Sabrina Claudio is in a league of her own. With her beautiful vocals, hypnotic melodies, and deeply emotional lyrics, the singer-songwriter has carved out a space in the music industry that feels both intimate and otherworldly.
Since first captivating listeners with “About Time”, she’s continued to evolve, blending R&B, soul, and Latin influences into a sound that’s undeniably hers. Now, with her latest album, she’s once again proving why she’s an artist to watch—vulnerable, fearless, and effortlessly smooth.
Cosmopolitan Middle East caught up with Sabrina to talk about her creative process, personal growth, and what’s next on her journey.
Cosmo ME: Your music has such a dreamy, intimate vibe. How do you approach song writing and what inspires your sound? What inspires my sound?
Sabrina Claudio: I think naturally I gravitate towards anything that’s really deep in emotion. I love ballads and I love things that kind of translate what we feel inside in a way that when you’re listening to it, it feels like a dream.
I think what inspires it though is the people that I work with. I work with producers that I’ve been working with for years and as a unit created my sound, which I don’t know exactly how it was created. It just kind of was naturally there.
I think it’s everyone’s different influences kind of mending into one and that’s how I’ve evolved as an artist. I love really deep emotions. I also love to cry. I love to listen to music that makes me cry. I love watching movies that make me cry. I love talking about things that make me cry. And so to translate that through my music is always my goal. Not always wanting to make people cry, but wanting to make people feel deeper than usual.
Cosmo ME: Can you tell us a bit about your journey to becoming a famous artist? When and how did it start?
Sabrina Claudio: I started doing covers on YouTube when I was 14 around there. And I would say it wasn’t necessarily a dream of mine to become an artist. I just loved to sing. And my parents were really adamant about getting my voice on the internet. We didn’t really have a goal. We just knew that there was a voice there. And once I had uploaded my first video on YouTube, I got some sort of recognition throughout my school. And I think realizing that there was something there, my parents were very encouraging when it came to building on top of that.
So it started on YouTube, but my parents were the ones that helped me find my way into a studio. A family friend knew somebody in LA. I was living in Miami at the time. She knew somebody in LA who knew a producer. And so I flew out to LA and I got my first experience in writing in a studio. I didn’t even know that writing was an occupation. That wasn’t something that was in my brain to do as a career.
Once I experienced what it was like to write a song in the studio, I fell in love with that art form. That’s when I started having that dream of becoming an artist. I would say that was probably around age 15 or 16. And ever since then, we never stopped. We, as in me and my family. My artist career started when I was 19, because I started writing the music that everybody has heard now. And I wrote my first project “Confidently Lost” the first year that I moved out to LA.
Cosmo ME: You’ve evolved so much since your early days, especially also since your
early days on SoundCloud. How do you think your artistry has changed over the years?
Sabrina Claudio: I think inevitably art changes within us because we’re just constantly growing as people. Like I said, I started writing when I was a teenager, so I’m 28 now. It’s been over 10 years that I’ve been writing. And inevitably I’ve evolved as a woman into womanhood. I’ve had so many different experiences within love and friendship and within myself and within my career that all of those experiences influence what we create. I think my evolution came from natural experiences and natural growth as a human being. I’ve only matured in my music, not just the sound of it, but conceptually. I have so much more to talk about because I’ve lived so many different things.
Cosmo ME: Collaboration is huge in the music industry. Who’s your dream artist to work with and why?
My dream artist to work with, well, I’m halfway there. She doesn’t know it yet, but I happened to write a song for my queen, Beyoncé. I don’t know how it happened. It just happened. But thankfully I had that opportunity and I wrote a song for her. She would be my dream feature, my dream collab. And why? She’s my favourite artist and I’ve grown up with her. And to have had written a song for her was ridiculous. So to have my voice on her record would be the next step in that dream.
Cosmo ME: Your latest project explores deep emotions. What message do you hope your fans take away from it?
Sabrina Claudio: I think the biggest goal that I have for this album that I’m working on is I want it to be as vulnerable as possible for myself and for my fans, because I’ve written a lot of music in my life, but for the most part I’ve written from other people’s experiences. I like to consider myself a storyteller, a writer, because one, I don’t fall in love often. I feel like because I was always storytelling and writing from other people’s experiences, I would write from like friend experiences or conversations that I overheard or things that I saw on movies or things like that.
Thankfully I was helping my fans and people who were listening to my music, but I didn’t feel a connection. When I meet people in public and they come up to me and they tell me how much something has helped them, I used to feel like I was a vessel. I heard stories and concepts and things that I knew people wanted to hear. And I was just the vessel for it. And I was just singing about it.
But with this album, I’m writing everything from personal experience because I took two years off of writing music. And within those two years, I lived a lot. I was in love. I was heartbroken. I was going through things internally with myself and I couldn’t help but want to write about those things. With this album, I hope that there’s more of a connection between me and my fans and my fans can actually see who I am and understand the way that I love, the way that I am, how I am when I’m heartbroken and all the fears that I have within love and within life.
That’s my biggest goal is just to feel more connected and more accessible and more attainable and more relatable to the people that listen to me.
Cosmo ME: Your style is effortlessly chic. How would you describe your fashion aesthetic? And do you have any go-to styling tips?
Sabrina Claudio: Well, I would like to give credit to my stylist, Katie. We are like two peas in a pod. She has helped me so much to dive deeper into who I am stylistically. She’s helped me get out of my comfort zone and experiment with a lot of different things. My styling tip would just be to be yourself. I don’t really think there are any rules when it comes to styling. I think whatever makes you feel beautiful and whatever makes you feel good, I would just do that. That’s what I do. I try to do as much as possible. I like to tap into my feminine, divine feminine aura. I just love being really girly and I love being sexy. And I love to show my femininity in that way.
So my tip would be just do you, boo.
Cosmo ME: Self-care is so important, especially in a fast-paced industry. So what are your favorite rituals to unwind and stay grounded?
Sabrina Claudio: I love to spend time, as much time as possible with my family and my friends. I think they keep me the most grounded. When I moved to LA, my family moved to LA with me. Because of that, I was able to go to work and do what I had to do and be an artist and all those things and then come back to my home and the people that know me and love me and don’t treat me any other way other than their daughter or their sister or their granddaughter. In order to stay grounded, I just love to spend time with people who just genuinely love me for me and not for any other reason.
Cosmo ME: What’s one song on your playlist right now that you can’t stop listening to?
Sabrina Claudio: I have been listening to Chapel Rowan “Picture You” for like a month now, straight. I’m the type of person, if I fall in love with a song, that song is on replay until I annoy myself. That one right now, I’m obsessed with.
Cosmo ME: If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?
Sabrina Claudio: She was very, very insecure. It’s interesting because I feel like all the advice that I would have given myself, I kind of transitioned into naturally. I would tell her to give yourself the time and the patience. Give yourself grace because everything that you dream about being, you will become. Till this day, I’m not a patient person. I rush things and I want things immediately. But even more so when I was younger, and I would just tell her to be patient and give herself some grace and to trust her intuition and who she is. And she will grow into this. She’ll just blossom and bloom. She just needs to give herself some time.
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