How Clara Miller finds movement and meaning

When we speak to singer-songwriter Clara Miller, she’d just finished teaching a dance class. “Baby ballet,” she says. As a former dancer with the New York City ballet, so much of Miller’s music has been heavily informed by her relationship with movement.

With songs like “Silver Spring” and “Say Yes,” that bloom amid acoustic strings, soft percussion and airy flutes, her sound leans firmly into soft indie and folk. Ideal musical backdrops for complex choreography, its mellowness buoying deeply vulnerable lyrics. But since releasing her debut album Ghostlighter in 2023, she already has her eyes set on a slightly new direction.“I feel like I’ve written a lot of like what I would call just like kind of like mellow-ish beautiful music that was kind of like simple and structure, but this year was kind of a turning point and I felt like I really needed to like just write more rock music,” she explained. “I really wanted to scream, so I did some of that and it felt really good to be able to describe my sound as more indie rock. But people will get it because I think as hard as I try to be more hardcore, they’re still inescapably myself."

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While her earliest years were spent listening to classical music in dance training, a move to New York for school would place her in new musical territory. “I got into a lot of softcore emo punk. Like I’m a huge fan of early Panic! At the Disco,” she explained. At 18, she’d get into the New York City ballet, but a series of back injuries and subsequent experimental spine surgeries coupled with gruelling training would ultimately change her creative trajectory. “My physical therapist was like, what would you want to do if you can’t go back to dancing? Or if you have to retire?” I said my dream job was to be a musician and be on stage but I know that’s super unrealistic,” she said. “But I’ve only ever had faith in myself that I could do two things, and that was dance or music. I’ve only ever cared enough about those things to really try.”

Eventually, she’d start writing and learning to play guitar, releasing her first singles and taking on live performances early on. But she knew that connecting with new fans digitally would be an important step. “Social media definitely gave me access to the world, [although] sometimes I feel like my digital footprint is a nightmare,” she explained, her Instagram littered with small peeks into her life as both a musician and choreographer. Still, she was immediately drawn to the ways platforms like BandLab and ReverbNation could be important springboards in the earliest points in her career. “Getting on ReverbNation, I feel like I probably saw it when I was submitting to play a show and I needed an electronic press kit. Then I created an account and could submit to all these cool things.” By 2021, she’d released her first EP Oath, a 5-song project that saw her explore a more folk-leaning sound and raw lyrics that explored the new, complex relationship she had with her own body. Later on her album Ghostlighter, songs like “Hospital” detailed her time in recovery. Her dance sensibilities continue to show up in her music in more abstract ways; with Miller noting the similarities between how she structures her songs with how she choreographs. “Some repeating sections, but a lot of it was just like emotional moments. I like restraint, release, and balance,” she explained. “A Lot of the time [a song] comes together when I’m just fiddling around with the guitar and like saying fake words and refining it.”

With the release of her new single “Honored”, which Miller says is about “putting other people’s artistic pursuits ahead of my own,” she wants to keep not only combining her various creative worlds, but expanding them. “It felt almost selfish to write this song where I was so blunt about my feelings,” she said. “And then I heard just how incredible the people who worked on the song made the emotion come across. I would like someone to listen and be like, I can be more than, more than just a dancer or just a girlfriend. It's very much so about how grateful I feel to have found the community that I’ve found.”

Miller says an upcoming project is still in the works, something she hopes to use as a vehicle to further explore the full scope of her artistry - in all its forms and for all the right reasons. “I made it so far in the dance world and then had to deal with injuries and only on a few occasions had the opportunity to dance with the full ability to express myself alone on stage,” she explained. “I want to perform in the full range of what I feel and how I’ve felt as an artist my whole life and there’s something about it being strangers that feels like I have the opportunity to say something extra honest without it coming across as pandering to people I already know.”