Friendship, happiness and Inner World Peace – Frankie Cosmos

March 8, 2023
Interviews, Music

Are friendships for life a thing anymore? Does our unsettled world give us the right habitat to grow older together as friends? I’m not so sure. But maybe that’s just me. It’s the sign of a deep friendship when you can see someone after, like, forever and it’s like you’ve never been apart.

Frankie Cosmos had already made the decision to go on a hiatus ‘from touring and the rat race’ before Covid struck, a hiatus that ended up lasting almost 500 days. The decision to get together again and start work on new music threw up a few questions: How would they feel? Would it work? Would the space afforded by the hiatus and no live shows allow new influences and ways of working to be embraced into their world?

Greta Kline, Lauren Martin, Luke Pyenson and Alex Bailey are sat together, looking relaxed and joking like a bunch of friends that are locked in for the long haul. There’s warmth, humour, openness, observation and candour from them all and a very definite excitement and pride in their excellent new record, Inner World Peace, a sparkling storybook about inner reflection, curiosity, perception, times past and times to come all delivered with alluring harmonies and joyful brevity.

I start by asking about their individual perceptions of what this record means to them.

Greta Kline

The writing process was definitely affected by not being on tour for the first time in my adult life. I’d been on tour non-stop since I was 18 pretty much. Being able to write in a still moment where I’m in one place for a period – we didn’t have a single show booked – was really cool. It also made all of us appreciate being together and able to make music together after, like, 500 days apart. When we finally got back together and played music in a room together, I don’t know, it felt magical….

Lauren Martin

We were much more relaxed than other times when we were arranging. We were having fun together, cooking dinner and watching movies. Whereas before, we’d have to arrange three songs and then a week later, we were leaving on tour.

Alex Bailey

For me, it was more like I had a list of demos, and I’d sit there and be like, okay, I gotta make a part for this kind of a thing.

How did having that headspace make you feel?

We had like 500 days off, so when it finally came time to ‘Oh, my God, we’re going to be a band again, this is going to be who I am again’, it was so intoxicating from start to finish. When we started arranging to the moment we were done recording, I was just completely drunk from start to finish, but really, I was like, oh, fuck, actually who am I?

I don’t wanna speak for you guys, but for me, the best part is working together on it. The harder part is the touring element that we have now had all this time and space away from. This was the most concentrated time working on new music together that we’ve ever had.

And also, we have always had to carry 30 songs around with us to play live.

Yeah, and the other thing is, we really had the time to dissect each song, talk about every aspect of it, talk about the lyrics, talk about the inspiration behind the lyrics, the mood that we want it to conjure, and we maybe could have given ourselves the time or made more of an effort to give ourselves the time to do in previous sessions…

We considered everything a lot more.

By having that time to dissect what each song means to you, do you feel like it brought you closer together even more?

Yeah, I think so. I felt that it was more inclusive in general. But I always feel like I get a little more willing to delegate and share responsibility and stuff. The fact that I allowed Luke to write a lyric is huge for me. (Tons of laughter) Normally, I go ‘No, this is the format of the songs’. And with this, almost every single song changed format.

Yeah, the intros and outros. There’s a phenomenon on this record, where we literally were having so much fun and we would add space on the songs for us to just like jam, there’s a bunch of places where we would just say, ‘Okay, now there’s like an open area’ or ‘just kind of lay into it’ for our own enjoyment.

Yeah, normally I’m like, ‘no, no, no, this song’s a minute and a half’. And that’s it. It’s just the lyrics, no other parts.

I find it interesting that we definitely created space for ourselves.

Until now, you’ve had most of the creative input, Greta, in terms of song format, lyrics, so was this approach liberating?

I think, like, after having a year and a half of just making demos where I had full control over them, I didn’t feel like it was difficult to like, go in and collaborate. That’s exciting to me. I used to be stricter with wanting the final song to be the same format as the demo.

You’re very flexible. A lot of the songs are really different from the original version. I mean, obviously, all of Greta’s lyrics and the melody are the same, but yeah, we cut things up and changed the order or stuck part of this song on the end of that song. It’s like we were all collaging.

There’s only one line that someone who’s not Greta contributed, and it wasn’t even out of thin air, it’s a kind of a rephrasing of a line that occurs earlier in the song. It was more of an edit than a completely new line. So lyrically, that’s not really a place where that kind of thing happened. I am also an editor and I feel like now having worked with Greta for such a long time. I feel like I can kind of inhabit her voice a little bit. A little bit. I feel like the job of a writer and editor is to try to, well, you shouldn’t be seen or felt. You have to make sure that it’s that person coming across.

Actually, we haven’t really talked about this, but I think it feels like the most that we worked on an album, where it’s one thing. In the past, it was like, here’s three songs, arrange them, here’s another three songs, we’ll arrange them. This time, it was like they were connected.

It feels more cohesive.

There’re consciously no solo songs, which is weird for an FC album. Usually, there’s a couple acoustic numbers.

I feel like I have my demos as a place that I can do that acoustic thing, and they now don’t need to be part of a Frankie Cosmos album. I also think not having shows planned allowed us to make the arrangements thicker than they normally would be. How we are going to achieve that arrangement live, that’s a problem for future us, which we’re now dealing with. When we play the show, we’ll be thinking about how we are going to get all six guitar parts to happen at the same time!

I remember distinctly with previous albums being very concerned about how we were going to play the songs live. But this one was like, well, we may never play this live. It was pretty bad. Like, when we were making this, bands hadn’t necessarily started touring again. So, we were like, we’re never gonna tour again or play a show, so it doesn’t matter. Of course, like, I never really thought that! It was just more freeing to do it without the live thing on our mind.

It’s funny because it sounds like what we’re describing is actually a fairly normal process. We just didn’t used to operate like that.

We’re all practical people and we don’t want to create problems for ourselves in the future. So, we’ve all been like, let’s make an album that we can play.

How has the experience of knowing each other and being in Frankie Cosmos changed you as people?

Well, I guess the first thing that popped into my mind is that Lauren and I got married during the process of making this record

{Loud whoops and applause from everyone}

I feel like our closeness and our shared wavelength just blossomed. We’ve been in the band together and, I don’t want to say that that influences the music necessarily. We also have very similar music tastes and influences, and we live together, so we’re listening to the same stuff for the past two and a half years! We’ve talked through everything we’ve listened to, so I feel that has definitely been a theme for us.

With each album, I feel like we all get better at making music together and closer as friends and then Luke and I got closer as partners. I think what we’ve all gotten better at and what Greta’s gotten so good at is letting go of expectations of what the song has to be.

I think the hard thing about collaborating is also the point of collaborating, someone else is going to have a different thing that they are impulsively, intuitively, drawn towards. I always say that the harmony that I write for myself is going to be so different from the harmony that Lauren or Alex writes, or the way that I hear the tempo of the song is going to be different than how Luke interprets it. And it’s like, that’s the point of collaborating. If I wanted it to just be the way that I see it, I would make it all by myself, like a lot of musicians do. But, you know, there are parts on this album where I didn’t really like how those parts were changing and didn’t really like to do them. And maybe Lauren would feel strongly about repeating this part. And I would say that I hate repeating stuff and then I would just go ‘okay, well, let’s try it. And then, hey, it would really grow on me.

I always felt like I could just play my part and you guys don’t tell me not to play! With my part, you get to do whatever you want {everyone laughs}.

I mean, ideally, everyone just gets to play a part that they like to play, and nobody’s telling anyone else what to do. But of course, when it comes to like the format of song, that’s where we have conversations of who feels the strongest about it turning out this way or that way. There are moments of, you know, compromise but those can turn out to be things that you end up really liking.

The person we recorded with, Nate, who was an engineer / producer, he did shape the album as well. He had opinions and would direct us and say, ‘ok we’re gonna do this now because that’s enough takes and stuff’.

Bringing ideas is all done with extreme kindness, like no one’s feelings get hurt feelings. We’re just like ‘are you sure we should do that?’ or ‘maybe we should try that’. It’s all very kind of like, fun.

There’s ‘play’ – not play like playing music, but play like fucking around and finding out, so it’s an attitude. That’s why we ended up maybe playing the song a bunch of different ways.

To me, this all shows your open mindedness to try different things, and it also shows your trust in each other. I mean one of the hardest things is if your ideas get rejected, isn’t it?

Ha, yeah! They’re all in the control room, and I’m recording by myself, and I get a little ding and they’re like ‘can you play something else?’ {everyone laughs}

It’s like a vocal part that I latched on to from a demo and it was to do with this last ‘again’, in a pause. And everyone’s like, we don’t like that last ‘again’. And I was like, but it’s part of like, the pause, otherwise, it’s…. a pause. And then when we got in the mixing room, we just turned it down. And then we turned it down. And then we turned it down until it was gone. And I was fine with that. As long as it’s as long as I think it’s there somewhere {everyone laughs}

I hear it even though it’s not there anymore {everyone laughs}

Collaborating is obviously complicated. That’s why most people don’t do it. There’s a lot of nuance involved and this is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently: nuance, for whatever reason, doesn’t sell. There’s this element of like, ‘are listeners going to get this, or are they just gonna hear this and just not listen to it, the way that a lot of people sometimes do’. Often, you have an expectation of what something’s gonna sound like or what something means, so you just decide it’s that before you even hear it.

It’s a common behavioural bias, isn’t it? Confirmation bias, I think. I think what, you were saying earlier about the album as a whole album feeling more cohesive, I like the idea of an album feeling like a storybook, where there are whatever themes or narratives holding it all together

Right now, particularly the way the music industry is going it’s a very single track focused business right now. Personally, I don’t often listen to full albums. I mean there are albums that I love but I’ll more often pick up my favourite songs and put them on a playlist. It’s a playlist culture that we’re living in. And that’s difficult when you’ve got an album like ours where every single song is a hit…..{pause, then everyone bursts out laughing} Ha, no, it’s hard because I’m like ‘I really hope people listened to track five on this album’

This is like our first big interview for this cycle and I’m just loving this preview of how Greta’s going around with no filter {laughs}

There’s so much of everything. I was just thinking recently about being a person who loves music is like being someone who’s like polyamorous. It’s like yes, there’s infinite love – and for the record I’m not polyamorous so this is not…

….she is actually polyamorous and wants you to put it in the article…. {everyone laughs}

{laughing} I know about polyamorous people because I’ve read about them….no, it’s like there’s no limit of how much love you have in your heart. But there’s just not enough hours in your life to listen to all the music. But every single day, it’s like ‘new single, new single’ from different bands. You have to decide, ‘I’m gonna give this album the time of day, I’m gonna care about this musician’s whole album and devote 38 minutes or whatever, as opposed to filling those 38 minutes checking out 38 different bands or whatever.

You can decide based on how nice the album cover is. And how good the band’s PR is….

That’s a very neat segue – I’m grateful! What’s your view on the relationship between the art that goes into an album design and the music? Lauren, you’re a visual artist, so over to you!

Yeah, I drew the album art, but we all worked on the concepts and vibe together. I felt that there was kind of an obvious vibe based on the music of a little bit of mystery, a little bit of sparseness. A lot of the visualisations that we created to inform how the songs sounded were based on collections and collage. I’m inspired by artists whose work is informed a lot by found objects and putting things together that don’t necessarily go together. It was based a lot on the emotions of making the album and then using visual inspiration, then we all collaborated on what the object should be based on lyrics in the songs – not entirely but there are a couple of things in there that are mentioned in songs and just yeah, this like, it feels like a still life that would have emerged if we could walk through the songs and pick little items from them.

The press photos that we took were in a super cluttered space that had all these cool collectors’ items, it’s the ‘your eye could go anywhere’ kind of feeling and that there’s a lot of like depth to pick out from it.

We made visual mood boards for each song. But this is the thing I’m very aware that I don’t have. Lauren can make a connection, as a visual artist between music.

I’m not a musician who can read music, so I just think about songs in a visual way, like through shapes and colours. I think more so than other albums. I was really vocal about how I felt the songs could be and I use a different language to try to explain those things to the band. So, I was like, why don’t we make mood boards, and we can show how we think the song could look.

I think like that too, but I’m maybe not as good as at turning it into what Lauren does. I would say that we all talk about music in a way that’s not your standard music theory way of thought.

I play classical guitar a little bit and I can read music and stuff. I think like in standard music ways, generally. I’m very aware of this thing that like visual artists that make music have that I’m maybe kind of lacking or something. I do try to access it but…..

{To Alex} Once in a while one of us will say something, like what if there was like a tinkly – I’m just making this up – guitar part. And you’ll play it exactly how we’re describing it. You have that real skill to bring it to life.

I think this is beautiful how we’re all wired differently, and we can bring all of these wirings together to create music…

And similarly, to what you said about us having all trust each other, we have to also trust the listener. We’re trusting them that they’re going to feel it too

Do you feel your songs are relatable for old and new listeners?

Well, you can never control how the other person’s going to interpret it, I’m just used to that. I’m never trying to write something to get you to feel a certain way. That’s not possible. In the same way that I know that when we have a conversation, you might be hearing something totally different to what I’m saying.

I think a really good example is – I was obviously younger at this moment – when I put out Next Thing, I thought I was in a normal relationship and that it was a normal album. And then all these people on the tour were like, wow, I just like left an abusive relationship because your album inspired me. And I was like….what??

Sorry, but it was really obvious.

It was obvious to everyone apart from me! {laughs} But the point being that you might interpret something from your own song years later that you didn’t know you were writing into it at the time. I’ve had a lot of people notice stuff that I hadn’t even known that I was trying to say. Like, I’ve had a lot of people say, ‘Oh my god, your song’. ‘This song? Really?’ ‘Yeah, I relate to it because I’m nonbinary’. And I didn’t even realise that this was about nonbinary.

Greta, I think, by contrast to a lot of artists is very private and doesn’t share a lot about her personal life in our PR or in interviews. And so that leaves a lot of lyrics open for people to find what resonates with them and…

…figure out what it means in relation to Greta. You’ll never know.

Exactly. And I think that’s a strength in the music and how the music’s presented to the audience because, rather than obsessing about Greta as Greta outside of the band and Greta’s life. It’s somewhat of a conscious choice on her behalf and also, as Greta’s bandmates, I think we’re thankful and appreciative that it’s not like an obsession with personal lives and selling the personal life and selling the personal stories. We do try to keep the focus on the music as much as possible, perhaps to our commercial detriment.

We’re a multi-hyphenate influencer musician. Yes, that’s where we’re different {laughs}

One of the reasons we started MÜ Magazine was to bring more attention to the counterculture movement. I think we’re seeing much more mind control in the arts – like music and social media platforms and also the corporitisation of art through sponsors, collectors. Do you think this is reducing our ability to think for ourselves and use our imagination and curiosity?

It’s selling you that feeling. Yeah, actually, I was just thinking that counterculture…there’s a culture of that too, which is like, ‘I’m special for knowing about this or listening to this.’

And gatekeeping it.

It’s so bizarre what’s happened to this thing that we call indie rock. Like when I was a kid, or whatever, we had Animal Collective and Deer and we had this weird sounding music. And now Indie Rock is something completely fucking different. It’s weird to me what it is, because basically it’s just like pop, everyone has the same plucky bass tone. The weird thing is that it’s completely changed into this, like synth rock thing where it used to be this freeform freak show.

I almost feel that too. Like, in terms of music and art, is this all conforming to algorithms where it’s like, ‘this worked, so we’re going to do it like that?’ I don’t think consumers are allowed to be genuine to their real feelings about what they like because they’re being fed an algorithm which is telling them, ‘Well, because you like that and they’re similar, you should listen to this’. I feel lucky that we were a little bit before that algorithm culture and we got to pick organically and go to record shops and have the cool owner be like, ‘here’s a new album that you’ll like‘ – the ‘staff recommends’ section where you pick up something you’ve never heard of. There used to be this paper in New York every two weeks it would print every show that was happening, and Greta and I would be like ‘This one sounds cool, let’s just go’.

It was just listing all ages shows, all DIY, only at DIY venues. And there were tons of DIY venues in New York when we were growing up

So, you got to meet a lot of bands and a lot of cool people who introduced us to cool music and we were able to, without judgement, form a taste without it being formulaic

It wasn’t a homogenous culture where not everything was trying to sound like one thing.

So, all these bills, there would be like four bands who were all completely different. Nowadays, I’m just like, wow, that’s three of the same band.

It feels too safe, doesn’t it? And perhaps this is the commercial pressure that bands, promoters, agents feel now to create a bill that is less risky in its appeal?

It makes it so hard to create music and all the stuff that we’re talking about now is what we felt burdened by and with this release, we just weren’t thinking about this.

It’s like ‘this is my last shot. It’s got to be successful.’

I’ve never thought about that. I’ve never listened to enough music or paid attention enough to feel that I have any clue where we stand within a culture. It’s taken other people, young people coming to me and saying, ‘Oh, you are like, a pillar of this kind of culture or something’. Really? I don’t know. I don’t. Every time we make an album, I have no idea how it’s going to be received.

But the culture of music and touring has become so much about making money. It’s not about creating an experience anymore. It’s just like what’s gonna sell the most tickets? We’ve just never been like that. Obviously we all need to make money and live, it’s just that we’re more about music

We also don’t have manager, so these questions have very much always been in our hands: who do you want to take on tour? What bands do you guys like? We toured with Lomelda and like Ian Sweet probably four times each because I love them but maybe some people see that as our travelling circus too where we take our friends .

Before I joined, I always thought there was something cool about you guys bringing these commercially unsuccessful bands in front of people because you always had big crowds and you would take these freaks and you were aligned with them.

I don’t know. I mean us choosing to not have a manager and not kind of play the game maybe means we haven’t been as commercially successful as we could have been, but I just think kept it all in our hands and it’s just felt so much better. We’ve had no pressure from SubPop or our booking agents to do it any different. And also, we’re all control freaks and I feel like it would take a very specific kind of person to be able to fill that role in a way that we would find satisfactory. What it means didn’t happen is that we didn’t have some super strong personality advocating really hard for us to be on late night TV or like on Spotify billboard in Times Square all that…

All these labels that buy like a billboard for their band, and it’s just so that the band can go like take a selfie with the billboard, and it’s literally just theatre for other musicians to go like, ‘damn, they’re more famous than me’. It’s literally just more debt. There’s absolutely no upside to feeling competitive in art.

Or in life. Winning is getting to do this as a job. It doesn’t really matter if we’re the most successful or not.

Familiarity makes us feel comfortable, right? But it doesn’t help you grow as a person, and I think a lot of people will probably accept that. But a lot of people won’t do anything about it.

The need for familiarity does not fit well with the commodity of newness that we live in, where you have to post something every day, you have to put out a single. Everything has to be new. If people could just be like, ‘Wow, I love something familiar to me. I’m going to go back and listen to it. I don’t need a new one.’ I mean, I appreciate that people are hungry for new music and I’m excited to put out this album, but I’m also like, ‘Hey, I’ve got a lot of stuff already out that you could go listen to fill the gap!’ I think a lot of people, myself included, hear music and attach their own personality to the stuff they like. It’s like ‘I identify as like a Frankie Cosmos fan and if Frankie Cosmos puts out something that’s different from that it might make me confused about my identity’.

I’m not to go into a tangent about my favourite band The Strokes, but I don’t need a new Strokes album. I love it when there’s a new Strokes album, but I’m not desperate. When you love something, you could listen to it more than once. There’s a weird commodity of newness which is one of the things that’s really toxic in our culture right now. I don’t mean to sound jaded, I just wanna fight against that by being an artist.

Inner World Peace out now on Sub Pop Records

https://www.frankiecosmosband.com

Photo Credit Pooneh Ghana