Katie Costello couldn’t help herself.
“I really couldn’t,” Costello said. “It just shows I have really terrible self-control. I mean, really, honestly.”
Costello has always been against EPs. They are little records with only a few songs and they always seemed to her, somehow, beside the point. She is, admittedly, an old school girl. Costello, 19, has frequently described herself as “a teenage octogenarian” who has abiding passions for outlandish sweaters, sweet treats, and Long Playing records.
But then a few months ago, she found herself in a strange position. She’d already completed her second full-length LP – Lamplight, which will be released early next year – but something was missing.
“You just don’t know how long something is going to take, and then all of sudden you are waiting around, and pretty soon you are like, ‘Oh my god, if I don’t fulfill my purpose soon, I am going to have a hard time continuing onward!” Costello said.
So she did the unthinkable. She hustled together some of her favorite musicians and in four quick days in September she did the dreaded thing: she made an EP. It was just no longer possible not to make some music.
“I realized two things that kind of made me happy,” said Costello, a Hermosa Beach native who now makes her home in New York City. “One is that when you release a record it is with the implication that you are releasing a statement, as well, about who you are, and what you are doing, and what you think about everything. And it’s kind of a serious thing.”
The second thing was that EPs have a purpose in this world. Her new little record is case and point: The City In Me is a remarkably cohesive lyrical and lovely gem of a record.
“The City In Me EP was kind of like a footnote to everything that has been happing,” Costello said. “It made me happy to know you can still make music in the midst of working on a greater project. Not that the EP is less serious – it’s just that it’s an abbreviated statement versus like a full length essay. It’s like a poem versus prose. I don’t know!”
It’s actually kind of a novella. Costello is old school in an inherently literate way. Her very first record, Kaleidoscope Machine, was released two years ago when she was only 17. It was a remarkably coherent and oddly world-wise statement, particularly given that the songs were written mainly in her bedroom from the ages of 13 to 16. Her voice had a winsome loveliness and her lyrics an almost Salinger-esque smartness and bursting-at-the-seams creative rebellion.
She moved to New York that year, finishing her senior year at Mira Costa High School from an apartment in the Village. Here, she’d always felt, she said, “kind of one-of-a-kind, but not in a good way.” In New York, she discovered a fellowship of musical oddballs. She also found a life lived fully in song, and she found herself at home.
You can hear it on The City In Me. From the opening swirl of “We Are The Way We Are” (“We ran away from where we couldn’t stay/We are the way we are….Who would I be without this city beneath my feet?”) to almost fairytale fright of “Lost and Far From Home” (“With her head on a pillow and her pain tucked under the sheets/Music playing softly, without a steady beat….”), there is a story unfolding here. By the third song, the purely exuberant “Cityscape”, Costello has finally found the city in herself – the ground is firm beneath her feet, and it isn’t dependent on geography (“Cityscape, you’ve let me see that I am home wherever I shall be….”).
She has found her steady beat. As beautiful as Kaleidoscope was, there was certain unsteadiness, a wobbly coltishness, a little girl unsure of her place at the helm of a record-making machine.
“I listen to my first record, and on a creative level and a musical level, I love it,” Costello said. “But on a personal level, it makes me think about how confused I was with the concept of what I was doing – how complicated it felt.”
With The City In Me, she has taken the reins. She’s in control, and she knows exactly what she’s doing. She is making beautiful, sharply crafted music, and she’s just begun. She can’t help herself.
Katie Costello plays Live at the Lounge with Greg Holden Oct. 15. See liveatthelounge.com for ticket info, or katiecostellomusic.com for about on her music. ER
