Clairo and Frankie Cosmos’ Mutual Admiration Society

On a sticky night in the summer of 2015, Claire Cottrill played one of her first-ever proper shows, opening for her musical hero Greta Kline’s project, Frankie Cosmos. “I remember seeing Greta carrying her guitar into the venue and freaking out,” says Cottrill, who was just 16 at the time, and scored the gig after personally contacting Kline via email. “I had been religiously listening to her music. It was such a big moment for me.” 

Kline recalls that night at Massachusetts’ Cambridge Elks Lodge too, how the inside of her guitar fogged up from the humidity of the DIY space. She also remembers a brief encounter with Cottrill’s mom: “She was like, ’Claire won’t let us stay for the show, we’re gonna go drive around.’ It was really cute.”

Back then, Kline had already built up a catalog of self-recorded indie pop gems on her Bandcamp page. Her clever, aching, and often self-effacing miniatures empowered a generation of young artists to experiment with songwriting. Cottrill was one of Kline’s acolytes, and by the time she played that fateful opening set, she was starting to fill out her own Bandcamp page with hissy, heartbroken songs—including a cover of Frankie Cosmos’ “Leonie.” Two years later, as Clairo, Cottrill released a synth-pop ditty about losing yourself in longing called “Pretty Girl,” which skyrocketed her to viral fame and changed her life forever.

Fast forward to this September, when Cottrill celebrated the release of her third Clairo album, Charm, with a sold-out, five-night residency at Manhattan’s Webster Hall. The shows’ opener: Frankie Cosmos. “I’ve looked up to her for so long, it felt perfect,” says Cottrill of the full-circle moment. 

The pair, who both also contributed covers to a forthcoming tribute album honoring the cult songwriter Margo Guryan, caught up again via video several weeks after the shows. Cottrill spoke from backstage before a show in Austin, while Kline was in her New York apartment.

What do you appreciate about each other as songwriters? 

Claire Cottrill: Greta has always been herself, and that was the coolest thing for someone like me to come across as a teenager. I was so unsure of myself and didn’t know who I was at all, and I wouldn’t know for a long time. But being a fan of Greta was the first thing that made me feel seen. Also, simplicity and silliness and genius all in one song is everything to me, and still is. Being able to be profound and matter-of-fact is really hard to do! Frankie Cosmos made me feel like I could try to write songs, no matter how short or long, and just put them out. So I tried.

Greta Kline: You also are very true to yourself. You have this audience as if you’re a pop star, but you’re showing them actually cool music—no offense to pop, which also can be interesting! But you took this opportunity and decided to make this really beautiful, harmonic music. It’s really sick to see young people liking that. It’s almost like you’re teaching them about music history, because that type of music is not the zeitgeist of 2024. And that is the epitome of being yourself, being like, I’m gonna make the music I’m gonna make. There’s some young person looking up to you and realizing that they can make music that sounds unique to their taste and still have great success. It’s inspiring to me to know that that can still happen, because it’s a freaky industry to be in. 

Claire: You have no idea how much that means to me, coming from you. It’s really fucking tough to to put out music as the person you are, and the way you did that was revolutionary for me.

You both have passionate fan bases. How do you set boundaries? 

Greta: There are so many people who have kissed me without my consent, grabbed me, rubbed my head—just weird, boundaryless people. I’ve become a tiny bit agoraphobic; you find ways to cope. I’m sure Claire has it much worse than me.

Claire: It’s the same shit. I have had really crazy interactions with people wanting to kiss or pull me, all those things. I think it has a lot to do with how you portray yourself online. When I was younger, my energy was like, Hey, let’s hang out! The more private I am, the more people inherently respect it. It’s gotten slightly easier, because I don’t really post or interact with people on the internet anymore. But there are moments where people will chase me down the street. I leave the house a lot less often nowadays.

Greta: We both write really personal songs, and they make people think that they know us, or that we’re their friend. Beautiful interactions can come out of it. I’ve had so many amazing people who get it and express the way the music has reached them, and that can be very meaningful. It’s a balance between the way you present yourself on the internet and the way you present yourself in your music. 

For a period of time it made me want to put up a wall and write vaguer, less personal songs. Claire, has this affected how you write songs?

Claire: Yeah. For a second, I was really worried that it was going to get in the way of good music coming from me. I think there are benefits to being creatively vague, because then anyone can relate to what you are saying in a way that maybe they couldn’t if it was hyper-specific. But sometimes it’s sad to not be as specific as you’d like to be. I’ve gotten to a point where my stories, and the people in those stories, are mine, and I refuse to give them up. But I can talk about the feeling. I don’t need to completely air it out the way that I would in conversation. 

Greta: It’s definitely made me more private, not just in songs, but in life. I’m never going to say who my partner is on the internet again, basically. People love information and gossip, and I do it too. It’s natural!

Claire: I was a Frankie Cosmos superfan! I was probably one of those people who was freaking you the fuck out! Now that I’ve experienced it, though, I understand why it can be difficult.

Greta: I did a lot of writing about stuff going on in my life, and yet it still felt like nobody knew the reality of my life. The lore that I was selling was overpowering the actual experience. It made me realize that it doesn’t matter what you say in the song, because people are going to get it wrong anyway.

Claire: As a teenager, I was living in a small town and was obsessed with everything that was happening in New York. I was looking at Greta and her entire friend group, wanting to look like you, wanting to make music like you. I was doing the thing that teenagers do, mimicking something that you really love out of respect but also maybe as a ticket out of whatever situation you’re in. 

Did it ever feel weird to have your life and music and friend group commodified?

Greta: I got to see a very special scene flourish in New York. Scenes are really interesting, because even the people in them all feel a little bit like observers of a moment. Your experience of seeing this thing happening in New York when you were a teenager was probably not that different from my experience of being there. Music is just one of those things that requires community. You don’t have to make music with other people, but it helps to have other people to play shows with and support you. Obviously the shows at Webster Hall weren’t DIY, but it did feel like an extension of the same thing, where Claire brought in her friend from the scene. Having an opportunity and sharing it, that’s what music communities are.

What have you both learned from being the opening act across your careers?

Claire: I don’t consider myself to be a natural performer, so having to win people over when I don’t even want to be on stage myself is hilarious—it’s like “me neither” vibes. But at the same time, people can receive and understand you in surprising places. My first tour was opening for Dua Lipa, and I didn’t think there would be any crossover, but there are still people that come to my shows now that say they saw me then, which is really cool.

Greta: I also don’t feel like a natural performer. Maybe we both have that thing of, Oops, I just ended up here—which is the only way to cope with performing.

I want to point out Claire and her band’s current ritual of coming on stage and sharing some wine before they start playing. It reads to me like you are deciding that you are just hanging out with your friends, and that’s a way of making it more comfortable to be on stage.

Claire: That’s exactly why I did it, to reclaim the show, because audiences can be very demanding at certain points, yelling things, which can be fun but other times you’re like, How do I wrangle this in? So starting the set like that allots us four minutes of essentially ignoring the audience, which I think is really funny. The whole band gets to become comfortable being on stage, and then we start. It helps me take inventory of where I am and where the people are. We are doing it for the audience, but we’re also doing it for us.

How do you evolve as individuals and artists, publicly and privately, when some fans are inclined to hold you to an idealized or outdated version of yourself?

Claire: Both of us were incredibly young and impressionable when we were first noticed, and that plagued me for so long. I was so jealous of bands that got the chance to hone their sound and know their vision, and then something happened. I always assumed I’d be posting online and starting bands and doing other things for a long time before anything happened. 

And I do think I’m a person that would have been better as a member of a band that is not someone’s name. My way of getting past that is that every project needs to sound really different from the other ones—in a normal way, not a way of making it different so that people don’t like it.

Greta: I’m always quoting this line, which I read in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets: “No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” We just finished tracking a new record, and there’s a song on it that we kept referring to as having “that Zentropy swag” because it’s from a demo from 2015. It’s not even a sonic reference, it’s a vibe, and the song is so old it feels like it was written by someone else. But you can learn stuff from your past self and look at her with love and be like, That poor Zentropy-swag Frankie, she was so confused, let’s give her song some 2024 nurturing.

Claire: That’s something I’ve been trying to learn, that you don’t need to completely disown every version of yourself.