This summer, I often find myself listening back to the songs I loved in high school. Under the growing ruin of my 8-year-old poster wall, each forgotten note reopened a once-forgotten version of myself. So when I spoke with Claire Martine about her Better Safe Than Sorry EP this June, her story struck a chord with me. 

 

“It’s for the daydreamers,” she says about her music. 

 

With a shy smile and fuzzy eyeliner, Martine sits behind the Zoom screen, backdropped by her childhood bedroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Unlike some who move away from home in pursuit of a dream, the now New York City-based singer-songwriter doesn’t feel detached from her childhood home. Rather, she regards the space as the sanctuary where she first came into contact with her creativity. 

 

“I’m really proud to be in this artsy family. I think that all the way through high school when I was living in Wisconsin, it all felt very intuitive. I loved theater, and I loved Shakespeare, and I was just practicing my violin.”

 

In fact, it took Martine many years to find her footing through the New York noise after moving away from the safety of her creative home. 

 

Martine made her move to the city to pursue her love of theater in college. But by throwing herself into the burden of schoolwork, her passions for performance turned from intuitive to calculated. 

 

“College was good, but I’m really happy to not be in college anymore,” she says. “What I got really good at in college was fitting in and tamping down intuition, and then I realized in the time after graduating, oh my god, I didn’t like this.”

 

She knew she needed to make a change. For her, that came in the form of writing music. 

 

But her process did not start with words; she learned the guitar first, giving her the needed confidence to start writing down lyrics. 

 

“I had always wanted to write music, but something was not working,” she says. “I’ve written some poems, and I know enough guitar to feel comfortable just testing things out [...]I had written a song that I was like, wait, this is working. Some kind of door opened and now it feels like I can do this.” 

 

Out of those first poems came songs like “Gossip Baby” and “Tough Luck,” both bubblegum bedroom pop tracks with twinkles of 2019 saturation and Y2K bedazzle. 

 

Both songs would wind up on Martine’s debut EP, Tough Luck, in 2024, which she described as tracks “for the teenager in me and the teenager in you.” And the teenager in Martine called out for more. She wanted to produce her own music, but she didn’t know how. 

 

She decided to convince her guitar teacher, Alejandro Florez, to take a chance on trying something new. 

 

“It was a weekly guitar lesson, and then as the years went by, we kind of transitioned those lessons of learning guitar into, ‘I wrote a song. Can we either workshop it or could you be a sounding board?’ So it turned into songwriting lessons. And then after college, it was, now I have some songs. I want to learn how to produce.”

 

Having recorded some of his own music and equipped with a studio, he had the assets to assist Martine in this journey.

 

Their creative exchange resulted in a hands-on collage of ideas. Pulling from a variety of inspirations, the two threw out any preconceived ideas of what the songs should sound like and started to imagine what they wanted the songs to become. 

 

Her non-traditional approach to learning production–using YouTube and friends– allowed Martine to find what she wanted to hear in her sound. Dipping her toes into pop, dreamgaze, and indie, this open-ended learning approach eventually created a noticeable shift in her musical language. One that she was proud of. 

 

“As I’ve been wanting to produce more myself, the grungier sound is something that I think I’d love playing with,” she says. “That sound speaks to the themes that I’m going for. It’s sad, but not self-pitying. There’s kind of a tongue-in-cheekiness to having a grungy guitar line, I think.” 

 

Out of her collaboration and motivated learning came Better Safe Than Sorry. Tracks like “Means to an End” and “Better Safe Than Sorry,” have soft edges and gritty undertones which ignite themes of love lost and transactional relationships. 

 

As a lyricist, Martine keeps it real, refusing to hide any messages under metaphor. As a result, with more texture, her raw, honest lyrics cut even harder. For Martine, a song with no takeaway is a disservice to her listeners. 

 

“If I was writing something and as I read it back, I don't know what the meaning is, even if I don't know every last detail of the situation, if there's no kind of meaning I'm conveying, I would be hiding something, you know?”

 

Granted, hiding anything proves to be a challenge for someone who calls her lyrics “journal entries.” 

 

Martine deeply values her open connection with her listeners, as for most of her life, her love language has been to talk. 

 

“My whole family can just talk and talk and talk forever. Anybody I’ve ever been close friends with is like, ‘Let’s hang out and just talk for 4 hours straight.’ That’s what I want to do,” she says. “I think that because it feels like I have a lot to say, I don’t want to hide behind a metaphor.”

 

Martine describes the people she writes for as people like her and people like me. Young, thoughtful women who are “artsy, and shy, and love listening to music.” 

 

For many, music holds memories. And for the artsy, shy girl in me who loves listening to music to rediscover parts of myself, Martine’s songs do not just live in the past, they’re reflections of my present.

 

A new poster was added to my wall.