“I Didn’t Really Ever Learn How To Cope”: Why Best Coast Had To Take A Step Back To Move Forward
"It was very obvious to me that the way in which I use drugs and alcohol wasn't the 'cool, casual way' that most people do. I was like, 'it doesn't fit, doesn't seem right'."
On Best Coast’s new album, Bethany Cosentino echoes what her critics have been saying since 2010: “I wanted to move on, but I keep writing the same songs”.
It’s not entirely fair. Over the past decade, Best Coast have subtly grown their sound and songwriting with each album, incorporating country twangs and adult contemporary tones that are far flung from the sun-stoner haze of their first album, 2010’s Crazy For You, filled with the angst-ridden love songs that only a college dropout with little to do but obsess can write.
But yes, many of the elements have remained the same. Cosentino’s love for California and tendency towards straight-forward lyrics stayed strong across releases even as the band moved beyond chillwave, the turn of the ’00s micro-genre which they pioneered, kind of.
Only Best Coast’s earliest work really exemplified the sound, a low-fi, bedroom pop guided by a hazy melancholy and nostalgia, riffing off (whatever) sounds from the ’60s and ’70s. Even as they’ve moved on into cleaner sounds, the term’s stuck with Cosentino and band-mate Bobb Bruno’s work — not helped, no doubt, by Cosentino dating chillwave poster-boy Wavves (Nathan Williams) for several years.
Ironically, Best Coast was stuck in the immediate past — an era of music bloggers championing low-fi production to the point it became a breakthrough genre. Drew Barrymore even directed one of their early music videos. The shroud around Best Coast is itself somewhat nostalgic, oddly shrouded in a self-imposed naivety, an eagerness to indulge those slightly bratty feelings and sounds.
That’s all shrugged off with the self-reflexive, clean Always Tomorrow, even if it began after those criticisms of staying the same finally wormed their way into Cosentino’s head. As a result, it took far more time to write than any of Best Coast’s previous releases. Four years, technically, though much of that was a self-imposed exile.
“It was really hard,” Cosentino says on the phone, “because I didn’t want to disappear entirely [and] lose my career and I didn’t want [people] to forget about us, but I also like really needed to take a step back because I really needed to like figure out what the fuck I was doing and who Bethany even really was, you know?”
“I was 22 years old when this band started. And I was blessed to be in this position and the spotlight, which I didn’t expect to happen. And I didn’t really ever learn how to like cope or be myself. Everything came to a head, and then all of a sudden it was like, ‘Okay, I need to figure this shit out before I put more music out’.”
‘Everything Has Changed’
That shit — the stasis — was Cosentino’s relationship to alcohol. Always Tomorrow is the rare rock(ish) record about reaching sobriety, characterised by endless tides of frustration, self-acceptance and optimism. But there’s a difference between repetition and quiet, gradual movements — especially when they take place away from the public eye.
“Basically around the time that I turned 30, I realised that I don’t drink and do drugs like normal people do,” she says. “It was very obvious to me that the way in which I use drugs and alcohol wasn’t the ‘cool, casual way’ that most people do. I was like, ‘it doesn’t fit, doesn’t seem right’.”
“And so, I kept having these moments where I would be like, ‘okay, something needs to change here’. But, but it wasn’t easy for me to hear that. I’d try to quit drinking, and I could never really fully stop.”
“I’d try to quit drinking, and I could never really fully stop.”
These false starts are across Always Tomorrow, even if it brims with the sun-soaked optimism the band’s known for. Cosentino tells me lead single ‘Everything Has Changed’, while now true, was, at the time, wishful thinking.
“When I look back on it, nothing that I wrote about in that song was true at the time. Just a life when I wanted to one day live. I think I wrote that song in 2016 or maybe even 2015 — I can’t even really remember — [but] I didn’t get sober until the end of 2017.”
Cosentino jokes she willed a life out of witchcraft, prophesying her sobriety through song. On the phone, she sounds particularly proud of the album, calling it the most resolved of all of Best Coast’s works, before clarifying resolution doesn’t necessarily look or sound like we’d hope.
“I mean, there is no resolution,” she laughs. “I’m a human being — I struggle, I’m obviously not perfect and I’m not out here trying to tell anybody that I figured it out, [or that] I’m fine every single day.”
“Now, the reason I even named the record Always Tomorrow is because there’s hope in that but there’s also some pessimism. It’s like, you have tomorrow as another day to fuck up, but tomorrow is another day to do things better.”
“[But] in terms of the record, the resolution for the record is I’ve reached that place of being able to accept that. Like, yeah, there is always tomorrow. Sometimes I just have to put the phone down or put the computer down or put the remote down and just, like, go to sleep and just trust that like tomorrow will be a different day.”
As an album, Always Tomorrow is, yes, a little repetitive at times (as suggested by the album’s first three songs: ‘Different Light’, ‘Everything Has Changed’ and ‘For A First Time’). But listen a little closer, and you’ll hear the small movements behind the mantra, like the castanets on ‘True’, and the synths of ‘Seeing Red’. Always Tomorrow looks towards a bigger change, and works towards it.
While we couldn’t blame you for waiting for the next Best Coast album to hear these flourishes in full, there’s a lot to be said for capturing the transformation as it happens.
Best Coast’s new album Always Tomorrow is out now via Concord Records.
Jared Richards is Junkee’s Night Editor, and freelances from Berlin. Find him on Twitter.
Photo Credit: Eddie Chacon