Little changes lyrics clairo7/24/2023 The quietness and occasional opaqueness of Sling remind me of a recurring complaint about Clairo’s stage presence, that she’s too withdrawn and timid to reach her audience. There are real risks here: that the music is so understated and tasteful it becomes a snooze, that in wisening up you lose the gleam in your eyes. “I blocked out the month of February for support/At least I have this year I won’t be worrying anyone on tour/…I throw my drink into the faces of my demise,” she sings on the pastoral, lullaby-like “Just for Today.” By her own admittance, all but Sling’s single needs “constant context” she seems content for some of this knowledge to be hers alone. Here, Clairo is often alone, picking at knottier and more specific anxieties. But her prior songs were low-voiced conversations with other people, or at least her imagination of them-“Sofia, know that you and I/Shouldn’t feel like a crime,” she sang-and their simplicity afforded them a kind of openness. (From “Zinnias”: “Got a cold piece of information to bring to you, said ‘Sorry but I can’t stay here while we wait for June.’”) Clairo has always been an insular artist, attuned to the nuances of private thought. The granular and incisive lyrics are further proof of her songwriting talent, but they can also be harder to penetrate. Her songs are wordier than ever before, etched with proper nouns and specificities-her friend Claud, the Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody, the Syracuse intersection of Comstock and Waverly. For Clairo, Sling was a necessity: “This record has changed everything for me, because I was fully going to quit music,” she told Rolling Stone. You can read the album, like many artists’ second projects, as an attempt to prove seriousness and maturation, to illustrate depth beyond what initially made her famous. In place of the heady ambiguities of young love are themes that Clairo once believed were “too emotional or intense to unravel”: “Motherhood, sexualization, mental health, and a lot of my own mistakes and regrets,” as she wrote in a recent newsletter. Nothing really resembles a “hit” the only single, the aforementioned “Blouse,” sounds like Elliott Smith's “ Say Yes” tucked away in a sleepy winter cabin. Recorded in the mountains of upstate New York with Jack Antonoff, Sling features vocal harmonies that sound like gleaming sighs, bluesy electric guitar whines, and plenty of minor key piano. ![]() If it took Taylor Swift until her eighth album to retreat to the woods and return with a muted, elegant folk collection, then Clairo is far ahead of the curve. “Mitchell told me I should be just fine,” she foreshadowed on the last record now she’s stepping up to the mantle. Sling is her ’70s singer-songwriter album, the work of an old soul raised on Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and the Carpenters. ![]() And so, shrugging off the pressure to embody the future, she instead turns back the clock, embracing the touchstones of the past. On Sling, you sense her exhaustion with this framing: “‘She’s only 22,’” she quotes anonymous commentators on closer “Management,” a song about feeling depleted by her career. Since she stumbled into fame in 2017, and not entirely of her own volition, Clairo has been narrowly interpreted through the prism of her generation-keywords: viral, YouTube, bedroom pop, POLLEN, bisexuality-as an avatar for sensitive youths more comfortable online than outside, and who speak frankly about their feelings. It is brutal to realize, when you’re young, that the ogling curiosity with which older people regard you is not the same as respect, and getting attention does not mean having real agency.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |