Claire Rosinkranz on Growing Up Viral, Therapy, and Hearing God Differently at 22

Claire Rosinkranz knows what it’s like to have your whole life change before you’re old enough to vote.“Backyard Boy”made her a household name at 16, and she’s spent the years since figuring out what to do with a career that arrived way ahead of schedule. Now 22 and two albums deep, she says the early success created expectations nobody could live up to, and she’s learning to separate her identity from her output. Her mantra: my identity is not in what I do, but in who I am.

She’s also gotten honest about faith. Claire recently told her therapist she doesn’t hear God the way she used to, and the response she got back was a reframe worth stealing: maybe you hear God differently now, not less. It’s a shift from the black-and-white thinking a lot of us inherit, toward something more grown-up and more spacious. She pairs that with a practical grounding tool, naming what she does know when the unknown feels enormous.

Musically, she’s in a whole new lane mentally, citing Baltimore hardcore band Turnstile as a major inspiration. For an artist who came up on dreamy bedroom pop, that’s a fun left turn. Growing up in public is never clean, but Claire’s version of it is refreshingly human. What belief have you outgrown in a way that felt more like growth than loss?