![]() And if I don’t feel genuinely connected to something, I can’t fake it. And what better reason is there than the planet literally shuts down and everybody is sort of forced to go inward and reevaluate and ask themselves, What is it that I want out of life? I realized that I just don’t feel like that thing anymore. I always felt like if I was going to make a solo record and walk away from Best Coast, I needed to have a legit reason. We were on tour and COVID happened two weeks in. It was 2020, after the last Best Coast record came out. Was there a moment when the idea of going out on your own crystallized? That didn’t even cross my mind while I was making it - I don’t care, because guess what? No one knows that this is even real! So it was a cool experience of keeping my mouth shut for once. ![]() I think I would’ve been a lot more inclined to worry about what people were going to think if I had put it out early. So when it came time to release it I was like, Oh my fucking God, can I just get this out of me already? But I’m glad that I held it in. Because I have a very neurotic brain, the worst parts of me were like, People are just going to think I’m doing nothing with my life: “ What does she do all day, sit on the couch?” I mean, the record’s inception was in 2020. I knew that what I was doing was going to be very different because I felt like a totally different person, and I didn’t want anybody to have access to that while I was still figuring it out. But I just felt like I was going through such an identity shift. Very rarely do I hold back from my opinions, that’s for sure. I was 22 when Best Coast started, and I’ve always been a really forward-facing person. You didn’t announce the album until it was completed. Most of all, she’s intent on showcasing the hard-won, well-therapized work of cracking “the Bethany that was behind 17 layers of glass.” Over the next several hours, she also roams easily and earnestly across her history: the winding journey of the now “indefinitely paused” Best Coast her secret foray into solo-dom her long-lens take on the indie-rock Me Too movement she helped foment. As she wanders, Cosentino leads an informal tour, stopping by the on-site museum to admire an oil painting of one particularly beatific Jesus (“He’s, like, smizing”), saying hello to the property’s marauding gangs of geese (“I call them my cemetery puppies”), and moving unhurriedly through a maze of crypts, statuaries, and tucked-away small chapels. Even under June-gloom skies, its vast acreage is dotted with fresh flowers and family members having makeshift picnics around the gravestones of loved ones on one freshly tilled hillside, a stand of bright carnations spells out MR. The Forest Lawn guest experience, it turns out, is more pastoral Disney dream of the afterlife - Walt, naturally, is also buried here - than Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. “But it’s become part of my practice of softening. “I used to be very afraid of death,” the 36-year-old Glendale native says, pulling into a parking spot. These days, the cemetery - a verdant, hilly sprawl just up the road from the house she bought several years ago - is a place Cosentino goes regularly to reflect and ramble and sometimes just sit in her car, writing songs. The result is Natural Disaster (July 28) a dappled, jangly, and unabashedly sincere amalgam of ’70s AM-radio rock and peak-era Sheryl Crow filtered through a lens of lo-fi California cool. (Those years of enduring tired girl-with-guitar critiques and an industry that all but sanctioned male sexual misbehavior culminated in a watershed 2017 op-ed for Billboard.)Īround the time of the band’s fourth album, 2020’s Always Tomorrow, though, the singer got sober and started exploring the “terrifying” idea of striking out on her own. In an age when a certain kind of casual bloggerati misogyny thrived, she also proved consistently unafraid of engaging onstage and online. But first, caffeine.Ī deadpan, Ray-Banned queen of the mid-aughts indie scene who spent more than a decade with the sunny slack-rock duo Best Coast, Cosentino is probably still best known, she admits, as the “lazy, crazy baby who loves her cat and palm trees and weed.” By 26, she had landed on the cover of Spin magazine with then-boyfriend Nathan Williams of Wavves, opened stadium tours for Weezer and Green Day, and become a tattooed avatar of next-wave millennial feminism. ![]() “I’m a real chain girl, sorry.” She’s planned an afternoon field trip to Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, one of the city’s most iconic resting places for celebrities (Clark Gable, Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor), captains of industry, and some 250,000 lesser-known Angelenos. “Do you mind if we swing by the Starbucks drive-through before we go to the cemetery?” Bethany Cosentino asks, steering her Subaru into a wide Los Angeles intersection.
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