Clair, the teacher-artist breaking down taboos through music
The classroom and the recording studio, learning support and international pop/R&B: after addressing gender-based violence, anxiety, bullying and long-distance desire, Clair returns with “Attraction”, the new English-language single in which forbidden attraction becomes the freedom to listen to and understand oneself, beyond the weight of judgement.
By day, she teaches. She works in learning support, alongside young people who often lack the tools to decode what they feel, caught in dynamics that push them to defend themselves from the world rather than tell their own story. She knows the weight of words when they are missing, the value of compassionate listening, and the distance that can open up between what a person experiences within and what they are able to express outwardly.
Then she steps into the studio
And it is there that the same attentiveness takes on another form, without becoming a lesson or turning into instruction. In the music of Clair — the stage name of Barbara Rizzo, a Sicilian singer, songwriter and teacher-artist — her educational sensitivity does not soften the writing; it sharpens its edges. It enables her to approach themes that contemporary pop often barely touches, sacrificing the complexity of lived experience on the altar of algorithm-friendly immediacy.
With “Attraction”, her new single released by Loud Vision and accompanied by an official music video, the artist reaches the most mature chapter of her musical journey to date.
At first glance, moving into the territory of physical and mental attraction might resemble a change of direction by someone choosing to ease the pressure. In fact, the opposite is true: “Attraction” extends a body of work that has never made concessions to disengagement. Clair has entrusted her vocal, songwriting and interpretive talent with the task of challenging taboos, encouraging listeners to free themselves from the weight of judgement and internalised guilt. She addressed gender-based violence in “So Perfectly” and self-determination in “Never Give Up”, before narrowing the focus to the suffocating anguish of “Stop Anxiety” and the maze of internalised blame that bullying carves into its victims in “Colpa Mia”. Then came the international resonance of “Distant Love”, embraced by US radio stations for its portrayal of desire surviving physical distance and turning absence into an all-encompassing inner presence. With “Attraction”, the focus of the narrative does not shift; it evolves. Clair does not change course, but applies the very same narrative rigour to the realm of instinct and passion.
A passion that is neither displayed nor transformed into an image or reduced to content, but emerges through encounter — through the chemistry between two bodies and two minds, ignited long before words.
By examining the pull of attraction before it is ever physically fulfilled, “Attraction” rejects a narrative built around the display of the body and follows one shaped entirely by the power of imagination: the other person becomes a constant thought, a “forbidden” presence that has already occupied every corner of the inner world. Body and mind merge into a flame fuelled by anticipation, whispers and erotic projections, through which profound pleasure is experienced first and foremost in the mind.
The choice of English reinforces this dimension. For Clair, it is not a language adopted to appear international, but a natural vocal territory that allows her to work with nuance, melodic openness, the softness of phrasing and a sensuality carried first by sound, before the words themselves. Following the response to “Distant Love” across international radio, particularly in the United States, “Attraction” strengthens a trajectory that reaches beyond the Italian market while retaining the Mediterranean roots of her identity.
Produced by Francesco Ronsivalle, known professionally as Skyner, and mixed and mastered by Gianluca Trainito, known professionally as Kim Paris, the track moves through sinuous textures, supported by a voice that alternates warmth, control and incisiveness. Clair’s classical training can be heard in her breath management, her control of vocal openings and her ability to govern intensity without extinguishing it.
Her voice allows sensuality and eroticism to emerge without forcing them, finding a natural interpretive balance between allusion and suggestion. The result is elegant pop/R&B: physical without becoming explicit, with every element — voice, beat, phrasing, silence and repetition — guiding the listener towards that subtle threshold where desire is not yet action, but is no longer merely thought.
This is precisely where Clair stands apart. A teacher-artist who chooses to sing about attraction is not simply expanding her musical repertoire. She is broadening the horizons of her storytelling, without asking music to become a manual, a manifesto or spectacle for its own sake.
“Attraction” treats physical and mental attraction as part of lived experience, rather than as something to censor or a device to exploit.
“Attraction is about a forbidden desire, something that cannot always be spoken, yet is felt with overwhelming intensity,” Clair explains. “It was important to me to portray those profound emotions that make us tremble, that move through the body and remain in the mind, because listening to ourselves and understanding our own passion is never a mistake, but the purest form of freedom.”
Directed by Lorenzo Mascali, the official music video accompanying the track does not merely illustrate the lyrics; it reinforces a visual world built on presence, anticipation and glances. Its most sensual dimension does not lie in what is shown, but in what remains between the lines: a gesture that seems about to arrive and then stops, a thought that returns, a closeness imagined before it can become possible.
From the classroom to the studio, from academic training to the international language of R&B, Clair continues to shape a profile that defies every predetermined category: an artist unafraid to lay bare her own truths. Even when it is uncomfortable. Even when it burns. Even when everything else would demand silence.
Biography
Clair, the stage name of Barbara Rizzo, is a singer and songwriter from Paternò, in the province of Catania, Sicily. She graduated in Vocal Performance from the “A. Corelli” State Conservatory in Messina in 2011, building a solid foundation rooted in classical, sacred and operatic music. Over the years, she has combined her artistic work with a professional path in education: she specialised in learning support in 2020 and, in 2024, obtained her teaching qualification in Music Education for lower secondary schools. This dual artistic and pedagogical path has gradually become the defining feature of her work. Alongside her teaching career, Clair has taken part in numerous concerts and musical productions, performing in classical and operatic settings and, since 2013, founding and directing a children’s choir with particular attention to the educational and collective dimension of music. In recent years, her research has focused on writing and interpreting original songs in which music becomes a means of reflecting on social and inner themes. “So Perfectly” (2025) addresses gender-based violence; “Never Give Up” (2025) is a statement in support of identity and individual responsibility. With “Stop Anxiety”, Clair continued this journey by placing anxiety — as a widespread and pervasive condition — at the heart of the narrative, giving it a controlled, lucid and measured sonic form. Her voice — technical, expansive and consistently assured — reflects a vision of music that does not separate rigour from sensitivity, but brings them into continuous dialogue. This approach makes Clair an unconventional figure in the contemporary landscape: a performer capable of bringing together artistic practice, educational awareness and expressive research, without resorting to emphasis or simplification.