![]() ![]() I don’t wanna be in the conversation until I know what I have to say. “Everyone’s asking me all these questions about my sexuality and I’m not sure what those answers are yet. She still doesn’t like addressing her sexuality head on. It was the first song I ever explicitly wrote about a girl,” she says. “Bags” was the first song I ever wrote that I would totally listen to. “It was a good thing.” It was also a good thing for Cottrill’s creative confidence. The bags are also just Cottrill’s emotional baggage, which she explores throughout Immunity. The melody reminds of ‘90s alt radio: Marcy Playground’s “Sex And Candy” meets The Cardigans. The drum pattern is like a heartbeat skipping to the next scene, rising with fresh hopes only to fall as they’re dashed once more. The titular bags of the song are a reference to the final lyric of the chorus: “I guess this could be worse-walking out the door with your bags.” It’s about choosing to not express your feelings for someone and keeping them in your orbit, because it’s better than never seeing them again, or being rejected. “But I think she knew that it was about her,” she says. Again, her dimples crease at the thought. They’re supposed to feel like a stamp of that time.” When Cottrill showed this girl the song, she didn’t say anything. “It felt like the first time where I really listened to what was happening around me and tried to put it in a song. There it is on the screen: “BAGS (1)”.īefore Danielle Haim drummed on “Bags”, and before Rostam Batmanglij produced “Bags”, “Bags” sounded very close to the “Bags” you now know. She proves it by pulling up her iPhone and playing the original demo that she made alone. Her voice was “shitty” because she was sick. She wrote all the words in one sitting, and recorded the vocals and guitars. “The whole writing process was me writing songs every day till I’d get to a point where I’d have to connect with one song more than the other ones I’d written.” She’d written 40 ideas before she got to “Bags”. She played “Motion Sickness” on guitar, deconstructing it, then re-constructing it as a new piece of work. She did what she always did when she was learning to write songs at the age of 15, locked away in her bedroom in Carlisle, Massachusetts. The song is called “Bags”-the cornerstone of her debut album, Immunity. “I kinda knew she meant that it should be about us, but she didn’t explicitly say it,” she says, the ambiguity still lingering. Cottrill, now 21, went home after their hang. You should make it about me!’” Cottrill’s dimples widen as she laughs this memory off. ![]() I wish I could write a song like this.’ And she turned to me and said, ‘You should write a Phoebe Bridgers song. “I was like, ‘This song means everything to me. “We were listening to it for the 12th time in a row,” recalls Cottrill now at a cafe in LA’s Echo Park. As Cottrill and the girl she was seeing repeated the song, Cottrill would sigh with envy. “Motion Sickness” is a diss song Bridgers wrote about older troubadour Ryan Adams, who she would later out in the New York Times as an emotional abuser. “I have emotional motion sickness/ Somebody roll the windows down. There are no words in the English language/ I could scream to drown you out.” One day, they were driving, and listening to “Motion Sickness” by LA songwriter Phoebe Bridgers on repeat. It was the type of situation that can lead to obsession as she’d dissect the tiniest of glances, or the tone of passing words. This was Claire Cottrill (aka Clairo)’s experience one summer, as she spent time with a girl. They’re singing along to Joni Mitchell (“Blue”, of course), driving into the timewarp of Laurel Canyon, veering between a loyal kinship they have with one another and flickers of romance-a hormonal tension at the heart of intense companionship. Two teenage girls are riding in a car in Los Angeles. ![]()
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