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“I would say it's more of a transformation than a comeback,” says Sabrina Claudio, pointing out that her couple of years ‘away’ from the limelight were spent writing for people like Beyoncé (indeed she won a Grammy for writing Plastic Off the Sofa for Queen Bey), “But I think it's definitely a transformation for me on a personal level.”
Claudio had been a leading R&B singer-songwriter for nearly a decade now, but after some personal troubles, she took time away to reflect and refresh. She has now returned as a changed person with a new album called Fall In Love With Her. It is her fifth - not bad for an artist still only 28 - and is undoubtedly her most complete one to date, with dreamy, sensual, melancholic world for her fans to enter - but with a certain confessional attitude that freshens up her music.
“It’s probably the most conceptual album I’ve done yet,” she tells the Standard, “The idea for it was a self-journey, and it’s very vulnerable, more intimate, more exposed type of music, more so than any I’ve written before. It’s like an unfiltered version of myself.”
It’s always an interesting move for any musician to strip things back and make themselves vulnerable – John Lennon springs to mind – but it’s particularly so for a pop star like Claudio right now. Her contemporaries are all about adding more on top, putting on big shows and wild alter egos. It’s a pop world where excess is everything. Claudio is instead taking another route and it came from a period of intense self-reflection, which included questioning of whether she should even continue as an artist.
“I think the reason I took two years off was because I've released a lot of music in my life and I feel like I've said a lot without saying a lot, if that makes sense,” she says, “I think it's because naturally I'm a storyteller kind of writer. I didn't typically write from personal experience.
I wanted to now make sure that the story that I was telling was very authentic to myself. And I want to evolve as an artist. I was like, if I'm not evolving, if I'm not challenging myself, then I don't see a point in this anymore.”
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A strong thing to consider but a sign that despite the lush romanticism of her world, this is someone who wants to challenge herself not simply drift along on her young accomplishments.
She says, “I wanted to elevate myself and I wanted to make sure that the next thing I do was nothing like I've ever done before.”
Claudio grew up in the suburbs of Miami, Florida, and is of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent. She says she wasn’t part of Miami’s party culture scene at all and was a quiet and insecure kid. Her passion became uploading covers of songs to YouTube, but she had no expectation that this would be a step into pop stardom: “I liked to sing and that was pretty much it. It really was my parents that led me into this journey of songwriting. And the funny thing is, I wasn't even a writer, I wasn't growing up writing poetry or songs in my journal in my room. I don't know where it came from, but my parents knew it was there, and they were the ones that were nurturing it.”
She moved to Los Angeles in 2015 and began garnering attention with self-releases soon after, in that first flourishing of artists posting tracks on social media platforms. Her early hits Unravel Me and Belong To You established her as a seductive song-writer with a provocative edge.
Now though, she’s evolved into a more mature version of herself, one that can stand back and think about who and what she wants to be.
“The biggest challenge is the vulnerability of it all, because I'm naturally an extremely private person and I think nowadays it's not what fans want,” she reflects, “I think the mystery of it all was cool in the beginning of my career, concealing who I am and having this unattainable persona.
But it's not working anymore, not even for me. I don't enjoy it.
I don't like to pretend to be somebody that I'm not naturally, but I was and still am to a certain extent, a very private person, so I think the vulnerability side of it all was my biggest challenge. But by tapping into it and allowing that to lead me, I've created something that I think I'm the most proud of and it's only opened so many doors, not only in regards to the music, but in regards to the people that are on my team now and who I've allowed in my life.”
She says she didn’t go to therapy but the mental health work came from this opening up to people.
“Before, I think with not allowing myself to be vulnerable I was also very inaccessible. I wasn't allowing anybody in. And now that I feel a little bit more open, I'm able to let people into my life that only want to enhance me and only want to help me. There's a lot of benefits to being vulnerable, that I didn't realize was there.”
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She says she was a “control freak” and introverted, which kind of makes her job living in the glare of the music world a hard place to be. Where mistakes are made in public, relationships exposed, cancellation a possibility, any wrong turns rendered indelible. Fame isn’t ideal for private people.
“I don't like naturally go to post things and take pictures and show people my everyday life, but it's something that I'm really working on, something that my team is really helping me with and encouraging me on,” she says, “I'm being authentically myself just on camera. And trying not to be too afraid to post.
But the reception from my fans has only been positive. They feel closer to me and they feel like they can understand where I'm coming from with this music and they're excited for the next thing. That's just what's keeping me going and feeling encouraged to continue to to show myself in a way that I've never before.”
This ultimately, is what has driven Claudio to keep going, that connection with an audience and a desire to perform for them: “I missed the the touring part of it, the connection with the fans, the traveling. I think I need to get started that journey.”
She’s about to embark on a major North American tour, with British dates hopefully to come down the line. In the meantime, there’s the new songs to enjoy, which were led off by the single Need You to Need Me, a deceptively brave song which challenges much thinking about relationships, or rather tells the truth of how we feel, despite the lies we tell ourselves.
“I'm the type of lover, friend, daughter, collaborator that likes to be desired and needed, and I reciprocate that,“ she says, “In relationships, in my experience, that is normally seen as an insecurity, to want to be needed or to need somebody. But I just wanted to write a song romanticising that. Romanticising a necessity in human. I think it's a very natural desire to want closeness with your partner and friendship from your parents, you know, any type of relationship. I wanted to make it a beautiful emotion rather than an insecurity that I've been made to feel.
That intention carries on through the album. I feel like there's a lot of fear-based concepts that I flip to make it romantic and beautiful.”
In her own way, then, this is subversive music with plenty of heart and soul. There’s a sense that this is a pivotal period for Claudio, where the risks she is taking are necessary but the new exposure to the real her a worry too. What will people think of her? The way she is dealing with such questions is to continue as earnestly as she can from a place that at least feels like the real her.
“I hope that people feel more connected to me,” she says of her hopes around the record, “I hope that people are able to see me as somebody that they can see themselves within. I just hope that the vulnerability that I had to achieve and I'm still working on and working towards is for something.
Even if it reaches one person, or a million, it doesn't matter. I just want people to feel more connected to me. My goal is just to feel closeness with the people who listen to my music and support me. That's the biggest thing.”
Fall in Love with Her by Sabrina Claudio is out now
