Greta Kline grew up in New York City, but, considering she just recently turned 21 years old, hasn't truly been able to experience the CMJ Music Marathon until 2015. Luckily for us, the singer-songwriter better known as Frankie Cosmos is featured on a number of showcases, making her personal and professional CMJ debut that much more important!
Frankie Cosmos performs tonight, Fri. Oct. 16 at The Wick in Brooklyn at the Wild Honey Pie Presents the Beehive CMJ showcase.
We talked with Greta earlier in the week, leading up to her CMJ showcases, resulting in a pleasant conversation about Frankie Cosmos' upcoming Fit Me In EP on Bayonet Records, her musical relationship with Aaron Maine of Porches, her new band lineup, and releasing music that people are excited to hear!
How would you describe the new sound of your upcoming EP with what fans are used to hearing?
The songs are the same kind of songs; I just thought it would be interesting to put them in like a totally different context of sound. So, if people like my songs, I would hope that they will continue to like them if they sound a bit differently recorded. I think it's like popier and electronic sounding. It has electronic drums and - I don't know, it's kind of fun and kind of funny also, in the context of my music.
We're really excited about playing them live with the band and transposing the electronic songs into a rock band. It's just different. It's not lo-fi and it's not rock 'n roll sounding!
This will be the first time you play your new songs live?
Yeah! This is the first week we're testing it out before the tour with the EP.
You have a great relationship with Porches songwriter Aaron Maine - both musical and personal. Both Porches and Frankie Cosmos are gaining plenty of attention, therefore you two decided to leave each other's touring bands, but we're hoping that doesn't mean an end to your writing music together...
We made this EP together, so I feel this is like - of course we're going to keep doing things together. And also the full length album that we'll have coming out later - Aaron plays drums on it. In reality, I think that it's really important that bands are a unified, really happy group of people, so from here forward both of us are going to be working exclusively with our new band members because we obviously want them to be important and be a part of the band and feel like part of the family.
Since my new drummer and his new bassist joined, there have been times when one of them couldn't do a show and one of us was free and thought, "Oh, we could just fill in," but they're not understudies. We want them to know that they're important. We picked very carefully and we have these really great band members now.
We're definitely going to keep making stuff together. We live together and we're really creative together and love to work together, but it definitely won't be as these bands, I don't think. I'll sing with him at solo shows, but in a general way, whether or not we're both in the same city or free or whatever, we're going to have our new band members playing with us. They're now the ones (laughs). I think bands go through stuff like this a lot and I think it's important to have one unit and not changing it all the time, definitely.
How are you handling the attention Frankie Cosmos is getting?
After we put out Entropy, I did a lot of interviews and I had a lot more press. It was the first time that people heard my music, but we're still playing pretty small-scale shows, so it's not a super noticeable thing on tour. I mean, it's definitely amazing. Our last tour, every night was sold out. They were smallish venues, but it's a really good feeling to play to 200 to 300 people that are all excited to see you in every state that you go to. Although, it was although a split tour with Girlpool, so we had their draw as well.
It's hard to gauge, but it's definitely amazing because we get to play a lot more and tour. I hope that it keeps up. I hope that people have the same type of reaction to the next album because I'm excited about it. It's also kind of different from the first.
This EP is the first time that I'm releasing something with the knowledge that it might be heard, so that's kind of an interesting moment for me.
So what's next?
After the EP comes out, we're not going to tour too much deep into the winter - we're going to do this November thing. We try and not hit the road too hard in the real winter, because it's dangerous. In the spring we're just hoping to tour more and put out this record. It's basically almost done. That's going to be exciting.
Probably between now and then we're going to start recording even the next thing because in the winter time is when you don't tour as much.
Follow Frankie Cosmos on Facebook and Twitter, and make sure to check out Greta's BandCamp page as well!
Jon Niles is an Associate Editor for Music Times. He is a contributing features writer for MStars News as well. Follow Jon on Twitter right here!
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