Maine always drummed in Frankie Cosmos, and Kline played bass in Porches., Which made working on their own bands’ respective follow-up albums, if not messy, then at least pretty damn busy. With one band or another, they spent most of the spring playing a couple of times a week around New York, and at least as much in cities within easy driving distance. Fortunately, the couple share a booking agent who has been able to juggle their schedules so they could tour together then go home to their shared Greenwich Village apartment at the same time.
For much of 2015, after deciding that he want to self-produce the new Porches. album, Maine was working to give the record a “weird, obsessed-over” quality, tinkering endlessly with his modest collection of microphones and newly amassed array of analog synthesizers. He’s not as fanatic as Brian Wilson, but he does have that quiet, distracted aura about him when we’re talking, as he shuffles, for no particular reason, through a stack of business cards in his wallet while explaining his production process. “I’ve worked on the record every day for six months,” he says, obviously conscious of the massive amount of effort that indicates. “But you can tell someone made it alone, as opposed to performing in a big studio into a nice microphone.” He says the album is “loved, but not too much.”
Progress on Kline’s new Frankie Cosmos album, which she says she’s given the winking title Next Thing, has been slower, or at least less constant. The band—cemented earlier this year as a four-piece with Eskimeaux’s Gabby Smith on vocals and keys, and Aaron’s brother David on bass—has had to find the time to trek all the way to Binghamton, New York, where a friend runs a studio , to continue working on the record. That’s no insignificant task given Aaron’s Porches. preoccupations, Smith’s commitments to her own band and a pair of others, and David’s day job as a masseuse-in-training at a nearby health club. “Our record is going to feel like we whipped it out,” Kline says. “We’ve been up three times in six months, and we’re doing it all there. So it feels like the exact opposite [of Porches.]”
She talks excitedly about her signing to Bayonet Records, the new imprint started by ex-Captured Tracks employee Katie Garcia and her husband Dustin Payseur (who plays in Beach Fossils and Laced), with a characteristically undercutting sense of humor. “Yeah we signed,” she says, the scare quotes almost audible. “Got a deal.” Being signed is strange territory for both of them, who after years of issuing material straight to their Bandcamp pages had only just adjusted to the idea of working with their close friends in Double Double Whammy. The Bayonet arrangement works because, as Kline explains, they’re “people you can hang out with and trust,” but there are still growing pains associated with becoming a more professional band: picking publicists, meeting label staff, talking to me. “It’s been nice to meet the people that are involved, slowly but surely,” Kline explains. “But it’s hard enough to pick three people to be in your band.”
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