The day after the Oklahoma City concert, we wake up in the sun-beaten parking lot of a Sheraton on the outskirts of Kansas City, Missouri. There’s no show today, and Cottrill, her band, managers, and crew each do their own thing: sleep, laundry, scam a local hot yoga studio for a free class. Despite the city’s legendary barbecue offerings, Cottrill wants to eat someplace familiar, so we head to Panera Bread. The subterranean lunch spot is mostly empty, aside from a Guy Fieri look-alike who wanders around offering blessings. With our soup and sandwich specials ordered, we crawl into a booth to discuss the unlikely moment that put Cottrill on arena stages, playing to teens who look up to her with starry-eyed reverence.

Originally recorded on GarageBand for a cassette compilation that was limited to 250 copies, “Pretty Girl” is a song about changing for a relationship and losing yourself along the way. “I could be a pretty girl, shut up when you want me to,” Cottrill vacantly murmurs atop a stuttering drum machine. And yet, she remains strong in the face of teenage heartbreak—she could try to diminish herself while conforming to gendered expectations, but she won’t. “I’m alone now, but it’s better for me,” she eventually decides. “I don’t need all your negativity.”

In the summer of 2017, Cottrill filmed the “Pretty Girl” video with her computer’s camera. It shows her sitting on her bed and lip syncing alongside various knick knacks—including a figurine of Gizmo from Gremlins—and a Dunkin coffee. As she boogies in baggy sweatshirts, with a constellation of red acne dots spread across her forehead, she looks like just another girl in her room, goofing around. It was all so simple, so impromptu, that she thought nothing of it. Over its first few days online, the video gained a few hundred views, then a couple thousand, then “it just… kept going,” Cottrill recalls, her voice trailing off. She still has no idea how “Pretty Girl” became a runaway success.

A few weeks later, on her first day of classes at Syracuse University’s Bandier Program, a specialized school for music business, the video hit a million views. “By the time I got to school for orientation, people already knew who I was,” she says, poking at her grilled cheese. Classmates began asking her why she was even in college. Once, she caught a student in her astronomy class filming her just existing.

Soon the press came knocking, wanting to know all about this mumbling voice of Generation Z. Then the record labels started reaching out. Except these weren’t the scrappy, independent ones that Cottrill once dreamed of signing with, like Father/Daughter and Bayonet, but big ones like RCA and Columbia. Their attention took her by surprise. “I only recently understood that labels really do sign people because they’re being talked about, not necessarily because they believe in the music,” she tells me.

Though Cottrill admits that she was wooed for a bit by the majors, she ended up signing with FADER Label, the boutique New York imprint whose roster includes cheerful pop-rock acts like Matt and Kim. FADER co-founder Jon Cohen is a family friend of the Cottrills and, as “Pretty Girl” continued to spiral upward, he offered Claire a 12-song deal. Knowing that she was being guided by people she trusted, she accepted.

Around this time, a post appeared on Reddit accusing Cottrill of being an “industry plant”—a phrase sometimes lobbed at young, almost-always-female musicians in an effort to undermine their talent. The supposed evidence behind the claim involved the fact that her father, Geoff, a former chief marketing officer at Converse, had worked with the agency Cornerstone, for which Cohen is the co-CEO. As Cottrill she sees it, she was given the opportunity to sign a deal that would allow her to grow as an artist more than as a commodity; many others are not so lucky. So, at the end of her freshman year of college, she packed up her dorm room, donated half of her closet, put the rest in a suitcase, and flew to Texas for her first tour, supporting pop star Dua Lipa.

In terms of viral success stories, Clairo’s is a particularly unusual case. She wasn’t busking for tourists or yodelling in Walmarts. Her breakout song wasn’t a gigantic bop nor was it danceable meme bait. She wasn’t Lana Del Rey, tragically glamorous, or Azealia Banks, delightfully sex-positive. She was an awkward teenage girl in her room trying to turn her insecurities about feminine beauty ideals into something manageable. Yes, Cottrill posted “Pretty Girl” online, where it could be seen by anyone. But nothing about the video seems to covet validation. When every YouTube video seems to be selling something, there is power in humble autonomy. If anything, the ensuing backlash proves that, to some, it’s easier to find a nefarious motive behind a girl singing in her bedroom than it is to believe in her authenticity.

Given the whirlwind and the naysayers, I ask her if she’s ever regretted uploading “Pretty Girl” in the first place. She vehemently shakes her head no. “Because everything happened overnight, I have this irrational fear that it will go away just as quickly,” she explains. “I just want people to stick around long enough for them to know who I really am.”