Greta Kline is a musician from New York City. She has been the lead singer and songwriter of the band Frankie Cosmos since 2012.
Greta Kline is the New York-based singer-songwriter who records as Frankie Cosmos; Louis Forster, Riley Jones, and James Harrison are The Goon Sax, an indie pop band from Brisbane. The band’s new album Mirror II is out this Friday via Matador, so to celebrate, they hopped on a Zoom call with Greta to catch up about it.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Greta Kline: When you guys were all living together, was it to make the record or were you all roommates?
Louis Forster: I think it just kind of happened by coincidence. Riley was trying to move out and was putting a house together and just asked me — maybe it was more intentional on your part, Riley, I’m not really sure. But it was six of us living in a house, it wasn’t just the three of us. It was me and James’s partners, as well, at the time, and then someone else Riley was playing in another band with. I think Riley brought everyone she was playing music with together into one space in every context.
Riley Jones: They were my first choices for starting this house, because I thought that if I just got everyone together into the same place, we can play music there and then I’d be able to be so much more productive, because it would just never end. I kind of envisioned it being this endlessly creative space. And it sort of was that, but then the reality after a few months sunk in that that we were living in very close quarters. Likem it was a tiny house, and these guys were with their partners, who happened to be in bands with me as well. You could always, always hear each other, and there was one bathroom and one kitchen, obviously. And someone was living in this room that wasn’t even a room, it was just kind of a corner with a curtain around it. But it definitely meant that we could get very far into the album, just into the creative space all together. And we all were super affected by the other people living there as well, so it was definitely cool as an experiment. I’d love to do just a few days, or a few months and do it in isolation where you can really focus and you don’t have to deal with tying to look after yourself, and maintain a balanced life the rest of the time.
Greta: That was also where you practiced, or no?
Louis: No, I think we had jams in the house, like we’d sort of jam in each other’s rooms. But we had neighbors really, really close by, so we couldn’t play loud all the time. And I think we also felt self-conscious because there was other people living in the house at certain times playing music, so we did have a separate space as well. But we kind of jammed together there. Are you currently playing in the place where you’re living?
Greta: Yeah.
Louis: Where is it?
Greta: We’re all staying at my parents’ house for a couple of days because we couldn’t get a practice space in the city. Like, there was nowhere. Every band is trying to practice now, “post-COVID.” All the practice spaces are full.
But I can see how if you’re actually living somewhere for an extended period of time, to separate work from play, and when are you hanging out and when are you working…
Riley: It never stops. You wake up and you’re hanging out again.
Greta: Do you write songs together ever? Or are they mostly like, this is a Riley song, this is a James song, etc…
Louis: I think we write generally pretty separately. It’s kind of all of us writing on our own and then bringing the songs into that context. I was going to ask you the same question — I know that you write all the songs in your band, but you were saying that your band changes a lot. To me, there is such a through line through all of your records. I listened to all your records on Bandcamp when I was, like, 15, and I can still hear a through line from that stuff to what you’re doing now, even though it’s very different. When did you start playing with your band? And do you think they pushed your music very far, or how do you perceive their impact on your music?
Greta: Yeah, it’s funny. I’m glad we’re doing this now because I actually feel like right now, they’re pushing it farther than they ever have. The place I’m at now, personally I feel way more open to just fucking with the whole thing. I used to sort of be like, “No, this is the song and it’s finished. I’m not changing any of the chords or any of the structure.” But now, Lauren [Martin] will be like, “What if we collage this song with the chorus from this other song?” We’ve, since working on stuff in the last few days, have actually changed the chord that something goes to and it will really feel like it changes how the song is. It’s getting weirder and weirder, they’re feeling so distant from my old music. I don’t think it sounds at all like what people expect Frankie Cosmos to sound like.
Louis: That’s exciting!
Greta: Yeah! That’s like with your new record, right? It feels like a totally different vibe.
Riley: Yeah. Sometimes you just have to do it. And I feel like with time, you get influenced by so much that if we were to make a record that sounded like the last ones, and it would be so dishonest.
Greta: Totally. Do you think about how it’s going to be received while you’re making it? Do you think about that people will hear it, and how it will fit into like The Goon Sax oeuvre?
Riley: I don’t think I’ve thought about it. But maybe I should’ve!
Louis: Definitely on our first album, I really didn’t expect anyone to hear that at all. I was kind of thinking that we’d probably upload it to SoundCloud and maybe, like, 20 of our friends would listen to it. Right now we’re talking to a label in Australia, but — maybe I didn’t let myself believe that they were actually going to release it. I just wasn’t sure that it was good enough. Then this time, I was aware that people would hear it, but it somehow also didn’t feel stifling or something, which was nice.
I was going to ask you the same thing, because obviously you used to put so many things on Bandcamp all the time, and you were so incredibly prolific. Do you feel like at this point, working with labels has really changed the way that you write and create? Or do you think that’s just changed your output and the way it goes out on an outward level, but you still write and make things in the same way?
Greta: When I’m writing stuff, I really don’t think about people hearing it ever, but then when we’re collaborating, like as a band on the sounds, I think we’re constantly trying to shed some weird comparisons that are left over from 10 years ago. We don’t sound anything like the Moldy Peaches or whatever, [but that’s who we’ve been compared to] forever, because that’s what I used to sound like. I felt like listening to your guys’ record, I was very inspired. I was like, OK, they’ve really shed the twee label. It felt very decided, like you’re not gonna take it. We have a broad spectrum of stuff that we can make, so I think we definitely think about that stuff later when we’re arranging.
But also I think as I get older, I just maybe am influenced by having an audience without knowing it. Like, I think I’ve just noticed in the last few days, I’m like, Oh, yeah, all these lyrics are way more vague. They don’t feel like diary entries anymore.
Louis: Yeah. I think I have the exact same thing.
Riley: With the record that we made, we kind of almost made another record before we made this one — all the lyrics were very obscure for the most part, it was very difficult to decode what we’re actually talking about. And I think that comes from having an audience and also for so long feeling like we were giving so much of ourselves, just really wearing our hearts on our sleeve. Then we kind of tried to pull back for a while.
But then at some point, maybe it is because we realized we have an audience and that they kind of didn’t see the point or feel as much of a connection from being so obscure and so vague. It’s really cool creatively to explore that, but then at some point, you just want to be able to communicate. I think this album is kind of like a middle ground.
Greta: I feel like there’s themes that you all share in your writing, where it’s like you’re — I don’t want to assume this, but it’s what I took away — a lot of the record made me think about dissociating and feeling disconnected from the world, and then having music be this place that you’re making a space where you belong. And in the song is where you belong, like that’s where you’re supposed to be.
Riley: Yeah.
Greta: And then in the rest of your life, you feel like a weird fucking alien or something.
Riley: Yeah, that’s totally I feel. I haven’t learned how to say it.
Louis: It’s sometimes felt like the songs we were creating were like little spaces that we wanted to exist in. I think that’s what I was kind of trying to say before — you do have an awareness that maybe someone will hear what you’re doing, but I think that feels very, very distant, and it still feels like this little space that you kind of create to escape into yourself. I think every song was kind of the space that we needed.
It’s interesting that you say that you now feel like you’re shedding any sort of Moldy Peaches comparison, or tweeness or something, when I felt like your last record was kind of doing that already. It was sonically so much bigger.
Greta: [Laughs.] We thought so too.
Louis: Did you think other people didn’t perceive it that way?
Greta: I think it just feels sometimes like music journalists didn’t even really listen to it, and they were just like, “Yeah, more Frankie Cosmos shit, more of their stuff!” And it’s like, “Well, it’s really different to us.” We felt that we were doing that already, but I think every time we’re more extremely trying to shove that in people’s faces.
James Harrison: How did you try to shove it in people’s faces that it was different? Did you have a means of trying to do that?
Greta: Well, I don’t really care that much about music journalism, I guess.
Louis: Do you read your interviews ever?
Greta: Not much, I try not to take them too seriously. But we were just, I felt, musically sort of shoving it in their face that it’s different — like musically, it felt really different. And so we were like, Oh, this is rock, it’s weird, it’s got these new sounds. And then we also very purposely tried to use the press release — and I noticed you guys did this, too, listing your influences in the press release so that people have context. They can’t just make up some shit that they can say you’re influenced by.
Riley: You need to spell it out for them.
Greta: I think most people are just regurgitating press releases, so if you could feed them the lines, that’s ideal. But we found that people didn’t even take the bait. [We were like,] “We were influenced by the keyboard sounds in Broadcast,” and, you know, nobody’s going to say that. They’re just like, “Well, it’s sort of sort of anti-folk…”
Louis: What are your influences on this record?
Greta: I feel influenced by not having played for 500 days. It sounds like you just put us in a room, and we hadn’t seen each other in 500 days, and we’re having fucking so much fun. I feel like a teenager, it’s amazing.
James: Do you think your writing has been affected by COVID?
Greta: Yeah, actually. This is relates to something I was going to ask you too, which is that I feel that my writing’s different based on who I’m living with. I was living with parents, so if they can hear me through the walls writing the song, it’s going to change the way that I do it. [Laughs.] I’m getting more obscure or something, like I’m trying to hide from my roommates.
Riley: I felt that in our home, because the other two bands that I was in at the time, that I was living with, one of them was like this post-punk, but very Captain Beefheart-inspired raucous, like super chaotic. And then the other one was a brutal noise band. And so I felt like maybe was pretty shy about writing heartfelt songs, but I felt like they ended up being a marriage of all three of the bands. Goon Sax songs, for me, it’s a very pure form of making music, whereas the other ones are very chaotic or just improvised. It’s also pure in another way, but when you kind of distill it down to song form, it’s a completely different thing. It’s so much more symbolic of everything else that’s going on. I think I was super influenced by living next door to my best friend Tim, who’s a crazy noise musician. The music that he played in his room next to me was like, [Does crazy noise music sounds.] Like, this is so loud and otherworldly. But I felt like I needed to bridge the gap between all of my friends at the time.
Greta: Yeah, I can hear that. That makes sense.
Louis: I realized kind of only retrospectively that I often write a lot at night, and I was so worried about waking my housemates that on our record, like I’m muting, almost, on every song. That’s kind of just the way I started playing, because I was trying to be quiet. It completely influenced the way I wrote and the way I played. I was like whispering over palm-muted guitar, because I was writing very personal things and I think it kind of scared me to play them very loud. That maybe gave them a weird closeness that I didn’t even intend for.
Have there ever been moments where you felt like your audience were too close to you, or you felt that something was too personal? Or people saw too much, or maybe thought they thought they saw more than they were seeing and it felt wrong, like they were misinterpreting it?
Greta: Yeah. I don’t really mind being misinterpreted, I think I’m used to it — not just in music, but just in life. I think I do sort of live in a space of feeling misinterpreted or misunderstood in a way. That sounds really emo. [Laughs.] But yeah, I definitely have. I don’t think it’s a problem that the songs are ever too personal but I got really emotional when we played them the other day, when we got back together and played these songs from 2019. It was very intense. I was honestly like, These songs are so good because it feels like I didn’t write them. I have this distance from them to be like, Oh, my god, whoever wrote this really gets me!
James: [Laughs.] It’s funny how far away 2019 feels.
Greta: When did you guys make this record?
Louis: We recorded it in January, February 2020, so a while ago. It definitely took a while to release, and that was down to COVID, and a whole bunch of things.
Was there ever a moment where it felt like what you were doing wasn’t Frankie Cosmos? Or what exactly does that mean to you? Even now, if you’re pushing your sound further and further, is there ever been a point where that didn’t feel relevant anymore, like it felt like it could be a different thing?
Greta: Yeah, totally. Now I feel that Frankie Cosmos is very much this band of four people, so there’s a lot of songs that I write that are still honestly probably more like old me, like high school me, diary songs that don’t feel like they fit anymore. It’s a band of 30 and nearly-30-year-olds, so it’s just a different project. But Alex [Bailey] and I have another band, Lexie — some songs are more Lexie songs. I was thinking that when Riley was talking about writing Goon Sax songs versus for a noise band or whatever. There’s just a moment like, This is for this. You just kind of know. Or maybe you don’t know and you guess wrong. [Laughs.]
Louis: There was one song that Riley wrote and was like, “Oh, maybe I’ll give this to Soot,” which was her other band. And I was like, “No, don’t give it to Soot, I want it. We need to play it, give it to us!” And I wonder what it would have sounded like as a Soot song. It would have probably been quite different.
James: It’s kind of hard when you can recontextualize things with music so much. There are so many ways that things can go.
Louis: When you’re reflecting back on what belongs to what, to me, it’s a time when I realize that Goon Sax songs are a feeling to me. There’s really nothing sonically that means that something is a Goon Sax song. There’s something really weirdly deep about the way that it feels. Is that the same with you and Frankie Cosmos and Lexie?
Greta: Yeah, I think you just know. But also, I philosophically, as a rule, don’t believe that there’s an ideal form of any song. I think it lives on its own in space. And then bands can grab it and make it theirs. Maybe you want to rerecord it years later and put on a different record, maybe you want to do it in another band and have it sound really different. The song is free.
Louis: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. To me, I don’t think it’s quite like that. There are certain things that to me feel Goon Sax — like in lyrics, I think, more so than anything else. There’s moments of my life, where I’ve started to feel like I’m living in one of our songs, which is really funny. And there’s other points where I feel like I’m doing things that are so far away from our songs. But also, that’s constantly changing, so it’s really confusing.
Greta: Yeah, and the longer you’re in a band, the more that “The Goon Sax” doesn’t feel like it’s necessarily yours to define or something. I don’t know if you feel that way. I feel that about Frankie Cosmos. It feels larger than me or my bandmates, to define what makes something Frankie Cosmos.
James: Who will define it?
Greta: I guess no one. [Laughs.] God herself? I don’t know, you go play a show and it’s just like, who’s at the show — they’re there in the space with you, and you’re playing it to them. And then when you go to the next show, you’re playing it to someone else and it’s different. And then when you don’t play for 500 days, it’s different.
Riley: It’s so different. We played the first show in Brisbane after, a bit less than that, maybe 400 days or something — it was such a weird experience. Before, I felt so nervous, and I can’t remember feeling nervous before a show in the past. And then just experiencing the effect of a particular room of people on your music, and the effect of your music on them — it gave me a whole new perspective on it. Or just a new kind of love for it, which maybe I had lost. Maybe it was good to have the break so that I appreciated it more. I know what you mean about feeling hungry, now that you’re playing music again.
(Photo Credit: left, Jackie Lee Young)
