“Claire finds inspiration in the desert and at her restaurant, it’s her ‘storytelling laboratory’…On the surface, she’s checking reservations and greeting customers, but, behind the eyes, she’s a collector of anything she can use in her songs.”
C’est Claire is the nom de plume for singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, Claire Wadsworth, a California high desert resident and owner of the highly acclaimed Flamingo Heights restaurant, La Copine.
As C’est Claire, she has self-released two full-length albums in a thematic series of three. The Rule of Three: Birth, Life, and Death. First Lessons (released 2018) representing birth, Second Chance (released 2020) signifies life, and Rule of Three (due out Fall 2022) stands for death as an ending or new beginning... The series was co-produced with Charlie Stavish (Jenny Lewis, Ryan Adams). Rule of Three will complete the final chapter, which also marks the closing of the studio where they were created, The Clocktower Recorder in Yucca Valley.
The C’est Claire musical recipe includes a dash of Alanis Morissette, Patti Smith, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, and Radiohead — mixed with contemporaries like Warpaint, Cate LeBon, and Sharon Van Etten — all combined to blend perfectly into Claire’s own sound and vision. Mais oui c’est clair…
Drawn to music as a child, Claire began playing piano at age 4, engaged in music throughout her teens, and went on to graduate with honors from Berklee College of Music, where she studied vocal performance, production, and songwriting. Claire performed at the commencement alongside Melissa Ethridge and Aretha Franklin. Once out of school, she was on a mission to “unlearn everything” and get back to her creative roots. She recorded her first EP Prelude (released 2010), which was featured in the documentary Bernadette and has opened for Kurt Vile, Missy Higgins, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Little Dragon, and Japandroids. She also performed with Good Old War, Days Away, and Anthony Green. Off to Los Angeles where Claire and her sister did a short stint on Season 3 of The Voice as a duo called The Wadsworth Sisters. She then worked at the legendary recording studio, The Village, and recorded background vocals with artists including Liz Phair and Ben Harper. Since moving to the desert, Claire has performed and/or recorded with Dave Catching (Rancho de la Luna), Mojave Lords, earthlings?, Chris Goss (Masters of Reality), Lucius, Reuben and the Dark, and more.
Since her birth in Gothenburg, Sweden to a tapestry weaver and songwriter-turned-chemical-engineer, Claire has claimed many places as home, including New Jersey, Houston, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and now the High Desert of California, where she lives with her wife, Nikki. Claire first met Nikki, a trained Chef, at a cabaret in 2009 and fell madly in love. Later, they moved to California to legally get married. After a fated trip to Joshua Tree, they opened La Copine. They remain together, partners in business and in life, both supporting each other’s creative visions.