Following the release of her second studio album, My Lover, the fierce up-and-comer of bedroom pop, Claire Rosinkranz, returns to her childhood ballet theatre with the same discipline and dedication that went into the 13-song tracklist.
Claire Rosinkranz has been practicing ballet since she was three. So, when she waltzed into her alumna studio after a nearly five-year hiatus, no one batted an eye. Her ballet instructor explains to me that when Claire laces up her pointe shoes, it’s like not a day has passed; she can jump right in with the same poise, stamina and rhythm that makes her just as much a devoted and talented musician — and she wasn’t wrong.
Rosinkranz is a self-described perfectionist, “as are most artists,” she adds, and ballet’s heavily disciplined environment was her prominent reinforcer growing up. “The drive, the discipline, the persistence, just going over and over and over until it’s perfect,” says Rosinkranz, carried into the studio, where she works closely with her producers — one being her father, Icelandic composer Ragnar Rosinkranz — to make music that feels authentically to her, “like my journal.”
Her entire world was centered around music — both of her parents and her grandma are immersed in the industry — but there was a time that Rosinkranz went tête-à-tête with the idea of becoming a prima ballerina. Homeschooled and practically eating, sleeping and training at the studio, this wasn’t all that far-fetched for her, but instead of pursuing a life en pointe, the young dancer found herself drawn to the classical scores soundtracking each ballet session. “Hearing all of those melodies was part of the inspiration for making music,” she recalls.
At the youthful, yet wise-beyond-her-years age of 11, Claire was at a crossroads. The answer? Turning to a higher power. “I had a moment where I said, ‘Okay, I need to really focus my energy in one place because I want to be really good at it, and so I said, ‘God, am I gonna do music or dance?’” she admits. The Rosinkranz prodigy firmly heard “music” and made it her number one since.
“I would fill notebooks up—front and back — every single page,” she shares. “I was very OCD about this, front and back has to have a song: the verse, chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, but I didn’t put out my first thing until 15-years-old.” The teen songwriting awakening resulted in the release of “Best Friend” in 2019, followed by her game-changing single, “Backyard Boy,” in 2020, that chalked up a billion global streams and scored her an MTV Trending VMA for Best Breakthrough Song.
With the recent release of her second studio album, My Lover, it’s easy to admire how she’s kept up the momentum. “I don’t feel this way often, but recently I’ve thought, ‘Wow, my life is perfect,’” she laughs. “I feel very inspired, very excited, very motivated, and in a place where — it sounds a little cheesy — but I really just want to create and create and create and create; I’m hungry to create.”
Forward momentum for the bedroom-pop singer hasn’t come without its challenges, though. With detrimental health issues causing her to take a step down from the stage and tap into wellness and recovery in 2020. And lately, if she’s realized one thing from her whirlwind past tour dates, it’s to honor rest like it’s sacred. “The more internal side of what I’ve learned is you have to be very aware of taking care of yourself because it is a machine and it is a monster,” Rosinkranz shares of life on the road, which included touring alongside Maroon 5 on their “Love Is Like Tour.” “I know there are certain people who can just party, party, party and, totally be fine, but that’s not me.”
To pull good from the bad, overcoming her illness ended up being a driving force for a good half of her latest album. “Chronic” is a questioning, hard-hitting ballad that lyrically captures the confusion of illness. Lyrically speaking, she sings, “I wanna feel better, but something about being sick is easy twisted, comfortable/ Maybe I’m dying, so comfortable crying.”
Rosinkranz quite literally rooted the album in the metaphorical idea of a garden, where music serves as the soil for her creativity to blossom, and within that is nonlinear, theoretical “growth” and “death.” Upbeat moments like “My Lover” and “City” are the kind of euphoric, dance-in-the-kitchen or hands-out-the-car-window songs that Claire likens to the metaphorical blossoming and growing. Yet those high-highs can’t exist without valleys that allow for the process to keep cycling. “Both life and death can exist in the same place together and still be beautiful because of each other — you can’t have life without death and death without life,” as she puts it.
Leaning heavily into the metaphor of planting the album in time and place, Rosinkranz still imagines My Lover as an everlasting repertoire. “Being timeless is a really important thing for me going forward in my music,” she says, and not only when it comes to songs. Claire’s most cherished activities — horseback riding, surfing and par for the course, ballet — are her current pursuits that she feels she could do forever, but “what I think all of those have in common is they can be beautiful, feminine, delicate and sensitive, but you also have to have a lot of strength and a lot of discipline and a lot of drive.”
Much like her album — and her psyche, softness is met with an undercurrent of strength and authority. You’d hear it in the stirring, fast-paced “Crazy Bitch Song” in comparison to the brooding “Funeral” or in person, a 22-year-old singer-songwriter dressed in a dainty white tutu, leg warmers and ballet slippers hitting the barre with fierce, unwavering focus after deboarding a plane from the Big Apple just a day before.
“The dichotomy of woman?” I offer. “Exactly,” she echoes. “Dichotomy of Claire.”
My Lover is available everywhere now. Tickets to an upcoming show and more can be found here.
