claire rousay: A Little Death

A raw and honest conversation with the 'emo ambient' artist on the music industry, getting sober and finding back to her core practice

“Do you mind if we speak while I’m walking outside?”

claire rousay is smiling at me through her phone camera, standing in the doorstep of her current Los Angeles home on a sunny autumn morning, looking splendid in a tank top and baseball hat.

Of course I don’t mind, so for the next hour, I’m listening to claire’s musings while she’s walking through her neighborhood, wild parrots chattering noisily in the background.

I’ve been a fan of her music ever since I’ve first heard it right around the start of the pandemic. Some of her works have turned into staples that I’m returning to regularly, especially the two albums A Heavenly Touch (2020) and A Softer Focus (2021) that form a loose, unofficial trilogy with her newest one, A Little Death (2025).

claire rousay has returned to her musical roots on this record, incorporating acoustic instruments and manipulated field recordings into diaristic freeform compositions which she’s brilliantly dubbed ‘emo ambient’.

Though she doesn’t have an academic music background but comes from the DIY improvised music scene, much of her past music has been informed by post-classical styles like musique concrète and electroacoustic composition. In 2024, claire released sentiment, a slightly more pop-oriented album which would become her biggest commercial success yet. Still an experimental record by all means, it was shaped by songwriting techniques instead of her usual collage approach, and the sounds of emo and pop-punk that inspired her as a youth growing up in San Antonio, Texas.

In our raw and honest conversation, claire opened up about how touring that album led into a spiral of depression, how she finally freed herself from years of substance abuse, and why she doesn’t know if she’ll ever want to release another solo album again.

photo: Katherine Squier

What’s your earliest memory of sound, claire?

Just my mom playing piano in the house, or more accurately, her teaching piano lessons in the house. She’s a classical pianist, and she played in the church a lot as well. At the time, she had 100 and something piano students, and she was just teaching non-stop.

When she didn’t play or teach, what kind of music was she listening to?

She’s into slow, piano-driven classic rock, a lot of Journey and things like that. She likes music and knows a lot about it, but she’s not somebody who seeks out that listening experience with records. She’s more of a “I just like certain songs” type of person.

When did you start listening and seeking out music yourself?

I started taking piano lessons since relatively young, maybe four or five years old. Even then I would want to choose what I’m practicing, and out of the 15 choices that are in the entry level piano book, I would always like these fake bluesy things where you get to use all the black keys. I also wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music [claire grew up in an Evangelical Christian family], so I would find the Christian rock alternative to whatever band I was wanting to listen to, but wasn’t allowed to – like, white Christian rock based off of the aesthetics of Rage Against the Machine. I was really into fake Christian hip-hop too.

When did you switch to the drums?

Probably around 10. At the time I was listening to a lot of pop-punk and rap-rock type stuff. I had a neighbor who had a drum set. His dad was a huge Van Halen fan. He’d be fixing his Harley, smoking cigs and playing drums with their garage door open. And I’d be like, “Damn, that guy’s awesome.” So I decided to play the drums. My mom wanted me to be able to sight read piano sheet music at a certain level, or else I couldn’t play another instrument because it’ll get in the way of retaining the ability to read piano music with relative ease. I got to that level and then switched to drums. But I had to do it the right away and take lessons to read percussion clef. Which I did, and it was great, but as I went on, I did lose the ability to read piano music.

Your mom was quite strict in terms of musical education, right?

Sure, compared to other people’s experiences who had lessons but were not actually living with their music instructor, it would be more strict. But honestly, I don’t think I could have gotten a better parent. She’s like the best mom ever. And music completely drives her life. It’s both expression and an intellectual endeavor as well as an emotional kind of escape and all these things. So I was just around that, and I was super into it. Even when I was just expected to practice 30 minutes a day, I would voluntarily practice four hours, especially when I was learning how to play Fall Out Boy songs on drums. (laughs)

When did you start playing in bands?

Well, I was 13 by the time I was playing publicly. I played at my church, and it was evangelical rock music as well. It felt cool. You’re 13 years old and you’re playing to 200 to 500 people a week. It’s a big gig, even though it’s part of a service thing in the church, and you’re not supposed to make it about you. But it was definitely encouraging to have 500 people watching me play and 40-year olds coming up to me like, “Wow, you’re so good.”

You grew up in Canada, but moved to San Antonio, Texas as a kid. Did you connect with the local music scene aside from the church as well?

Definitely. There was a pretty robust DIY scene in San Antonio. I wasn’t involved until I was about 14, 15, which is still relatively young. Texas is so large, and there’s a statewide DIY network. You have South by Southwest in Austin, so there would be spin-off festivals, and you would get the popular indie rock band at the time coming down to play a show that’s not officially connected to anything and thrown by some kid who has a pool that you can drain. I was really involved in the DIY scene for close to a decade. I was at a show most nights of the week, I was in ten bands at all times. I booked shows, I booked tours. I would tour nationally as soon as I could drive, 16 years old, driving to and from New York. I learned all of that from the network in my city.

Was this mostly improvised music?

In the beginning, it was pretty regular indie rock. I was really into that band Portugal. The Man in the late 2000s. When I started touring, I was in a noise rock band, and then I started getting to heavier, more technical music, so I played in math rock bands, and by 21, 22, I was full improv shredding. I was always just trying to save up enough money to go to Chicago and play a show with improvisers for six people at some gallery.

Your solo music has often been likened to musique concrète and electroacoustic composition. When and how did you get interested in those more academic styles of music?

I was in a noisy pop band, a duo with this other person, and he introduced me to this one-off record by this supergroup called Nervous Cop, which is Zach Hill from Hella and Greg from Deerhoof on drums and Joanna Newsom’s playing harp. They would shred for an hour and then splice it all up. I was like, “That’s so cool, I wish more music sounded like this.” So I started looking up more of that kind of music. Eventually, with introduction to friends who are in a university context – because that was not part of my story at all – I started digging into anything that I thought sounded like that, stuff that’s not necessarily glitchy, but sounds that were taken out of context and then placed together to create a new thing.

But I have no formal education. Five or six years ago I got invited to play the festival that the GRM does, and I’d literally never heard of it before. I knew some of the composers, but I had no idea how they were organized, or that that kind of thing still existed. I knew bits and pieces, and it took years of assembling that, because I didn’t really have anybody until later on that was aware of those things. My friend Mari [more eaze] was coming out of grad school at Cal Arts at the time we started playing together, so she knew about all of those different worlds and traditions that I didn’t know about.

She’s from Texas as well. Did you hang out at the same shows in San Antonio back in the days?

Well, I’m a bit younger than her, and we weren’t friends at that point, so she would be playing all these shows, and I wasn’t quite old enough to go. Sometimes I would sneak in if they were opening for Bill Callahan or somebody else that I was a fan of. But we really connected after she moved away for university and came back. I was a fully-formed person at that point. We lived in what I want to call a secondary city, because it’s quite large, but as far as the music and culture scene, it moves relatively slow, and it’s not as connected to the rest of the world as New York, L.A. or London. Things come in slower and they go out slower, so it was basically the same place when she left and came back as it was when I was coming up.

Is that why you moved to Los Angeles some years ago?

Honestly, my reasons for existing here are not really related to music. It’s just personal relationship stuff. It’s a great place to live, though so fucking expensive, kind of stressful. But it’s way better than Texas, where anybody who isn’t a rich, conservative white dude is really fucked. So you’re a little bit less fucked here, which is a safety thing too.

photo: Katherine Squier

I remember reading about how Olivia Block’s electroacoustic piece Karren (2013) was another major influence for you.

Yeah, I found that record right when it came out. I had a weekly university radio show for about 10 years, and that was at the same time I was doing a weekly experimental music concert night in San Antonio. I was constantly trying to find new music and that one completely blew my mind. I didn’t realize that music like that existed, essentially sampling and manipulating an entire orchestra. I was more familiar with individual sound sources, microsound stuff. That record exemplifies perfectly that you could do this at a macro level also. I went back and learned everything that Olivia Block had done since the 1990s. I’m such a fan, and we’re acquaintances now, but she’s still a legend in my mind.

I interviewed her once, and a year later she was playing in Berlin and she sent me a personal email to invite me. I was so stunned.

I know. I was like, “Oh, I didn’t realize they let angels have an email address.“ (smiles)

That’s so sweet of you to say. Was she also an influence in terms of writing more longform pieces?

Yeah, it was her and then I got familiarized with Crys Cole’s work and that of many others around the same time, and I saw all of these people were connected socially, so I thought it would be cool to be part of a movement and have a global community like that. Then I got approached by the record label Second Editions to do a vinyl record [Both, 2020], which was my first time anybody wanted to invest enough money in me to put out a record, and it was very specifically asked that it would be two side-long pieces. I realized this is just how I work naturally – I record a longform thing and then chop it up.

That’s interesting. Take A Softer Focus for example, is that basically one long piece that you chopped up later?

Yeah, that’s how I work. I make 15- to 40-minute long, completely non-tonal collages of sounds, so it’ll be this huge mass of weird textural stuff, field recordings and everything. I sit with it and figure out where I want to go, and then I’ll dial it back or cut it down to pieces that are really accessible.

During the first two years of the pandemic, you put out a bunch of brilliant recordings that solidified your place in experimental music: A Heavenly Touch, A Softer Focus, It Was Always Worth It, 17 Roles (All Mapped Out). How did life circumstances at the time influence your music?

Right before the pandemic, I’d gotten a taste of what it was like to play and tour my own music as an independent person and make an okay amount of money playing it. I realized that could be on the table at least for a time. I was working at a restaurant and slowly started cutting my hours back because I was making more money. Then the pandemic hit, and between the supplemented income government checks, I was able to make music on my own for the first time in an uninterrupted way.

So I had all that time, but I was in a pretty brutal place emotionally. Financially, it wasn’t super stable, but it was the first time I was living in an actual house by myself. I had a studio in there. I had a yard. I’d wake up, go make field recordings, come back noon, drink 12 beers and work on music, basically just crush beers and manipulate the recordings I took in the morning until it was late enough to go to bed. I did that for a year. When you have ten hours a day to work on stuff, you finish it quickly. And then I realized, instead of burning CDs or making my own tapes to hand out at shows, I could just email the music to labels, and people would accept it and put it out.

Because I didn’t quite understand how it worked yet, I would send stuff to different labels, and then I’d have four records coming out around the same time. I had no real idea of the music business side of organizing a release, which is one of my strong suits now. I was just working at home all the time and listening to so much music. I got connected with [French label] Shelter Press, and I basically binged that whole discography. That roster, I still think, is flawless. Those are some of my favorite records of all time. Then Bandcamp started the subscription thing, and it became really sustainable for me, so when the government checks ended, I could live off the Bandcamp subscription. It paid all my bills. At the time I was so creatively charged up. I had never been in a position to just sit and make my whole life music.

But as time went on, everybody had less disposable income, especially here in America, and now that Bandcamp subscription is probably a fourth of what it was. With inflation and everything, it doesn’t really make a dent at this point. It’s just gotten significantly harder to survive as a working experimental musician. I’m so fortunate to be not working anywhere. Many artists have a day job, but I don’t have a university thing to fall back, so I don’t have anything besides working service industry jobs, which is a honorable thing to do, but it’s such a time suck, and the most valuable thing somebody has is their time.

Dealing with these economic realities, did you sometimes feel the pressure to make more accessible and streaming-friendly music?

I would sometimes make a thing and think it might be more accessible than others, but then I listened to it again and there’s the sound of a dog barking so loud panned all the way to one side – there’s no way that this is going to be on a meditation playlist or some shit like that. (laughs)

I’ve definitely made music under my name that I am not super stoked on, because I needed cash. Like doing a remix for an artist you’ve never heard of, and it goes nowhere, but the label has a ton of money, and you just use some of that money to buy gas and dog food, and the next month, you have to do it again. But I think it’s still way more punk to be working for yourself and doing things your own way, even if the project isn’t exactly how you’d like it to be – as long as it’s not something totally evil – than quitting all of this and making my life working at some horrible place, like a tech company. I don’t want to work for a tech company, and I’m not going to make music for Israel. But there’s a lot of grey area and middle ground between those things.

For sure. I’m asking that question because your last record, sentiment, was more song-oriented, had a lot of auto-tuned vocals and seemed influenced by some of the music that you grew up on, the pop punk and emo type stuff.

I think that as an artist, you can have all these different lanes. I don’t want to fall into the trap of Instagram and music industry stuff, just becoming something people can market, this perfectly packaged product. You see tons of artists like that, and granted, those are the ones that get placed on the bigger festivals. But I don’t have a singular, super curated image. That’s so not me. I dabble in many different things, and I draw so much from my actual life, and I am influenced by my friends from all over the world, so why would I not bring that collective brain and pool of experiences into the music?

Granted, that does sometimes come out sounding like auto-tuned pop punk, but that’s a part of who I am. And to carefully curate and segment out how much of myself and how different parts of me are going to come out publicly feels just dishonest and kind of fake. As somebody who’s actively trying to get off of social media, the worst thing I could do is bring that social media way of presenting yourself into the actual life and in-person interactions. Rather than being a globally successful mid-tier experimental musician, I would much rather prioritize being a well-rounded real person.

I totally appreciate that you’re exploring these different lanes. As someone who was really into those first couple of records, I do gravitate to the new album, A Little Death, where you’re going back to your core solo practice. Can you talk about how that rededication to those methods happened?

I never stopped making music like that. I was making this record for years, off and on, in the background. It’s just that I made one record last year that did better than any record I’ve ever done, and that became what people thought I was doing the whole time. I was touring so much last year, touring alone with hundreds of pounds of luggage, bringing a whole stage set with me. The whole time I was doing all of that, I was also in the hotel room making this record, and it was such a relief to finally sit down and start chopping up field recordings again, or messing with a filter on a two-second sound for an hour. This is what actually brings me closer to a flow state. I’m not a songwriter. I can write songs and I have, but it’s not a part of my identity.

Doing this tour, I was playing the same songs in the same way every night. You know how successful pop artists and songwriters do the thing where they’re not playing the hit? I never really understood that, I thought it’s completely selfish. Now I know it’s self-preservation, because if you play the hit too many times, you’ll never play any songs again. There’s that famous video of Elliott Smith playing “Waltz #2” or whatever on a Dutch radio station. He gets to the bridge and stops, and then he’s like, “I literally can’t do this again. I played this song so many times, I just don’t feel it. I can’t finish it. I’m really sorry.” I just got a 1% taste of that. I came up in improvised music, so you play the same-ish kind of stuff every night, but it’s never really the same. Collaboration is always fluctuating and changing things every night. I’d never gotten a taste of what it’s like to just play by yourself the same way every night. And I realized this is really not for me.

I have a rehearsal later today to tour this record. I’ve built in sections, and the ensembles are changing depending on where I’m playing. In every city, I have collaborative parts coming up. I have friends who do spoken word and poetry stuff coming in to sit in with different parts. So it’ll be the record, but arranged for different instruments, and being able to be flexible and malleable, and it is lot because I’m surrounded by incredible musicians. All my friends who play music are significantly more technically advanced players and so much more knowledgeable than I’ll ever be. So I’m grateful that they’re playing with me, but the fact that I’m able to do that is saving my life, compared to last year when I was drinking myself to death in the middle of those sentiment tours. I had to get sober in the middle of all of that, but I was totally miserable. It got to a point where now I’m on the fence about even making recorded music again. I definitely want to slow down, and I don’t have any desire to make a solo record probably for a long time, if ever again. There’s so many other ways of working, but I feel rejuvenated finally, aside from all the other stuff that’s happening and that’s burning me out. Musically, I’m finally doing the thing I want to be doing, which is cool. I’ve been doing it all along.

Thanks for sharing that so openly. I saw two of your shows in Berlin during that timeframe you were just talking about – one with Martyna Basta, and one with Jules Reidy. The energy I got from seeing you on stage was that you weren’t happy being there in those moments.

No, I definitely didn’t like being there. I was not happy really either those times. At the [CTM] festival, I had recently quit drinking and I was really having a hard time, because there’s a bunch of tech issues and people weren’t really cool about it, and I’m getting upset, just thinking, “All I’d want to do is get so fucked up right now.” But that wasn’t really the option. It was a hard time, but I was working on the new record that day too, you know? Luckily I had Martyna around me. I just love her so much. Same with Jules, who is also somebody I love so much. Throughout our conversation I’m realizing that this global community network I have curated and cultivated for myself is really, really important.

photo: Katherine Squier

You made all of the field recordings on A Little Death around dusk. Was that an intentional thing?

For the last couple years, I’ve been waking up at five or six in the morning, and I’d go to bed at nine o’clock at night. But it’s been switching up since the beginning of this year, just with the way my schedule is changing, my patterns of life are also changing. I’m up a little later into the night now. Driving around as the sun is going down, I’d come back to these three or four records. I thought it would be interesting to make music that I associate with that time of day – less of a dedication to dusk, more just music I would want to listen to at this time.

But I don’t feel creative during that time. I usually feel best working on music between 8 am and noon, so I can’t do that part of it, but I could probably gather field recordings. I’d found this file on my computer, and I started working on it a little bit. It was a field recording from 2021, and I remembered it really vividly. It was at a bar in San Antonio called Little Death, a patio wine bar, and I’d taken a recording of me walking from the bathroom inside to outside where everyone was sitting. I could see the scene in my head, and it was dusk. So I recorded more stuff in my neighborhood around this time of day. I thought it would be perfect if I could just put all of this together over this long period of time, starting with when I solidified this practice with the record that’s basically the first one in this unofficial trilogy, and at the same time driving around L.A., listening to Labradford.

Is that a go-to record for you to drive around L.A. at dusk?

Yeah, it’s so much kranky music, a lot of guitar music. Stars Of The Lid too. There’s a record by this 90s emo rock band called Seam, their second record, that I just associate with the sun going down and driving around at night. I’ve not been touring as much this year, so I’ve been home the whole summer, which is an interesting time to finish a record and sit on it, waiting for people to hear it. I was just finding comfort and basically bringing myself back to life with making this kind of music that changed my life in the first place. Also being able to stay awake at night, not going to bed at 8 pm in fear of relapsing. Being able to be up at night and not fiending for substances is crazy. That was a huge part of it too, just knowing that nighttime doesn’t have to mean debauchery.

There’s a voice memo on the record – a person is telling this story of being broke and homeless but wanting to go to your concert, sending you a message on Instagram asking for guest list, but receiving no answer. Is that a real story?

Yeah, so I do these things at shows where I go out into the audience, record people on my phone, and then air drop the recordings to the stage, throw it into Ableton and start looping, basically manipulating the field recordings in real time. Sometimes I’d even leave the venue to record people outside and then air drop it into the venue, while I’m completely absent from the space. I did a version of that when I was playing a show in Prague, and I was hanging out after the show packing up. I had 10 minutes to smoke a cigarette before I had to get in the car that drove me overnight to Berlin. I wasn’t really trying to talk to anybody, but somebody was like, “Hey, I wanted to add a recording, but you missed me in the audience. Can I record it now?” I put the phone up, and this person starts, and you basically hear the whole recording. It rocked my world. Afterwards we had a whole conversation and patched things up. Props to that person for being so bold.

You know, many people that are into fringy music, who are part of a subculture, are typically also not having great jobs and making tons of money. That’s why I make 10% of tickets to my shows available for a low income or unemployed tier, for people who can’t afford the normal ticket. Talking to that person just proved to me that it’s worth it, because they were telling me it really changed their ability to come to the show. It’s both a document of that time, and because that show happened in the summer, that conversation was also happening at dusk. There were many coincidences that I just had to add it to the record.

We’ve been talking about community a lot, and you have many great musicians guesting on the record – Matthew Sage, Gretchen Korsmo, and some others. What did you ask of your collaborators to bring to the table?

My friend Alex Cunningham, who plays on the second track on the record, he’s a violinist improviser who lives in St Louis, Missouri – he told me this rule years ago. His whole thing is like, “I don’t want to improvise with people I can’t have dinner with.” So the people that play on my records are people that I would have dinner with if I’m in their city, or they’re in my city. That’s how I choose collaborators.

Musically, I never ask people to do stuff that’s out of their wheelhouse, or something that isn’t them. When somebody guests on a record and it’s not necessarily a feature, it’s more like, “This is the track, add whatever you like. I’m probably going to cut it up and manipulate whatever you send me, but do your thing.” In my head, I just think this track needs something of what Andrew does on the lap steel, or what Alex does on the violin – so I send it to them and not really tell them anything. Many of the people in my network are improvisers at the core, and that makes it easy because I can just take these improvised takes, chop it up and make it into a more fixed, compositional framework.

Mari is the only person I give instruction to because we’re so close, so when I give her instruction, it’s just referencing other niche stuff that we both are fans of. We also have specific names for these things we do. Probably four years ago, Mari did a violin for this commission thing I had, and I was like, “Can you just send a wall of violin in D major?” She recorded it really well, and now when I need any kind of string arrangement, I’ll often go to that bank of recordings. I built some virtual instruments out of her violin recordings, and I can just pitch it up and down, put it in whatever key or whatever works. I’ve used that bank on every record since then – the Shelter Press records, the Sentiment record, this record. I use it all the time.

Last year, you put out a gorgeous soundtrack to the film The Bloody Lady. A lot of ambient composers make soundtracks for Netflix shows and stuff. Is this a new line of work for you?

For now, it was just a one-off. That was for a performance at a film festival, but it went so well that the people at the Slavic Film Institute wanted me to do another screening with the live performance. Then this label wanted to make an edited version for a vinyl release. In my mind, it wasn’t a big deal, more like something I just casually did on the side, but since then I got asked to play that music live with the film screening so many times. It kind of snowballed into this thing, and now it’s basically in the repertoire, so if somebody calls me up and wants me to do it, I’ll do it. I just did it in Vancouver about two weeks ago. I would love to do more work like that but I don’t have anything on the horizon. If anybody who reads this has a Netflix show and they want me to be the composer for the fucking soundtrack, I will 100% take that money. (laughs)

Following your music for a while, reading your interviews and your newsletter, and talking to you right now, I realize that you are deeply struggling with how the commercial music industry works, that whole commodification of art. What keeps you going? What keeps you inspired?

Honestly, just other people doing it. People having the capacity, emotionally and time-wise, to organize stuff, now that everything feels like it’s slipping away. It’s dwindling, the support that artists can get, especially in this kind of music. I’m pretty bummed on it right now. What keeps me going is just seeing other people doing it and also being able to commiserate with other people in the same position. Other artists speaking out about this is huge. Kelly Moran did this interview recently that really struck a chord with me. It’s so cool to see somebody who’s in what I see as the dream position that you could be in musically, and then realize that this person’s also kind of fucked. It’s just knowing that you’re not alone. It kind of keeps me going.

I hate saying this, but I’m embarking on a tour, and I’m very uncertain about how it’s going to go and how I’m going to feel. I’m always so grateful that I can play shows at all, that anybody comes to the shows, and it’s a very privileged problem to have. Obviously, there are so much more dire circumstances for so many people in the world. Even just commiserating about this and then trying to figure out ways to support the people of Palestine with other artists – these conversations contextualize what you’re going through very, very quickly. But the two things can be true at once.

Also just fucking awesome music. There’s so much good music coming out, and the people continue to make this music, even when the resources are dwindling, the audience isn’t necessarily able to support you in the same way, but they make it anyways. People who are actual lifers, who will always make this kind of music for themselves and then share it with other people. The reason that I do it is because I’m one of those people. I’ll always make this stuff, and if I have to fucking embarrass myself by slinging emo ambient hats for the rest of my life to pay for shit, I don’t have any shame in that.

claire rousay’s new album A Little Death is out now on Thrill Jockey.