Bethany Cosentino felt as if she was “put in a box” during her days with Best Coast.
The 36-year-old singer shot to fame alongside Bobb Bruno as part of the rock duo in 2009 but after recently deciding to go on hiatus explained that during the early days of her fame, she found people could be “horrible” to her and felt “reduced” to being a “dumb baby.”
She told NME: “With Best Coast, I was put in a box by the public. In the beginning of my career, I was widely accepted by critics and the public, but people were also so horrible. I was reduced to these tropes of lazy, crazy, baby: she’s dumb, she doesn’t know how to write a song, she can barely play guitar.”
The ‘Summer Mood’ hitmaker went on to add that she eventually acquiesced when it came to accepting other people’s opinions but now that she is recording under her own name and has released tracks as part of her solo country-pop album’Natural Disaster’, explained that she “doesn’t care” about the past anymore and is just going to say whatever she wants to.
She added: “I said, ‘OK, you guys say that I’m the California stoner, the slacker princess? Fine, that’s who I am and I’m going to continue to explore that persona against different sonic backgrounds or more produced records. I didn’t feel like I could get out of the realm of ‘life is hard, I’m obsessively codependent with my partners, I have really bad anxiety, I can’t sleep, blah blah blah. I don’t care anymore.
“I’m just gonna say what I want to say. I made this record when I was 35 and it comes out when I’m 36, which in industry terms is probably like 90-years-old!”