Nearly a year removed from her last album, the ever-prolific Greta Kline and her band Frankie Cosmos have already returned with new material, albeit in a form the long-running NYC slacker-pop outfit has never explored. Among the 50-some releases in their catalog, none of the titles are tied to a feature film until now, with Frankie Cosmos’ score for the upcoming film Something You Should Know About Me marking Kline’s first foray into the world of cinema (well, barring a couple of notable acting credits that long predate Frankie Cosmos).
Starring actor/writer EJ Marcus of I Love LA fame, and executive produced by Lilly Wachowski, the film is a coming-of-age tale of sorts about a trans cartoonist named Al navigating relationships and the queer art world. Director Andy Fidoten explained that he knew Kline from when he played with her “as a teenager, back when I was a girl in a punk band.” Beyond Frankie Cosmos’ original recordings, the soundtrack “is full of musicians I connected with during my days in the NYC DIY scene,” he added, “small, weird, alive, inexplicably and wholeheartedly themselves, just like Al.”
For her part, Kline opted to approach the project as just another Frankie Cosmos album, in a sense, as her songs land alongside music from her peers. “I’ve never made a soundtrack before, and I was encouraged to let it sound like Frankie Cosmos,” she explains. “So the recordings really sound like my band, and I think because of that, they fit in well with the surrounding syncs.” Beyond that, though, she notes that she took inspiration from a handful of other films she grew up with, in addition to her time on set helping to guide the direction of her work. Among the titles she references is Ghost World, which feels thematically tied to Something You Should Know About Me in being a Daniel Clowes adaptation (incidentally, her brother Owen’s directorial debut was also fairly Clowes-esque).
With the film debuting this weekend at Tribeca, we asked Kline to elaborate on a few of those influences. See what she had to say below, and read more about Something You Should Know About Me—which also sees Kline’s first credited acting role in 20 years—here.
Peanuts specials (Vince Guaraldi)
Something You Should Know About Me is about comics and artists. The director, Andy Fidoten, referenced Peanuts when I was first writing melodies for the soundtrack. The Peanuts scores are able to be both cartoonish and graceful. Particularly working on “Al’s Theme,” and the Wurlitzer-only versions of the themes, I felt inspired spiritually by Charlie Brown.
Ghost World (David Kitay)
Ghost World’s soundtrack is made up of mostly pre-existing music, with just one original song written for it (by David Kitay). It’s such a fun soundtrack, with so many cool songs in line with the characters’ tastes. I wouldn’t say my score is necessarily inspired by it, but I’m really honored to have the sounds of our score mixed in with pre-existing awesome song placements. I’ve never made a soundtrack before, and I was encouraged to let it sound like Frankie Cosmos. So the recordings really sound like my band, and I think because of that, they fit in well with the surrounding syncs.
I Heart Huckabees (Jon Brion)
I mention this movie because it marks the first time in my life that I saw a movie and was compelled to keep listening to the score after seeing it. In fact, it’s probable that this score by Jon Brion contains the first instrumental music that I listened to on my own as a kid. The internet was different when I saw this movie and got into the score—we didn’t look everything up all the time. It’s possible I had vague awareness that Jon Brion had worked on albums with other artists that I liked. If I knew that, it would’ve been because my big brother told me.
Something You Should Know About Me
Truth be told, I wasn’t thinking much about scores when I wrote this stuff. I was thinking about the SYSKAM script and the characters. I was on set for a chunk of the filming, so I did feel like I really knew the characters’ energies well by the time I sat down to work on the score. I understood their various styles and levels of nerdiness, sex appeal, snark, charisma, earnestness, fun. I wanted to write each of the main characters a melody, and have those melodies be able to entwine in a variety of ways, like the leads do. It was really fun to try and describe all the vibes and moments in the film to my bandmates while we arranged the songs for the recording.
