Clairo says she’s “squashed all the beef” with her song “Sofia”

For a while, it seemed like Clairo was harboring some mixed feelings about her song “Sofia.” In 2022, three years after she released the hit song as part of her debut album, Immunity, she stopped playing it live for several years to the dismay of some of her fans. But this past February, she suddenly brought it back during a set at Australia’s Laneway Festival, where she and Charli xcx performed it as a duet.

It turns out the singer did have a change of heart about the track, telling Seventeen in a new interview that Charli xcx played a role in helping her re-embrace the song that remains her highest streamed song to date.

“It’s so funny — I didn’t think people would mind that I didn’t play it, but it became a problem. I got myself into a pickle,” she said. “We played a few shows, and [Charli] told me she watched my set the day before. But she was like, ‘Where’s ‘Sofia’?’ and I said, ‘I don’t play it. Don’t you have any songs where you’re just like, ‘Man, we’ve done it a lot’?’ Then we came up with the idea to play it together. I was like, ‘Well, if anyone can make me sing it again, I think it would be you, Miss Charli.’”

Though Clairo said she didn’t mean to cause drama with her decision not playing “Sofia,” she acknowledged that she might’ve subconsciously harbored some complicated feelings around the track as well as her other older songs: “Especially with “Sofia” recently, I feel like I’ve squashed all the beef I have with some of my past songs because people have their own connection to them. So what’s the point of not acknowledging them?”

Immediately following her February performance of “Sofia,” Clairo hinted at those feelings in a TikTok she posted where she sang along to the track and wrote that she was “not bitter anymore.”

“Sofia” was the breakout hit from Clairo’s Immunity, and is about “my first ever crushes on women i saw in the media,” the singer previously explained on X in 2019. “people like sofia coppola, sofia vergara, etc. this was my way of making a celebratory song about this discovery while maintaining the cheesy/corny lyrics you’d normally find in songs where you profess your love.” The track became her first song to chart on the Hot 100, landing at No. 98 in 2020.