The Best Coast singer didnt abandon the band that made her an Indie It Girl.
She had a solo awakening.
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Do you mind if we swing by the Starbucks drive-through before we go to the cemetery?
Bethany Cosentino asks, steering her Subaru into a wide Los Angeles intersection.
Im a real chain girl, sorry.
But first, caffeine.
But its become part of my practice of softening.
Thats my emo reason for coming here.
You didnt announce the album until it was completed.
Very rarely do I hold back from my opinions, thats for sure.
But I just felt like I was going through such an identity shift.
Its been a long hibernation.
]But Im glad that I held it in.
That didnt even cross my mind while I was making it Idont care, because guess what?
We were on tour and COVID happened two weeks in.
And if I dont feel genuinely connected to something, I cant fake it.
Im such a bad faker.
I got to just go be Bethany.
I felt so disconnected from it.
I felt so disconnected from the person that I was when I made it.
And so when I expressed that to him, he understood.
Hes been my friend since I was 16.
Hes a lot older than me, and he has always been a person in my corner.
I dont believe in the finality of things when it comes to creative projects.
I dont think that you have to end something definitively to go and do something else.
Im going to go explore being a different person.
And I can always return if I want to.
I do see Best Coast at some point down the line doing an anniversary show.
But as far as having that be the top priority of my artistic life, I just outgrew it.
I dont think it had anything to do with Bobb.
So at the end of the day it was like, This has nothing to do with you.
This has nothing to do with the sonic sound of the band.
This just has to do with me as an autonomous human being.
And he was like, Yeah, you dont need to keep explaining it to me.
Weve eaten the sandwiches, were done.
Because I had a money plant in my house that was in desperate need of being repotted.
And he just kind of looked at me and was like [deadpan], Totally, babe.
This is where the girl who took mushrooms for the first time connects to the universe.
Im sorry, I did mushrooms very late in life.
What was the first song that you wrote for the record?Its Fine.
And then I realized I actually dont think I care.
But I walked over and I picked up the guitar in my living room instead.
Hes a close friend of mine.
And Butch Walker I knew from a million years ago because Best Coast almost made a record with him.
He had a foot in alt country and Americana, which is where I kind of wanted to go.
So I sent him Its Fine, which was just a shitty demo on my iPhone.
And he was like, I took the liberty of putting a little bit of a track together.
Is that okay with you?
He pushed PLAY and it was goosebumps all over my body.
The version thats on the record is the version from that day.
And I think that I had this real awakening within myself.
Truly, a lot of it was connecting to my inner child.
Literally, I was the kid at Disneyland on the leash.
No joke theres a picture of it on my fridge that I talk about in therapy.
I couldnt run free.
Thats a very heady, long-winded answer.
But if people dont get it, they just dont get it.
I have to really, truly believe myself when I say its fine.
Take your own fucking advice.
Was the album always going to be named after the opening track, Natural Disaster?Yeah.
And it was learning to let those two things exist.
Ive always been an L.A. girl, I would drive five minutes to go record in Eagle Rock.
It was a complete and utter rewrite of everything Ive ever known.
Bonnie Raitt even gets a little namecheck on the song Outta Time.
It didnt land there, but those were definitely references that we would make in the studio a lot.
I knew all about Travis Tritt and George Strait and all these artists because of my grandmother.
The thing about Sheryl Crow is thatshes a master songwriter.
And thats because its a fucking fantastic melody and a great song.
And that one, we actually used the demo from the day that I wrote it.
The next single is Easy, which is just a tried-and-true love song.
Ive never done anything like that before.
Those words would never have come out of my mouth before because I wouldve been too embarrassed.
Now Im just like, what do I have to lose?
Im in my mid-30s, I wear fucking Birkenstocks.
Why not just let myself be who I feel authentically that I am?
1, the pain that I was in, unbeknownst to me at the time.
2, Im tired of singing about these fucking guys; Im tired of singing about this story.
And then the realization that youre the one that keeps doing it!Go talk about something else.
Theres a lot of shit that I thought I fixed, but I did not.
I only scratched the surface, you know?
You have to consistently be working on these things until you end up at fucking Forest Lawn.
LikeHipster Runoffwas a joke, right?
But it was wildly hurtful.
That shit fucked me up.
I was also very much reduced to several tropes lazy, crazy, weed, cat.
But when I woke up the next morning, it was the classic thing of, like,Fuck.
It was really scary for me because I was like, am I qualified to speak on this topic?
Is this something that I even understand enough?
Am I the right spokesperson for this?
But I think at the end of the day, Im really grateful for that moment.
Because after that I feel like people started speaking out more about bad promoters, guys in bands.
But yeah, I dont think I really realized at the time the impact that it would have.
It was truly just a send tweet moment and then down the tower went.
You seem to enjoy social media now on your own terms.
Theres the very elusive one thats not online and they dont really give you anything.
And then theres the person thats sort of like, Hey guys, here I am at Trader Joes.
Hey guys, here I am at the gym.
But theres also certain things that Im not gonna do.
Im a 36-year-old woman, I dont need to be dancing on TikTok, you know?
Im not gonna do the dance.
I dont want to hear your opinion unless youve been with us since day one in the trenches.
Ive been watching these people for ten seasons!
Ive gone through a lot with them.
And I remember there were people that were like This is dumb, why do you like this show?
But I dont believe in guilty pleasures.
What I like is what I like.
My straight 43-year-old fiance likesVanderpump Rulesnow, and so does a 16-year-old in Missouri.
The thing that unites us as a society is our love of these crazy people.
I know Ariana personally, and shes an angel, and I was not happy when I found out.
No one was, obviously look what fucking happened.
Do you get recognized much out in the wild?Every so often I do.
Somebody just ran up to me at the mall the other day.
Have a good day I hope you find a cool pair of shoes!
And then the rest of my day was so nice.
The other thing that I get a lot is You were my favorite artist in high school.
And Im like, Im still an artist, Im still here, but thank you!
Its okay its a compliment!
He was such an emotional-support presence through all of those records.
Now Im having to be my own emotional-support cat.
This necklace that Im wearing actually has his ashes in it.
Im friends with Vanessa Carlton, and she had a similar relationship with her dog.
She was like, I have him in this necklace, you should do the same.
So I did and its so nice, its like hes with me all the time.
It looks like a Tic Tac, but its actually Snacks.
Are you going to be touring forDisaster?
I cant automatically play the places Best Coast was playing.
So I kind of feel like the new kid on the block in certain ways.
We have big goals over here.
This interview is edited and condensed.
