Greta Kline never expected to be here. In 2009, at age 15, Kline began writing and recording music in her bedroom as catharsis, just another way to pass the time following otherwise dreary school days. But five years and more than 40 Bandcamp releases later, the indie DIY singer/songwriter has gone from recording her adolescence online via indie-pop/anti-folk snippets to wrapping up Zentropy, her first studio album, under the Frankie Cosmos moniker. Looking back on the path to her studio debut, Kline seems just fine attributing some part of her musicianship to happenstance.
“I went to an all-girl private school for a year,” Kline explains. “I didn’t hate it, I mean I actually really liked it for some time. But then I went away for the summer before 10th grade and started making music. I was writing a lot, I really felt like I was learning a lot just on my own and I was thinking to myself, ‘maybe I could find a way to, well, never go back to school.’”
Kline and some of her friends found private school uninteresting and ultimately agreed to leave school after her first year. Kline opted for home schooling and quickly discovered that those angsty, awkward school experiences also happened to bear the most fruit for this newfound process. Those same experiences were at the forefront of her mind when she sifted through her entire catalog last year and handpicked the 10 songs that most deserved her first professional studio treatment.
“With Zentropy, I treated all my previous work as demos,” she says. “I still pretty much just made music whenever I got the chance. Before, once I had a good collection of songs I’d say ‘this is an album’ and just put it out there on the Internet. I think some people had it in their head that I was purposefully doing it once a month, but it just turned out that way.”
Kline is a rapid-fire writer of her songs, few of which stretch to the two-minute mark. She suggests this habit comes from her complete contentedness to forgo the standard verse/chorus/verse structure. If a catchy indie song can leave a listener agonizing for a few more precious seconds, mission accomplished. Zentropy’s de facto single “Birthday Song” best showcases how infectious melodies can so satisfyingly blend with the singer’s acerbic assessments of city life, all usually in the span of 70 seconds.
“I don’t purposefully make them short,” she explains. “I think the more stuff life puts on your plate, the less time you have to reflect and think about what you’re taking in. That’s why I love short stories. I actually did manage to read [Saul Bellow’s] Seize the Day, which was really good. But it’s hard when you’re busy. Everything I do, whether it’s reading or thinking of music, I have to base off of how much time I’ll be spending in a car or on a subway.”