Best Coast

Featured in No.6
www.bestycoasty.blogspot.com


Photo by Best Coast

Were you born in LA?
Born and raised in LA. I was born here, I’ve lived here for my whole life except for nine months in New York.

And you were a rising child star—is that the story?
(laughs) I did commercials and acted when I was a kid, and I performed in school plays and community theater and stuff. But um...I was never really into acting; it was something my mom kind of wanted me to do. But I just always liked to sing and to perform and stuff. I only did commercials until I was about six and then I stopped.

At what age did you start making music?
I started recording music and really doing songwriting when I was 15. But when I was younger than that, my dad would record me singing onto handheld stuff. But it wasn’t until my teen years that I started writing songs and playing guitar.

This was your project Bethany Sharaya, right? And you almost got signed to a major label?
Yeah, I was really young, and there were major labels that were interested and I remember talking to people and I was supposed to have a meeting with Atlantic Records but I was way too freaked out—I was really young and just wanted to hang out with my friends. I was like, “I’m not going to do this.” I didn’t want to play that music anymore.

What was that music?
It was a really singer-songwriter kind of thing. I was really into Rilo Kiley, so I was really inspired by Rilo Kiley. I listened to a lot of folk music and stuff, so it was more along those lines.

So after that was Pocahaunted?
Uh huh.

How long in between was that?
Years. Pocahuanted started when I was 19, and I did that for two years. I played in little jokey punk bands with friends between Bethany Sharaya and Pocahaunted, but I never really did anything serious.

What made you go into punk stuff?
That’s kind of part of the reason why I quit doing the Bethany Sharaya stuff. I was into punk in middle school and the beginning of high school. I tested out of high school early because I wanted to focus on music and then I got out of the whole Saddle Creek phase and got back into punk and so I was like “This is fuckin’ embarrassing because I’m a punk now” and so I started little bands with friends of mine and we played at The Smell.

So Pocahaunted came and went...
I quit Pocahaunted when I moved to New York because it was really hard to be in a long distance band. I also didn’t want to play that style of music anymore. When I moved to New York everything sort of changed and I started listening to a lot of 50s pop. I grew up on that stuff though, so it wasn’t like a crazy transition. People that were fans of Pocahaunted that hear Best Coast are like, “Wait, this is crazy that you do this now” but the truth is that my songwriting roots are in pop music. I wasn't into noise music or anything like that. I just was in that band because my friend and I were like “Let’s start a band!” and it happened to sound like that.

So you attended Eugene Lang for Creative Writing?

Yeah, I went to Eugene Lang for one semester of Creative Writing. I completed one semester and winter came and I was like “No, I don’t want to do this anymore, I don’t want to live here, I don’t want to go to school.” I was super homesick and the winter was really tough.

What about New York? Was it just sucky?
It’s a hard place to live—I feel like it’s constant work. I’d get out of class and I’d have to walk to train, I’d get off train, I’d have to walk home, and then you’d get home and your room home was a tiny box and I was like, “Ugh I hate this!” And I just woke up one day and thought, “I think I’m gonna move back to California.” I called my mom and she flew out to New York and helped me box up my room and I was home the end of that weekend (laughs). It was a very fast thing.

Were you thinking of making music while in New York? Or was it a decision you made after you came back home.
I wanted to play music when I was living there, but I didn’t take my guitar, I didn’t have any instruments, and I didn’t really know—I had friends that played music and stuff—but I didn’t really know how to go about starting a band there. I never was really inspired when I lived there to make any kind of music. I was really focused on my writing, because I was going to school for writing. But around the time that I decided I wanted to move back, I sort of decided “Hey I think I’m going to move back and go home and start a new band.”

And the themes just came from moving back to California?
Yeah I think it was just really inspired by the fact that I listened to a lot of The Beach Boys and The Temptations. I was just listening to a lot of happy-sounding pop music because it made me feel better. And then I was like, “Hey, I think I want to take a stab at making music that’s vaguely similar to this.” When I lived there, I just got super into California. Because before I moved there, I was really sick of California, and then I got there and was like, “Wait I love California, why am I not there?” So I came back, and the rest is history (laughs).

Do you usually write your lyrics first, or music? What is the songwriting process?
The songwriting normally works like, I sit with my guitar, I come up with a few chords, I figure out a melody...the lyrics always come last. The lyrics are also something—I never write lyrics down—it’s something I always just do as I’m recording. It’s a spontaneous thing, and it’s not until after I’ve recorded a song that I listen back to it and I’m like “Oh, okay. Those words go together well, that makes sense.” It’s not really like a planned out thing, I’m like “I think I’m going to write a song” and then I go write a song.

How do you collaborate with Bobb [Bruno]?
The way that it works is I record everything onto my computer, like demos, and I send it to Bobb and say, “I kind of want it to have this vibe.” I sometimes play solo-y stuff that Bobb will eventually end up making into a fuller second guitar part. But yeah, we never work together, actually. We tried to sit down and work on stuff together and we were like “This doesn’t work, let’s just keep it the way we normally do it.”

Was there a time when you just did everything by yourself?
The only release that is just me is this tape I did on the label Blackest Rainbow...it’s from the UK. That was just a thing that I did because that label is really lo-fi and experimental and I was like “Well I’ll just give them some demos to put out.” Then I remember some of my demos somehow got on the internet—I don’t know how that really happened. I think it’s because I would send them to Bobb through Mediafire and people go in and search it. I never knew you could find songs that way. So I would see something on a blog and it would be “Demo version of blah blah blah” and I’m like, “How the fuck did that person find that?!” But for the most part, every recording that you’ve heard, everything that’s on a 7”, is me and Bobb together.

The new stuff sounds cleaner.
Yeah, that’s because we actually went in and recorded in a real studio and we added live drums to it and we ditched the drum pad thing.

So that’s the sound you’ve always wanted to get to? Yeah, I think it was easiest for us to use the drum machine just because we recorded everything at Bobb’s house and we didn’t have a full drum kit and we couldn’t really play drums and be super loud. So we were like, “Let’s just use the drum machine.” And then, once we had the drums in the studio, Bobb sat down and played and I was like, “Oh yeah, this is what we’re doing.” We’re recording a full length right now, we’re recording at the same studio, Black Iris, which is where we recorded the Black Iris 7”. We’re recording...everything is going to be a little more produced-sounding, but we’re not ditching the kind of hazy, lo-fi sound.

Yeah, the older recordings have a lot of vocals layering over each other, and the newer stuff has less of that.
Well it definitely has a lot of the elements still, but I think it was mixed differently. The stuff that Bobb and I did, I really wanted the harmonies to showcase, and with the Black Iris stuff, it was more like, “Let’s just do the main stuff and we’ll put some other stuff in the background.” We just had a full studio to our advantage, so why not make it sound better. Well, not better...but fuller sounding.

Any big upcoming plans?
We’re doing a tour in February, the West Coast tour with Vivian Girls. We’re gonna go to SXSW. There are talks of a European tour in May, but it’s not locked down yet. Our European booking agent sent us some tentative dates so we may end up there in May. I think this year, probably after SXSW, we’ll start touring more, and then once we have a record, we’ll definitely do a tour. But recording a record is hard. It’s really hard. It’s time consuming, and there’s a lot of timing scheduling, it’s hard to match your schedule to the engineer and to the studio, but the record will definitely be out this year. I’m promising that. And if it doesn’t, I apologize for that promise. (laughs)


Interviewed by Emily Hsiao
January 2010