Clairo: "I want everyone who's listening to know who I am and not just see me as this singer. I want them to feel connected to my story."

[On the past]

Clairo: "It’s hard not to romanticize it. I feel like romanticizing almost everything after it’s passed."

Clairo: “I think that’s probably one of my favourite parts about making music – being able to share experiences and have some camaraderie together. I didn’t know how to go about that for a long time, but I’m really lucky to have met so many amazing musicians.”

Clairo: "My friends started making music, and then I started making covers because I was like, 'I don't have anything to write, but I like music.' So I would just cover Frank Ocean songs."

Clairo: "It keeps me from getting too overwhelmed about the industry when I can just do my math homework."

Clairo: "It's really weird being placed into something like that because it was never an intention to make bedroom pop. I was just making music. All the people that have that genre placed on them are not the first people to have a home studio and and post it on the Internet."

Clairo: "Making music has always made me happy. When I go through a situation, the best way for me to get over it is to bundle up all of my emotions about it, put it in a little shell, create something, and then let it go."

Clairo: "It's crazy to feel like you have to sell yourself and just, like, be almost... marketable. I'd never thought of it that way."

Clairo: "I do think that [...] I'm at a point where I'm catching up to myself. And... I feel a lot happier. I'm creating healthy boundaries in my life and I'm doing things for myself instead of hoping that they'll happen some time in the near future. [...] Making choices that aren't based on [how] anybody else [feels] but how I feel."

Clairo: "Its almost impossible to memorize one song because of all the lyrics are like a stream of consciousness"

Clairo: “It’s easy to confess things when you’re writing. There’s no embarrassment – it just is what it is. It’s the same thing as not being embarrassed to tell your problems to a therapist because they can help you understand why something happened, or work through things with you.”

Clairo: "We all kind of dreamed about being musicians, but the narrative around being a musician is it'll never happen to you. It's not something that just happens - one in a million shot - all those things that just make you feel like it'll never happen."

Clairo: "It was really cool to hear a record that had both of their strengths together yet its still really different."

[On wanting to ensure comfort and safety at her shows for fans]

Clairo: “I’m lucky that [misconduct] never happened to me, but experiencing some of that in my adult life, I can’t believe how brave I was to go to shows by myself and be so carefree. If I can’t provide this [security] on tour, then I won’t tour – that’s my mentality at the moment.”

Clairo: "I never want to be one of those artists who feels untouchable and extraordinary. I have to be genuine."

Clairo: "I'm someone that needs to talk about my problems. I call my mom every single day at school just to vent about random stuff. Singing is the same thing."

Clairo: "I'm still writing from personal experiences, which is what people connected with in the first place."

Clairo: "I think being at home with my family during quarantine helped me figure that out. It was the first time that I actually got a break from touring and gave me a chance to reconfigure a lot of the things that weren’t working for me. There was no time to reconsider or re-evaluate any kind of boundaries or limits I wanted for myself. I realized that there were so many things I needed to adjust, like touring less and requiring certain days off—just little things here and there that will help my experience moving forward so that I don’t end up feeling sad and empty, which I had been for a while. Without that time off, I don’t think I ever would’ve been able to stop and think about the things I needed to change."

[On taking antidepressants]

Clairo: “They don’t make me happy, they just control the sadness for a while. [When I first started taking them] I was like, ‘This just sucks because I just feel neutral and it’s not making me feel better.'”

Clairo: “The conversations I had with my mom about motherhood, and the things she sacrificed for us, are really important to me. Also, it’s like you don’t actually know who your mother is before she’s Mom, before she’s Wife, because there isn’t a huge documentation of who she was as an individual. And I realised that I might be in the period of my life now where I’m in my individual phase: before I am Mom, before I am Wife, or whatever I end up being. It was a bit scary to recognise that I could eventually have a family, and then this whole identity that I’ve had on my own for a long time can, in some ways, disappear.”

[On getting a dog]

Clairo: “By getting Joanie, I realised that domestic life is very comforting for me and a huge chunk of what was missing.”

Clairo: “Quarantine was just really strange and terrible for [people with] mental health issues – no one really knew what to do and I think that made it even worse. Writing that song helped me and I’m glad that people enjoyed it because I don’t think it would have ended up on the record unless people asked for it.”

[On getting a dog]

Clairo: “If anyone ever came up to me and presented the idea to me, I would have been like, ‘You’re crazy – I’m young, I’m gonna be all over the place’. I was too scared to even think that domesticity could be something I crave.”

Clairo: "I felt like I needed to be a 'pretty girl' for someone else. I felt like I needed to change a lot about who I actually was to be perfect for them instead of just being who I am genuinely."

Clairo: "I was thinking, 'Do I have kids because it’ll make everyone happy? Would it make me happy? Do I even want kids? Is this the right climate for kids?' I know it’s too soon to think about kids—at least for me—but these questions were all crossing my mind for the first time. 'Reaper' ended up becoming the first song on Sling, and the album just started expanding from there. I was spending a lot of time with my mom and thinking about the sacrifices that mothers and parents in general make."

Clairo: “To me, that record merged my two worlds for Sling. I wanted that warm 70s feeling, but also I was thinking so much about kids, and especially the clumsy, sweet kid that Joanie embodies.”

Clairo: “The lack of knowledge I have about who my mum was before she was married or had children is really interesting and it made me think, ‘Am I in the period of my life before I have the relationship and the children? Is this the part of my life that my children won’t know very well?’”

[On coming come during the lockdown]

Clairo: “My older sister came home as well. And I found it interesting that no matter how much you’ve progressed as an adult in your own life, the family roles revert back to exactly how it was as a kid.”

[On navigating “a universe designed against my own beliefs” on the song, Bambi]

Clairo: “[The attitude is] ‘There’s a lot more that we can squeeze out of her before she’s done.’ Because I think that what this industry does a lot is drain young women of everything until they’re not youthful any more.”

Clairo: “It’s so awful that it took something like lockdown happening for me to reevaluate how I wanted to move forward. But it’s now about putting my mental health first, because I deserve to have nice things that I do care about. [Things] outside of music, like a house and a dog.”

Clairo: “‘Little Changes’ is a big deal to me because it was the first time where I acknowledged that I had depression, that it was a huge part of my life and that it may never go away.”

Clairo: "I had moved around my whole life. That was the one thing that was always so hard."

[On meeting Taylor Swift]

Clairo: “I was so shocked – but instead of us both standing up, I crouched down with her, so we were both on the floor talking to each other. It looked so ridiculous. No one could talk to me after that happened, I was crying so much.”

Clairo: "'Blouse' was the last song I wrote for Sling, in March of 2021. It actually replaced another song that I wasn’t sure about. I wanted it to be the first song people heard off the record because I feel like it requires the least amount of context and describes an experience that I think a lot of people can understand. It’s an experience I didn’t necessarily wanna talk about but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. It’s a song that I really needed to write, and doing so made me recognize some strength that I have in myself."