Nilsson, Margo Guryan, Blossom Dearie — it’s that you can’t really put your finger on them. Being silly and serious, being sensual but kind of far away. There’s this aura of mysterious energy around all of them that brings you in. And to me, that’s extremely charming. There’s this balance between all of those artists that is alluring.

Also, that’s what happens when two people meet. There’s a level of mystery. It’s this cloud that you can’t really see through, but you’re really interested in knowing more. I tried to tread those lines with this record. There’s songs that are sad to me but have a level of humor in them. Instead of thinking back on relationships or situations that I could write a sad song about, what if I wrote a song that was upbeat? That was a cool challenge. The record is a bubbling mixture of fleeting moments between people and how it left me, and then romanticizing the rest of it and making it up in my head, because it’s more charming to me for there to be some of what I know and some of what I’m making up. And some sadness and some fun and some serious and some not so serious.

The animated adaptation of The Point, directed by Fred Wolf, first aired on ABC in 1971. Dustin Hoffman narrated the initial airing of the film, but Ringo Starr narrates later releases.

Michels played synthesizer, piano, mellotron, percussion, and tenor saxophone on parts of the album, which was produced by his Arcs bandmate Dan Auerbach.

The upstate New York recording studio where Clairo recorded Sling and Charm.