Keep on Moving
By Tom Lanham
B
est Coast anchor Bethany Cosentino
admits that her duo’s chiming new
Always Tomorrow set, it's fourth, just
might be the Feel-Good Album of the Year.
But in retrospect, she only wishes that she
at first didn’t have to feel so incredibly bad
just to compose it. And she isn’t waxing
poetic when she describes the dire circum-
stances leading up to its recent triumphant
completion. “I was really struggling with
being creative, and I didn’t feel like I could
write,” she recalls, sighing. “I really, truth-
fully, thought that I might be done — I was
struggling really hard with depression
until I hit a primaryreally intense bottom
where I was just like, ‘I don’t know if I’ll
EVER get out of this, so maybe this is just
where my life is now and how I feel.’”
How could darkness overtake such a
bright, bubbly pop persona as Cosentino,
who had been making Beach-Boys-sunny
sounds with her guitarist chum Bobb
Bruno since 2009? It was easier than she
had ever imagined, she says. And — hind-
sight being a perfect 20/20 —it overtook
her in subtle life-altering increments that
now would raise instantaneous red flags.
Cut back to 2015, and the Los Angeles out-
fit’s third long-playing ode to its sunny
environs, California Nights. Even before
that release, Cosentino had begun juggling
her emotions, battling against the dis-
parate inner feelings incurred by the sur-
prise overnight success of Best Coast’s
2010 debut, Crazy For You. “I was kind of
being thrust into a public spotlight,” she
says. “As a musician, I was very young
when I started, and my career took off in a
way that I just didn’t expect. So at the end
of the album cycle for California Nights was
really the first time since Crazy For You
came out that I really had a moment to be
like, ‘Okay — what IS my life?’ And once I
22 illinoisentertainer.com april 2020
was faced with that existential question, I
thought, ‘Whoa. What do I do now?’ So
when I was trying to make music and I
couldn’t, things came to a screeching halt,
and I took a big chunk of time off from
making music.”
Artistically, the singer had one key
advantage. When it comes to her often
slacker-lifestyle-celebrating lyrics, she
says, she’s always been an open book, a
compulsive over-sharer who rarely sat on
private information or hush-hush secrets.
Unafraid of looking unhip or awkward,
she would sing about almost any subject
matter, even her huge orange tabby
Snacks, who not only featured on the Crazy
album cover but also became an online
sensation courtesy of his popular Facebook
page and Twitter feed. Yes, life was indeed
that simple and down-to-Earth for the
SoCal native, who in the past years discov-
ered the wonderfully symbiotic relation-
ship between art and depression, to the
point whereby carefully annotating exactly
what she went through in almost every
sonically-uplifting song. She exorcised all
of her debilitating demons in one fell
swoop. “So the new record kind of speaks
for itself about everything that’s been
going on with me; and all the changes I
went through, and the anxiety and depres-
sion that I was dealing with,” she explains.
“I’ve always been honest, but with this
album, I’m a lot more open about all my
struggles.”
Thus, fans have the the unique choice
of getting lost in the surf-frothy music –
which captures the punky spirit of “Eat to
the Beat”-era Blondie – or getting out
Roget’s Thesaurus and digging into the tor-
rents of grim catharsis roiling just beneath
the surface of Always Tomorrow. And it’s
incredibly — sometimes painfully — per-
sonal; diary entries so straight-forward
and unflinching that they can’t help but
endear the author even more to her audi-
ence. And the underlying message is clear
— often, just by writing down the details
of a traumatic event, or singing it out loud;
you can find the well-lit path that leads
you out of your shadowy forest. No thera-
py required.
For instance, “Different Light” pops the
cork on the proceedings with a pounding
guitar riff and Cosentino “asking myself
all the time/ What if this just goes away/
I’ve gotten used to looking forward to
another day.”
The swaggering “Everything Has
Changed” follows, with some suitably
strange, off-kilter couplets: "I used to drink
nothing but water and whiskey/ And now
I think those were the reasons why/ I used
to fall deep down in a hole”), then gives
way to chirrupy, Far Eastern filigrees of
“For the First Time,” and the vocalist’s
Horatio Alger pep talk (“I’m trying harder
than I ever have before/ Used to think that
taking care of myself would just become a
real bore/ On Friday nights I don’t spend
too much time lying on the bathroom
floor/ Like I used to/ The demons deep
inside me they might have finally been set
free”).
In “Wreckage,” she readily admits that
she’s “so sorry for everything/ You know I
really wanted it to work out/ I put the
blame on everybody/ Wasn’t capable of
not being stressed out…Ibefore wanted to
move on/ But I kept writing the same
song.” And “Master of My Own Mind”
finds her “scared of the future/But it has-
n’t happened yet, so why has it got me
down?”
With the plush ballad “True,” she’s, at
last, found her footing again, to the point
where she’s reluctant to jinx a new rela-
tionship by immortalizing it in song. Uhh,
like she used to. And throughout it all, she
somehow manages to make all these neu-
roses sound navigable. Fun, even.
Naturally, there was more going on
with the Best Coast frontwoman than a
basic open-and-shut case of clinical
depression. But — good news — she’s
more than happy to document every last
juicy detail that might have been over-
looked in song. And she’s got a great, self-
deprecating wit that lets her deliver her
yarns with an extra zing.
Looking back on it, she says, maybe it
wasn’t the wisest move to buy that spooky
old house in Burbank, which may or may
not have been haunted. Overnight, she
went from hanging out with a tight coffee-
house clique to an abode straight out of
[The Munsters] 1313 Mockingbird Lane.
“The place I was living prior to that was
within walking distance of a Trader Joe’s
and a coffee shop, and a lot of my friends,”
she remembers. “And then I went into this
house where — just to get to the main road
— you had to go down a very curvy, dark,
isolated street. So I definitely took myself
out of circulation and put myself up there,
and I felt like I turned into Howard
Hughes up there. It was a weird period in
my life, for sure. It was so far away from
everything, but things work out the way
they’re supposed to, I guess, to get you
where you need to be. So I had to go
through that. I needed a break and a pause
from my career for a second, and that
house kind of forced me to [take it].”
What was an average day like for the
usually industrious composer? She laughs,
even though it wasn’t remotely amusing at
the time. With no work or deadlines loom-
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