2018 is a strange time to be alive. Most contemporary artists have made this point in one way or another, but few do it as gracefully as Greta Kline, the frontwoman and creative force behind Frankie Cosmos. Kline released Zentropy, her studio debut, in 2014, weeks before her 20th birthday, after a New York adolescence spent unloading an obscene number of lo-fi bedroom pop projects on Bandcamp. It got rave reviews, including a “Pop Album of the Year” nod from New York Magazine, charming critics with the same concise intimacy that had already won over legions of adoring online fan.
Her subsequent LP, Next Thing (2016), was a major step forward musically, critically, and commercially. It featured stranger song structures and fuller arrangements, earned a Pitchfork “Best New Music” distinction, and kicked off two years of intense world touring and non-stop publicity. Kline was living a life most artists could only dream of, at an age where many people are either finishing up school full of uncertainty or settling into a trade. She embraced the opportunity, but the long stretches on the road stressed her out and led to periods of depression. At the same time, she was dealing with a public break-up with her long-term boyfriend and bandmate, Aaron Maine (of Porches). Through it all, she battled fatigue and social anxiety to go on stage every night and spill her innermost thoughts to eager crowds.
Vessel, the newest Frankie Cosmos album, was born from these periods of darkness, but for the most part, its message is hopeful. Sure, there are lines like “I wasn’t built for this world / I had sex once now I’m dead,” but they’re balanced out by the serenity that permeates every modulation of Kline’s vulnerable voice. When we spoke in early August, Kline was enjoying some much-needed time off, relaxing at home before her upcoming tour in September.
You’ve said in the past that you’re not a natural performer. How do you negotiate that anxiety onstage?
I’m still figuring it out on a day-by-day basis; but mostly, I just do it. I’m trying out different stuff all the time in terms of being onstage and handling it, and I’ve definitely gotten much more used to it. At this point in my life, it feels more normal, but it still doesn’t come as naturally to me as sitting down to write a song does. I think the way I deal with it is by considering it as an extended part of the songwriting process. I try to give the performance meaning by considering it as working on the songs while I’m playing them.
The songs you write have always been very personal. You’ve talked about the emotional energy it takes to perform them live. How do you find that energy on days when you’re not feeling like your best self ?
Oh man, it’s hard. When I’m not feeling like my best self, I feel like it really shows onstage. I can get freaked out and start acting weird. But as much as it’s scary to perform something really personal, it also feels like part of a healing process for me, where the more I face the feelings that I’m writing about, the more they can be released; and it’s almost like the audience is taking this weight off of me. So that’s what I’ve come to really appreciate about performing. Even old songs that I may not be feeling as intensely about now, I still find ways to put my current feelings into them.
It felt like the band was more present on Vessel than on your previous albums. Does that help you carry some of the emotional weight?
Yeah. For me, writing is a really solitary thing. It’s very personal, as you said, and a lot of the feelings are really raw. But once I show those songs to my bandmates, when they’re excited about it, it infuses it with this whole other thing for me. It’s so fun to get to play music with your friends. It goes from being this sad song to being this fun thing you get to do with your friends. And when we’re experimenting and arranging it, it puts a different energy into it than I would bring to it if it was just me by myself. So yeah, they definitely take some of the weight off me. That’s why I’ve always wanted to play with a band. Being alone onstage is so scary, but if you bring on a couple more people to distract from you, it’s so much better.
You sell your own merch at shows and it seems like you’re making a real effort to connect with fans in person. I’m sure people overidentify and project their own stuff onto you all the time. Has that ever led to a confrontation? Have there been times when you’ve thought about cutting down on the facetime with fans?
Well, for the first time with this album, we’ve started bringing a friend to do merch and it has been so amazing for me. It’s not that I don’t want to meet people and talk to them, because I actually really like that part. But doing that while also selling merch is so exhausting. Now, I get to come and hang out by the merch table and I’m not also working, so I get to just talk to people. It takes such a huge weight off me. I realized that what was hard for me about selling merch was using so much of my voice before performing to have those conversations in a loud room and having constant interaction before going onstage. Most nights now, I’m pretty content with socializing with people after the show. There’ll be a rare night when I won’t go out and meet people, if I’m feeling really bad about the show or something. But yeah, I actually love having those interactions because they’re mostly really positive. I think it was just selling the merch that was getting really hard on me. It’s like working at a store and then having to go perform. It’s two different jobs and it was getting so exhausting to have to do both in one night. That’s also such a spoiled thing to say because so many people go to their day job and then play a show. But I think doing it in the same room can get really intense.
I think you’ve earned the right to hire a merch person.
Yeah, totally. I feel like I’ve sold merch to every Frankie Cosmos fan. But in terms of confrontations, I think that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten way better at knowing my own limits and boundaries when I interact with strangers. Once in a while—kind of often, actually—people will ask me for a hug, and sometimes I feel like it and sometimes I don’t. Recently, on the train, someone asked to hug me. It was surprising because I had my earplugs in and I didn’t notice she was talking to me. And then I took my earplugs out and she was just like “Can I hug you?” And she was getting off the train and I was just like, “No, sorry.” And she was like, “Oh, OK. Sorry, bye.” It was awkward, but I was proud of myself for saying no. I don’t need to say yes to every single interaction. I also felt bad. I hope I didn’t bum that person out. But I think I’m getting better at setting limits on what I’m willing to give to a stranger on a given day.
I know you generally don’t love giving interviews (sorry). You’ve talked about your frustration with language as a communication tool, with all its limitations. Since you chose music as your medium, you obviously feel there’s something about it that can help you express yourself better than language on its own. The songs on Vessel are a lot more musically complex than your past work. Do you feel that they’re better representations of what you’re feeling?
Huh. That’s such a good question. I don’t know. It’s interesting. I should say, also, that it’s not that I don’t like giving interviews; it’s that I feel like I’m bad at it, because of what you said: It’s hard to communicate exactly. It’s hard to take the thing you’re feeling and put it into words and actually have it make sense.
[pullquote]”I do share a lot of my personal feelings with the world, but there’s a comfort in knowing that communication is impossible and nobody’s ever gonna really understand what I mean.”[/pullquote]
Right. And then it’s just out there on the internet (or in print) as is. I get it.
Yeah. It’s just hard sometimes. I have a hard time communicating my thoughts. That’s why I make music. Every time I write a song, I’m trying to chip away at this communication that feels like it’s ultimately impossible. There’s no end goal where I’m like, “There it is! I communicated my feelings!” But I’m getting closer to communicating something, some part of me. I don’t know if the music aids the communication, but it does express another part of me. I feel like with anybody making up a melody, that melody is gonna be close to their heart and their brain; it’s a part of them. It’s really a piece of you that you’re making.
So in that way, I feel super connected to it. But also, it’s cool when I arrange it with my bandmates and they write their own parts, so there’s a little piece of them in it too. And the way we all write music—the way that everyone writes music—is different, because you have years of your own music listening and experience that led you to write each piece of music you write. When Lauren [Martin], my bandmate, writes a keyboard part, it’s totally different than anything anyone else is gonna write, and it’s coming from her own years of music listening and music making. Even though she’s not writing lyrics, she’s still adding a piece of her. So once the song is fully arranged, it’s a piece of all of us.
A lot of people loved early Frankie Cosmos because it was so raw and intimate. It was just you and a guitar, and now it’s a little different. Do you ever miss that direct line of communication?
I don’t know. It still feels really pure. I’m not someone who makes up my banter in advance. I’m really just making shit up when I’m onstage talking to the audience. No matter how big of a room we’re playing, it always feels really intimate, to me at least. I feel like I’m making friends with everyone there—or enemies. [Laughs] I always feel like I’m interacting with everybody in the room, and I hope that they feel that way too. I hope it still has that quality to it because for me, it feels really raw.
In other interviews, you seem concerned that you won’t leave behind enough of a legacy or put out enough music before you die. You’re only 24, though, and you have like 50 albums up on Bandcamp, so that’s sort of insane. Do you ever take some time when you’re off tour to just do nothing for a while?
Oh yeah. You wouldn’t believe how much TV I’ve been watching this summer. It’s crazy.
What have you been watching?
Oh my God, so much stuff. I watched all of GLOW, all of Crashing, all of Sugar Rush. It’s fun. I love TV and I love relaxing. I feel like that thing that I said about wanting to write lots of songs… I was just depressed. I was like, “I don’t wanna die on tour!” I reached this intense moment where I was really emotionally raw. I still agree with that; like, I don’t wanna die on tour. It’s scary to spend so much of your time in cars and airplanes and be away from home. It’s like, “What is the point of this?” But I’ve reached a balance where I do feel like I’m writing the songs that I want to write and I’ve learned how to relax a little too. That’s new for me. This summer, I’ve actually been relaxing and it’s just amazing. I’m loving it.
On Vessel, it feels like you’re grappling with the desire to share the most intimate parts of yourself, while also maintaining full autonomy. At the same time, you’re still figuring out who you are, and growing up in real time. That seems like a really difficult tightrope to walk.
I do share a lot of my personal feelings with the world, but there’s a comfort in knowing that communication is impossible and nobody’s ever gonna really understand what I mean. I’m the only person who knows my real feelings in the way that I’m feeling them. I’m happy to share what I can of that and I like when people can relate to it and find comfort in it. But it’s funny: a lot of the people that I meet—a lot of young people—will ask me for advice, and I’m just like, “I am not a good person to ask for advice. Are you listening to my songs? I’m crazy!” So it’s really nice to get to form these bonds with people, but everyone’s hearing a different song. Everyone’s hearing and reading and taking in everything through their own lens, so they’re never gonna have the same experience with it as I do. It’s a fun experiment to try to communicate, to try to make music and share it. It’s really weird. I feel pretty good with it. I don’t feel like I’m losing a part of myself when I put music out. But I do think this album is a lot more vague than past albums. I don’t know if people thought that, but I thought that. This is the first time I’ve ever voiced this, but I feel like the lyrics on this album are a little more vague because I was confused about how I was feeling when I was writing a lot of them and I think that comes through. So the meanings stretch all over the place because of that, and it’s cool to see how different people interpret them.
A lot of the songs on the album are written in the second person, but the “you” you’re addressing seems to be constantly changing, even within a single song.
Totally! Wow, nobody’s ever noticed that before! I feel like you’re the only person who’s listening! [Laughs] Yeah, totally. The “you” will change within songs. I always joke that there could be a drinking game of how many times I say “me” and “you” on my albums. But yeah, you’re totally right. The “you” changes so much. What was the question? Sorry for interrupting. I was just proud of you!
No worries. That was a great compliment. I was going to ask: Do you choose the subjects of your songs before you start writing or is there some free association involved?
I think my writing process has changed a lot since touring. When I was younger and in the city all the time, I would just sit and write a song from beginning to end and it would be more of a uniform idea. But now, I don’t get to sit with my guitar really when I’m on tour, so I’m mostly just writing in my notebook. I’ll write little lyric ideas or pieces of songs, but I won’t piece them together until I get home. So the songs are a lot of different ideas and feelings pieced together. They’re not necessarily related sometimes. For the song “Vessel,” for instance, I wrote parts of it at totally different times and it’s about so many different moments. I piece them together based on more of a shared feeling. That song is totally about one feeling, but it takes place over so many different moments. There are vignettes within the song of where I am and who I’m talking about, and I piece them together because of the feeling I associate with them.
You re-recorded “Duet,” which originally appeared on donutes [2014], for the new album. It has a much clearer subject than most tracks on Vessel do, and it’s a lot more lyrically straightforward in general. What made you choose that song, in particular, to recreate?
I think somebody just shouted it out at a show and wanted to hear it, so we ended up making an arrangement of it. That’s honestly how we usually end up revisiting old songs; people just request to hear them. And “Duet” is one of the most requested songs. It’s so weird. The old recording of it almost feels like it would be boring live, but the new arrangement and the stuff my bandmates added made it so fun, and now we play it at every show. It’s fun to have these bandmates who bring life to stuff that feels like old news to me, that I wouldn’t want to play normally. They make it exciting. It was fun to revisit that one because I got to do stuff on the album with it that I didn’t get to do when I first recorded it. I panned the vocal, which I was excited about because now it sounds like I’m two different people on either side of you, singing the duet.
“Accommodate” and “Vessel” both seem to deal with your relationship to your body and to traditional concepts of womanhood. When you say, “I’m always yearning to be less accommodating,” is that directed towards fans? Men? The world in general?
Everyone! Just everyone, all the time. I think that, since writing that, I have been less accommodating in a lot of ways. I wrote that at a turning point and I really did take it seriously. I actually have to go in like 30 seconds. I’m really sorry.
Damn, that’s not very accommodating of you. I see what you mean! [Laughs]
Yeah. I’m sorry I have to go so abruptly.
No worries. I’ll skip to the end. You were clearly going through a lot when you wrote many of the songs on Vessel. “Being Alive,” and particularly the lyric “Being alive matters quite a bit, even when you feel like shit,” is the one that struck me most as the work of someone who’s battling tough times. Now that you’ve been home for a while and had some time to relax, has being alive gotten better?
Yes. So much better. Thank you for asking. That song’s pretty old and it also has a lot of pieced together feelings and stories. But I think it’s a good message, ultimately. I do really appreciate being alive and it gets better all the time for me. I’m figuring it out day by day.
Frankie Cosmos plays Gasa Gasa on Wednesday, September 19 with Lomelda and Stef Chura opening. For more info, check out FrankieCosmosBand.com.
Illustration VICTORIA ALLEN
