Attention, Clairo Hive: after three years of leaving her fan-favorite track, “Sofia,” off her setlist, the singer-songwriter has “squashed all the beef” with the song. Clairo gave me the scoop for her stunning aquatic cover of Seventeen when we FaceTimed ahead of her highly-anticipated Coachella comeback. Of course, I did my due diligence by asking about her rocky relationship with the song, and dear reader, she truly delivered.
But before we get into any of that, let’s get into some Clairo lore. When the singer (also known as Claire Cottrill) dropped “Sofia” in 2019, she explained the meaning behind the song on social media and admitted it was “about my first ever crushes on women i saw in the media.” She added, “This was my way of making a celebratory song about this discovery while maintaining the cheesy/corny lyrics you'd normally find in songs where you profess your love.”
Read Clairo’s full ‘Seventeen’ cover story
Over the years, the song gained traction and eventually became one of her most listened-to songs on Spotify with almost 863 million streams. Clairo peeled back and stopped singing it at live shows for three years—that is, until Charli XCX brought it out of her for a joint performance at Australia’s Laneway Music Festival in February.
“It’s so funny—I didn’t think people would mind that I didn’t play it, but it became a problem. I got myself into a pickle,” she said during her Seventeen interview.
The “Juna” hitmaker continued, “We played a few shows, and she told me she watched my set the day before. But she was like, ‘Where’s ‘Sofia’?’”
She kept it real with Charli and expressed her frustration with performing the track “a lot.”
“Then we came up with the idea to play it together. I was like, ‘Well, if anyone can make me sing it again, I think it would be you, Miss Charli,’” Clairo added. “So we planned on it and had no sound check. We sort of winged it and it was awesome.”
Shortly after they took the stage together, Clairo posted a TikTok set to the song and wrote, “I’m not bitter anymore.”
As the artist keeps gaining an audience, she told me what it was like to witness her growth while revisiting past work and making new music. “It’s nice having three records that feel like certain moments in my life,” she said before acknowledging her 2019 debut album, Immunity, and her 2021 album, Sling.
“I was 20 years old when I made Immunity, and then I got existential and made this second record where I was so scared of things that the girl on the third album wasn’t even thinking about,” she shared. “Especially with ‘Sofia’ recently, I feel like I’ve squashed all the beef I have with some of my past songs because people have their own connection to them. So what’s the point of not acknowledging them?”
I think we could do it if we tried... if ‘it’ was solidifying “Sofia” with a permanent place on Clairo’s setlist moving forward.
