“Sharks in the Swimming Pool”

Claire Rachel Wilkinson was 17 when “Sharks in the Swimming Pool” came out on 17 March 2015, her first single as Clairity and her first for Lava Records, released through Republic. She had started voice lessons at eight, began writing songs at 13 and learned keyboards from YouTube videos. Pebe Sebert, Kesha’s mother, became a writing partner and passed her on to others, and Kara DioGuardi signed her to a publishing deal and played her songs to Lava’s founder, Jason Flom, who phoned while she was doing the dishes. The night after the release she played BMI’s showcase at SXSW, at Bar 96 in Austin.

She wrote the song with DioGuardi and with Tim Sommers and Jeremy Dussolliet, the New York duo Kinetics & One Love, another introduction that came through Sebert. Sommers produced and engineered it, and Robert Orton, who won two Grammys for mixing Lady Gaga’s The Fame, mixed it with Tony Lake. Her official bio that spring described immersive production built around a catchy refrain, and a portrait of the awkward kid who stands out from the crowd.

By her own account the title image came from a family holiday, when her younger cousins refused to swim at night in case a shark jumped out of the pool. That fear reminded her of middle school, where she felt “like a total alien sometimes”. The verses put her alone at a party watching the in-crowd, hood up, drawing crop circles in a notebook and getting answers wrong on purpose so nobody calls her a freak. The classmates are the sharks, and the bridge tells her heart she doesn’t have to fit in. “It isn’t some anti-bullying rant though. It’s lighthearted,” she said: a song for feeling like the outcast at a party.

Her Vevo channel posted the audio on release day, a lyric video in April and an illustrated “motion book” version at the end of May, and a remix by the Noisy Freaks followed in June. The song was left off her debut EP, Alienation, which came out on 17 July with four other songs, but Billboard still pointed readers back to it as her debut. In 2016 her cover of Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic” played under a trailer for X-Men: Apocalypse, and in 2017 she started again as 7Chariot. The shark that launched Clairity came from a pool her cousins would not swim in after dark.