Bethany Cosentino chose the name Best Coast in her early 20s, freshly appreciative of the California sun after a brief, wintery stint in New York. Her first album with bandmate Bobb Bruno introduced her as a lovelorn stoner who sang about boys, California, weed, and her late cat, Snacks (please, a moment for Snacks), over Bruno’s fuzzy take on Phil Spector. But long enough into an artist’s career, personas can become cages. Cosentino was tired of being, as she put it on 2020’s Always Tomorrow, the “lazy, crazy baby”—Best Coast had grown musically from the easy three-chord melodies and anodyne harmonies of their first album, but their image was stuck in 2009.
For her first record under her own name, Cosentino returned to the music of her childhood: Bonnie Raitt (who gets a shout-out on “Outta Time”), Linda Rondstadt, and Indigo Girls. She recruited producer Butch Walker, who has helmed radio-friendly pop for everyone from Weezer to Taylor Swift, to help her realize her visions of Americana, and left the comforts of Los Angeles for his studio in Nashville. The approach is reminiscent of Best Coast’s second album, The Only Place, where they partnered with Jon Brion to fill in the gaps in their sound. Walker’s production builds from the blues rock of Always Tomorrow with a bevy of percussive elements and glimmering guitars. It’s the brightest and catchiest she’s ever sounded—if only her lyrics could rise to the occasion.
Even before she decided to embark on a solo career, Cosentino’s writing had started to veer from sunny run-on sentences about West Coast supremacy to weightier topics: depression, isolation, sobriety. “I guess this is what they mean when they say people can change,” she sang about her own self-actualization on her last album as Best Coast. To Cosentino, growing older is a process of trading hedonism for disillusionment, or trying to find acceptance somewhere in between. That ennui is still present—“If nothing’s guaranteed/Then what’s the point of doing anything?” she muses on “For a Moment”—but her existential quandaries are almost always met with rote solutions: a kiss that can silence anxiety, if only fleetingly.
Hackneyed lyrics seem to be part of a larger strategy: “I tried really hard with this record to leave certain things so that they could be a little bit more universally relatable,” Cosentino said. But the resulting songs are so broadly written that they become meaningless. “Everything’s insane,” she sings on the Train homage “Calling on Angels”; on “My Own City,” she gestures at some broader authority—“They say relax, gotta stay on track”— without hinting at who “they” might be. “Easy,” a piano-driven love ballad, makes the most obvious choice at every turn: “It’s always easy,” she sings. “I hate to sound cliché and cheesy.”
