Long gone are the days of waifs like Joni Mitchell or Judy Collins turning up in Greenwich Village with their guitars.
And forget Madonna, who arrived in the East Village and slept on floors. Or Jewel, who became homeless after rebuffing her boss’s advances.
The new star girl singers come from wealth and privilege.
That couldn’t have been more underscored than last night, when famed restaurateur Keith McNally had quite a surprise in his own eatery, the famed Minetta Tavern. He reports on Instagram that he encountered indie artist Clairo — whom he’d never heard of — dining in his place, and she definitely was not singing for her supper!
McNally reports: “She was with four friends and ordered an $8000 bottle of wine (La Tache Grand Cru, Romanée-Conti 2013). I didn’t know Clairo from Adam, but she generously sent me a glass of the $8000 wine with a lovely note.”
Clairo has never had a hit record in the six years since she first started getting press mentions. She may have amassed 1 million in sales thanks to streaming of early hits from 2019. A couple of her songs have drifted around, but she’s never gotten to the level of Sabrina or Taylor. She’s more like Maggie Rogers, who probably wash down dinner bottles of $8000 wine.
No, as I wrote quite a while ago, Clairo’s real name is Claire Cottrill, daughter of top former Procter and Gamble and Coca Cola marketing exec Geoff Cottrill. Geoff was Brandweek’s “Marketer of the Year.” He worked at Starbucks’ HEAR Music. He’s been a co-chair of Musicares at the Grammys. He recently served as chief brand & games officer at Topgolf.
Cheers to Clairo and her $8000 wine!
More successful are two other pop tarts. Stella Lefty has been on the top of the charts all summer with her song “Boston” and album, “Long Way Home.” She’s 24. How’d she pull this off? Her dad is a co-founder of Groupon. Eric Paul Lefkofsky — according to Wikipedia — “is an American billionaire businessman. He is the founder and CEO of Tempus AI, and the co-founder of Groupon, Echo Global Logistics, InnerWorkings, and Mediaocean. As of June 2024, he is also a co-managing partner of Chicago-based venture capital firm Lightbank.”
Cue the guitars.
And let’s not forget Gracie Abrams, struggling on the charts right now but basically a hit since she opened Taylor Swift’s tour a couple of years ago. Her dad is JJ Abrams, famed movie producer and director of things like “Mission Impossible,” “Star Wars,” and “LOST.”
This all started with Taylor Swift, whose father Scott, was also a top stock broker and finance guy who managed millions of dollars of clients’ money. (The original rumor was that he the heir to Swift meatpacking. That was like people thinking Linda Eastman came from Eastman Kodak!) Scott invested in Taylor’s record company, Big Machine, when she was signed and the rest is history.
And ve
