Bethany Cosentino on breaking free of Best Coast’s boxes: “I’m just gonna say what I want to say”
You might think you know Bethany Cosentino, the California-born-and-raised musician who led sunkissed indie duo Best Coast for over a decade. In that time, the singer and guitarist’s work would often be categorised into a handful of subjects – cats, weed, her (now ex) boyfriend – while she became an It Girl for the slacker scene. But, as she prepares to release her debut solo album ‘Natural Disaster’, it seems we might not know Cosentino at all.
“With Best Coast, I was put in a box by the public,” she says now, sitting in a chair in her house, legs tucked up close to her chest, on a July LA morning. “In the beginning of my career, I was widely accepted by critics and the public, but people were also so horrible. I was reduced to these tropes of lazy, crazy, baby: she’s dumb, she doesn’t know how to write a song, she can barely play guitar.”
At the time and over the years, the narrative placed upon her really affected Cosentino, making her struggle with feelings that she wasn’t good enough or that she had to fit herself in the restraints others were trying to squeeze her into. As a result, it wasn’t just the world putting her in a box – she played along and tried to give it what it wanted. “I said, ‘OK, you guys say that I’m the California stoner, the slacker princess? Fine, that’s who I am and I’m going to continue to explore that persona against different sonic backgrounds or more produced records,” she explains.
She points to a lyric in ‘Wreckage’, a surging punk song on Best Coast’s last album ‘Always Tomorrow’, released in 2020. In it, she sings: “I, I wanted to move on / But I, I kept writing the same songs”. It would be unfair to characterise all of the band’s tracks as carbon copies of each other, but the musician admits she wrote them while pulling from a limited pool of topics. “A lot of it is the same experience, just told differently,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I could get out of the realm of ‘life is hard, I’m obsessively codependent with my partners, I have really bad anxiety, I can’t sleep, blah blah blah.’”
Now, though, Cosentino is breaking out of those boxes and fulfilling the wish of the version of herself that wrote ‘Wreckage’. Under her own name – Best Coast is now on indefinite hiatus – she’s releasing the country-pop-indebted ‘Natural Disaster’, a big, beautiful record that serves as a monument to the journey of change and allowing yourself to follow your own path. “I don’t care anymore,” she smiles. “I’m just gonna say what I want to say.”
What she wants to say this time around includes, but is not limited to, reflections on the precarious nature of life, questions about motherhood, observations on the world around us, and examinations of new experiences of love. Its lyrics offer much to ponder and moments of inspiration for your own personal evolution; contemplations that only someone who’s come out the other side of the whirlwind of their twenties can make.
Starting anew as a woman in your mid-thirties isn’t easy, especially in an industry that often places an oversized value on youth. Cosentino is more than aware of this. “I made this record when I was 35 and it comes out when I’m 36, which in industry terms is probably like 90-years-old,” she deadpans. Her age doesn’t matter to her, though, she says, because she isn’t the same person as she was in her past.
“I’m a 36-year-old woman with a story and an experience and a life that I am very proud of, and a life that I want to continue to explore and live. I think about the things that were so difficult for me at 22 and I’m like, ‘Those things don’t even seem that hard now.’” What now feel like trivial worries have been replaced by much bigger concerns – whether she should have a child, climate change, racism and misogyny, women’s and trans rights being stripped away. “I view the world very differently than I did when I was younger – I’d like to have a perspective on that, share it and hopefully create something that will make people feel seen and heard in a time where there’s so much shit happening.”
In the last lines on the album, in the sparse, piano demo of ‘I’ve Got News For You’, Cosentino offers advice we could all take heed of: “I’ve got news for you / Let somebody love you / And love somebody too.” “It’s a simple thing to say, right?” she notes, shifting in her seat. “But it’s a difficult principle to actually act out in your life.” She hopes it will resonate with those who hear it, and not necessarily in relation to romance. “It could be a relationship with your friends or even nature – I think about climate change and what we could do to change things and it’s love Mother Earth, treat her well, because in turn she gives you a fucking place to live.” She catches the pace gathering in her speech, halts and apologises: “Sorry, I’ve become a huge nature girl over the last few years.”
If romance is what you’re looking for, though, there are moments of that within ‘Natural Disaster’. Cosentino has described the gentle twangs of ‘Easy’ as her first true love song and, in it, she reflects on her current relationship with her fiancé. “Every time I’m scared of falling / You’re pulling for me through it all,” she sings. “It’s always easy.” It’s taken her so long to write a song like this, she says, because it’s taken her until this point in her life to find a relationship healthy enough to inspire it.
“I’ve always had this softer side inside me, but it was under all these different layers of glass and cement, and I was like, ‘Don’t even come near,’” she explains. “[Now I have] a person who’s willing to listen and sit with me, and also willing to leave me alone if that’s what I need. I think I’m finally ready to hold that and have it.”
As much as ‘Easy’ contains signposts of the album’s overarching theme of change, it also points to another subtler current – parking lots. “Sitting in my car in a parking lot,” Cosentino sings in the opening line, while the video is filmed in different car parks. On the title track, she adds: “It’s August 1 in a parking lot.” Her fiancé even proposed on the asphalt of a parking area.
“Sitting in my car in a parking lot, in my driveway, on the side of the road, is a meditative place for me,” Cosentino laughs. During the pandemic, she began driving to the cemetery near her house and would sit in the parking lot, eating lunch, reading, and answering emails. “It became my mobile office but also my meditation space – I will seriously zone out and come to and be like, ‘I’ve been sitting in my car in my own driveway for 40 minutes’. It’s just a place where I can turn off the world.”
That habit might continue, but Cosentino is committed to keeping pushing forward with change where necessary. “This is just the beginning of a new chapter for me and I really hope I can continue to explore,” she smiles. “Even though it’s beginning at 36, it’s cooler – you know yourself better. Who wants to start at 22?”
Beth Cosentino’s ‘Natural Disaster’’ is out July 28 on Concord Recordings
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Rhian Daly
NME
