FEATURE: Spotlight: Bethany Cosentino

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Bethany Cosentino

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EVEN though….

Best Coast have not parted ways, the Los Angeles duo are on a hiatus. Consisting of songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Bethany Cosentino and guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno, their most recent album, Always Tomorrow, was released in 2020. Bethany Cosentino is now embarking on a solo career. In fact, her debut solo album, Natural Disaster, came out on 28th July and received some great reviews. Even if it may take a few albums for Cosentino to establish her solo sound and win over all critics, she has huge potential and promise as a solo album. I will come to a review of Natural Disaster to end. Before that, there are a few interviews worth sourcing. Stereogum wanted to know more about Cosentino’s sound and her solo aesthetic. It is a fascinating interview you should check out. I have selected part of it to highlight here:

“You started teasing your first-ever solo album on social media well before the actual announcement happened. Was it a relief when the announcement happened along with the release of “It’s Fine”

Bethany Cosentino: I feel very relieved. I have been holding onto this secret for a while. It was fun to keep it secret, and I think it was necessary for me to keep it secret as well, because it removed a lot of the pressure around what I was doing. But at the same time, it was starting to make me go a little cuckoo. As I started approaching the announce, I was every day like, “Oh my fucking God, I cannot hold onto this one second longer.”

Now that it’s out there, I feel a big sigh of relief. It goes from anticipatory anxiety to a busy schedule, and all of the other anxieties start to trickle in… But I’m very, very, very excited. I feel very ready to talk about this, and really ready to step into this next chapter.

Your press materials describe how you started giving thought to a solo move in 2020, in the pandemic’s early days. But given how many years you’d been doing Best Coast, was this something you had been thinking about even pre-2020?

Cosentino: I had definitely thought about making a solo record or a very different style of record. When Always Tomorrow came out in 2020, it was the first Best Coast record in five years. It was the first headline touring that we had done in a while, and I was very invested in this new chapter of Best Coast. It’s so funny because five years doesn’t really feel like it’s that long of a break, but if a band goes away for one to two years, people are like, “Where did they go?” So it was kind of this comeback moment, and I had definitely been thinking at that time about [a solo move] because I’m one of those people that the second something comes out, I’m like, “What’s the next thing?” I have a very hard time sitting in the present, which I’m working on.

So I had thought about it, but it wasn’t really on my mood board for the next five years. It was just sort of a thought that I had. Then when the pandemic really hit, we had to come off the road, and we kept trying to reschedule these tours. I just felt like the universe was, from all sides, being like, “Hey, you know that idea you have about doing a different kind of record? Why don’t you try to explore that now?” It was within that period that I realized, “Oh, I have the time to do this.” I think if the pandemic wouldn’t have happened, I would have just had just my eye on the prize of doing the Best Coast album cycle and seeing what happened with that.

I think the pandemic probably forced all of us to reevaluate what was going on. I feel like I can’t talk about this without talking about pandemic, which is annoying, because I feel like we all want to move past it. But it’s impossible not to, because I think it’s really what led me to end up here.

There’s been some discussion about Natural Disaster’s tone, your shift in aesthetic, and the sound. I’ve seen a lot of comparisons to Sheryl Crow, and I personally thought of Jenny Lewis a little bit. When you were working on what the sound of this would be, how did you want Natural Disaster to reflect your present-day tastes?

Cosentino: I think the necessary piece of the puzzle for me, in order to really lean into present-day Bethany’s interests and what she listens to, was removing the box of Best Coast. I talk a lot about how I felt critically – and from a public perception – put into this box. But I also think that I kept myself in that box. I think that people moved on from the “lazy-crazy-baby” ’60s lo-fi, sunny-pop thing. But because I did not know what I felt that I identified as anymore, I clung to that. I would see the criticism, and I would be like, “Okay, they know better than me.” That’s when I finally decided, “This is not going to be a Best Coast record, this is going to be a Bethany Cosentino record, I’m going to step out on my own. I’m going to just follow all of the things that I want to follow, all of the things that are influencing me.”

I didn’t feel beholden to anything. I really felt free to explore all of my interests. I would say that the real influences behind this record are things that I’ve always loved, and things that I’ve always listened to. Like, I’m a massive Indigo Girls fan, I love all of the Lilith Fair era, female-fronted ’90s music. That’s all shit that I listened to as a teenager, but I couldn’t really make a Lilith Fair-ian Best Coast song. Technically, sure I could have, but I just didn’t feel that it was right. It didn’t feel like an organic thing to do.

At the top of the pandemic, when it was still that period of not being able to do anything, I would take these long walks with my dog, I would just listen to music. I just went back to being a fan of music and listening, immersing myself in stuff that I had always loved, but forgotten about. It’s funny, because I was really listening to the music that I discovered as a teen, which was Sheryl Crow. I loved Sheryl Crow, growing up. I was listening to a lot of Shania Twain. I was listening to Counting Crows. I was listening to a lot of stuff from the ’90s that was on the radio when I was a kid.

I feel like it went into the DNA of what I knew that I was going to create. Even shit like Michelle Branch, The Spirit Room, that was one of my favorite records when I was in the eighth grade. I was just like, “Nobody really makes music like this anymore. This music is just so carefree, it’s uplifting, it feels good.” So I just started to chase that kind of stuff. Because it was a secret, I didn’t really care. I was like, “I don’t really care if people think the Counting Crows are cool, because I think the Counting Crows are cool. And I love that songwriting, and I’m going to make my own version of that kind of shit.”

Nobody knew that I was doing it, so I didn’t have to deal with any of the external, “What do you mean you like Dave Matthews Band?” I got to just be like, “I like what I like, and that’s fine”.

I am going to move things on. There are a lot of great interviews out there with Bethany Cosentino. I have selected a few but, if you are interested in her music, go and check the recent ones out. DIY sat down with her and discussed her debut solo album. Natural Disaster seemed like it was a long time in the making. She talks about the last Beast Coast album and transferring to her solo work:

“Her first record under her own name, though, involves changes of a deeper and more wholesale kind. They were inspired, in part, by the frustration surrounding the last Best Coast album - the endearingly poppy ‘Always Tomorrow’ - released in February 2020 and, accordingly, soon swallowed up by the pandemic.

“It got swept under the rug,” Bethany sighs on a Zoom call from her Los Angeles home. “Not that it was anybody’s fault. But I did start asking myself, ‘What more do I want out of my life? What do I want to do differently?’ And I didn’t feel like I could reinvent myself again as Best Coast; I felt as if I’d always be in a certain box under that name. So I thought I’d see what would happen without it, and the result of that experiment and that faith in myself is ‘Natural Disaster’.”

The title suggests that her knack for witty self-deprecation remains intact, but nearly everything else is new. First, there’s the sound. Through all their reimaginings, Best Coast stayed true to scuzzy guitars of some description, whereas now there’s a country-folk feel, encompassing acoustic and slide playing; it all revolves around a new sonic nucleus of Bethany’s vocals, which have never sounded as rich, confident and unadorned by effects as they are here.

Having always cited the likes of Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie and Linda Ronstadt as influences, never before have these musicians informed Bethany’s own songwriting as keenly as they do on ‘Natural Disaster’, where the songs have a classic feel pitched somewhere between Emmylou Harris and Sheryl Crow. “As corny as it sounds, I think stripping away the persona or identity that your stage name gives you means that you can bear your soul more,” she reflects. “I was giving myself permission to be Bethany Cosentino, and that involves channelling some of those influences more honestly than I had before, and it also meant being able to talk about all these things I was reckoning with and digging through.”

Now 36, Cosentino is no longer the fresh-faced stoner girl singing wistfully of doomed summer romances. With the plaintive pining of early hit ‘Boyfriend’ a thing of the past, she’s instead tackling bigger issues these days. On ‘Easy’, the kind of swooning piano ballad that would have been way out of bounds for Best Coast, she taps into the approach of another of her key California touchpoints, Gwen Stefani, ruminating on the future and potential motherhood in a manner reminiscent of No Doubt’s ‘Simple Kind of Life’.

“I knew that I wanted to challenge myself, and get super fucking uncomfortable,” she explains. “And that probably meant that there were many different times in the process where I threw my hands up in the air and said, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ That definitely happened, but I wanted to be really specific about the stuff that I wanted to talk about, which is why a lot of the album is just wildly vulnerable in ways I’ve never been before”.

The penultimate interview is from DORK. They go into detail with their questions and investigation of Natural Disaster. There is a positivity and sense of encouragement and motivation that comes through. Bethany Cosentino is going to grow even more amazing and assured as a solo artist in years to come:

“The album is a record about living in the moment and making the most of life. “The song that conveys the message of the album is ‘For A Moment’, which is really about the understanding that nothing is guaranteed,” she explains. “If nothing is guaranteed, why not lean into love, lean into joy, experience all of life in its hard times, wonderful times and mediocre, boring times? Even if you’re only experiencing those things for 30 seconds, it’s like having a container in yourself where you can store these really big important, beautiful moments that push you through when you look around, and the world is burning down.

“The record doesn’t feel like it belongs to one genre or category, and that was the thing I was most proud of. Every song feels like it can live on a different playlist. I wanted to make something that gave people hope and joy in a time of real joylessness.”

The freedom to finally make this album comes from a much-changed musical landscape from when Bethany first emerged making lo-fi bedroom recordings back in 2008. “Because the industry is so different and in a lot of ways collapsing and having to be rebuilt, there are no rules to be beholden to.,” she says. “You can do whatever you want. You look at pop music, and the things that are popular now exist in so many different categories. There doesn’t feel like there’s this one thing that you strive to be. I try to see the silver lining that nothing matters anymore, and you can do whatever the fuck you want.”

With that newfound freedom of expression, the possibilities are endless for Bethany. “I see this as the start of a new chapter.,” she says excitedly. 15 years in and making the album of her career, Bethany Cosentino is beginning to rewrite her pop story, and we’re very much here for the ride”.

Prior to getting to a review of the excellent Natural Disaster, there is one more feature I want to highlight. For The Line of Best Fit’s Nine Songs feature, Cosentino chose nine tracks that mean a lot to her or have inspired her music. There was one particular that stood out to me – as it is a song that I really love too:

“Don't Speak” by No Doubt

If I'm going chronologically, The Chicks “Wide Open Space” represents the side of me where I wasn't fully aware of the way the world worked yet, I was still young enough that I was like, ‘Oh, this is just fun.’

But when I first saw Gwen Stefani, I had never seen a woman as the front woman of a band who wore crop tops and exposed her abs. She was very feminine and girly, but at the same time she was also tough. Out of all the bands I discovered in my formative years, the discovery of No Doubt and the discovery of Gwen Stefani was wildly impactful on the person that I later became.

But this song is not the rambunctious punk of No Doubt. I think a theme through all of these songs is that I'm a very emotional person, I'm a very deep person, I love to analyse people and I think this is one of most beautiful breakup songs. It's one of the best sad songs.

It's the delivery of her vocals, the lines, how she sums it up with the words ‘don’t speak’. You think about going through a breakup, where you experience all the levels of grief, and it's ‘I don't even need for you to speak. I don't need to hear from you. I don't need you to say anything. I know exactly what you're thinking. I know exactly what's happening.’

I’d listen song over and over and over again. I had a twin sized bed with a pink metal frame, and I would lay on my back staring up at the ceiling in my bedroom listening to it. I was 13 or 14 and I had never experienced heartbreak, but the song resonated so much with me, and she resonated so much with me. It's really funny for me to think about being young, listening to the song, and being ‘I know, I feel you’, I had probably had two crushes on boys at that point so I probably thought, ‘Oh my god, life is so hard!’ But that was the first time I’d seen a female frontwoman and I was like, ‘This is what I need, I need more of this’.

Best Coast actually got to open for No Doubt twice. It was incredible, you talk about living out your childhood dreams, and that was the epitome, the pinnacle of living out my childhood dreams. I've been very fortunate to open for the majority of the bands I was obsessed with, Weezer, blink-182 Green Day, all of this stuff that I loved as a teen, but No Doubt in particular was so special for me because Gwen was such an impactful figure in my life.

“Don’t Speak’ is so beautiful, the music video is epic, it’s everything about this song. There’s a flamenco guitar, which is such an anomaly on that album. You put Tragic Kingdom on and there's all these up-tempo songs and then it's just like, ‘Bamm!’ This song comes and takes over the entire room”.

I will finish with a review for Natural Disaster. You can buy the album here. This is what NME said when they sat down to share their thoughts regarding an album that everyone needs to have a listen to. It is an album I have listened to quite a few times since it came out:

“Produced by musician Butch Walker at his Nashville studio, Cosentino’s LP smiles back at the precarious nature of life, the passing of time and love through a pop-folk-coloured lens. The album’s title track was influenced by the early days of the pandemic, the internal struggle of thinking nothing matters anymore and everything matters even more simultaneously, all played out against twangy, bright guitars.

‘It’s Fine’ takes on the form of ’90s radio hit, as she sings “Look at all the pink flowers in the rearview / Reminds me of the seasons that I wasted on you” over rock-and-roll meets country pop arrangements. Her track ‘Outta Time’ enlists pedal-steel work and mandolins in a climbing anthem about urgently searching for signs and the unavoidable passing of time, backed by a big chorus and a hearty guitar solo.

Album closer, ‘I’ve Got News For You’, drives the message of risk and reward home in stripped-back demo form, a decision Cosentino and Walker made to not masquerade the vulnerable message behind the fragile piano ballad. In it, she sings, “I got news for you if we go down this road there’s so much more to lose / Am I the only one whose scared of believing this is true love / Do you feel it too?” before her voice cracks at the refrain and she gives into the songs prevailing emotion. It’s the same heartbreakingly optimistic feeling tying together each track of the album.

In May, Cosentino announced her solo debut the same day Best Coast announced their “indefinite hiatus”. It was a bold move, but judging by the fruits of ‘Natural Disaster’, it was worth it. “It’s really scary to take those risks and make big changes in your life,” she said at the time. “But what you find on the other side can be so magical.” So it is”.

If you are not aware of Bethany Cosentino or were not conscious of Best Coast, go and check out her terrific solo album. I think that we will hear a lot more solo albums from Cosentino – and I am not sure what the future holds for Best Coast. A wonderful songwriter and compelling artist, there were so many reasons why I wanted to spotlight her. Make sure that Bethany Cosentino is…