Greta Kline of Frankie Cosmos Talks Their New Film Score
The artist wrote and produced an instrumental score for the new trans rom-com hitting the film festival circuit this summer.
Photo: Riley Nightingale
Greta Kline/ Frankie Cosmos has been a big name in indie synth music for over a decade, but this June, they added another musical skill under their belt. The artist along with their band wrote and produced the score for the new rom-com Something You Should Know About Me, which made its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 6th. We sat down with Kline to talk about acting, writing instrumental music, and expanding their craft ahead of the project’s release.
Can you start by giving us a rundown of what the project is and your role in it?
My friend Andy made this movie. It’s a trans rom-com, and he asked me to audition and be in it. Even though acting’s not really my skill, I did get the part. I had very few lines, but I was in the background of a lot of it, so I was there for seven days of filming, living in this boarding school. Basically, I was living at camp with all of these wonderful actors and filmmakers, and pretending to be in a cartooning camp. We were all drawing all day and having a great time.
Afterwards, Andy asked about maybe using some Frankie Cosmos songs in it, and I was like “yeah, we can make that work.” Then he brought up “would you want to score it?” I had maybe two or three months between tours that I could probably squeeze in scoring this movie, and just kind of got to work. This was maybe eight months after filming. We were about to put out Different Talking, my most recent album, and we knew that there would be July and August at home before we started touring with it. So I worked on these various melodies for the characters. I felt like I knew the characters in a way where I could write them theme melodies. And Andy workshopped them with me.
I arranged them with my band, [and] it’s a really different form of expression because I’m such a lyric-forward artist that to try to express these feelings and moments only instrumentally was a really fun challenge. I remember specifically Andy being like “can this be sexier?” and it felt like such a hard prompt, but we managed it. We ended up recording an hour or two hours of different instrumentals, and an original song with lyrics for the end credits. And the whole recording we did in three or four days, just to save money on studio time, then they did all the work from there: fitting it into the film and picking out parts from the stuff that we sent.
Was this a whole [Frankie Cosmos] band endeavour or was it mostly you doing your own thing?
It was kind of the same as Frankie Cosmos. I write it and I make a demo and then I bring it to my band and we arrange it all together. It’s my same bandmates that I just made Different Talking with. We kind of worked around these demos that I had and it was really fun. We brought in some violin players for a couple tense moments in the music, but otherwise, it’s just guitars, synth bass, drums: classic Frankie Cosmos setup and style of recording. And my bandmate Katie engineered it, so it was very much in the same style of the record we were about to tour with.
What was the timeline between filming and making music? How much of a film do you have to have before you make music and vice-versa?
We filmed it in June 2024, and then they sent me a cut of it in January 2025 and I started thinking about the melodies and stuff. It’s just hard to know exactly what you’re going to want for the score. It was like “maybe we’ll have a song for this moment.” And they ended up using all different stuff. They just picked and chose pieces. That was like a year ago, so they’ve been editing it for a year [since].
Did your castmates have any say on the music while you were working on it?
It’s funny; while we were filming, I didn’t even know that I would be scoring it. Andy was the only person giving me direct feedback while I was writing it, but I do feel like being there on set for a week and falling in love with the characters and the people playing them, and just understanding the character’s energies was really informative for how I wrote their theme songs. I’m sure I could have done it just seeing a cut of the movie, but I think being on set, I just felt really close to them. Like these are my friends that I went to camp with.
Is this your first time doing a film score project?
It’s definitely my first time scoring a full-length film. I’ve dabbled in scoring stuff before. I’ve done a couple short film scores, but nothing this intense.
Photo: Riley Nightingale
How was the process different between a Frankie Cosmos album and a Frankie Cosmos film score?
I guess it’s different because, even though I was the producer and in charge of making sure we get it done, it’s still for someone else and in support of their vision. It’s easier with Frankie Cosmos to be like “this is done because I’m happy with it and I’m in charge.” With a score for someone else, there’s just more pressure to give this person as much to work with as possible because they have to be happy with it. So we recorded so much more material than we needed to, but it was fun. And in some ways, it was easier than recording a Frankie Cosmos album because there’s no vocals. What we normally do when we make a record is record drums, bass, and guitar at the same time as much as possible, then we overdub other stuff, so it was much more limited to overdubs because there’s no vocals, no harmonies. It was more about creating dynamics by bringing instruments in and out and giving them moments to work with.
Do you remember the first thing you wrote [for this project] that stuck, and everything else expanded from?
The way that I wrote it isn’t exactly how they ended up using it, but I really wanted to make three melodies for these three characters and have them be able to intertwine in different ways when the characters interact. It was like making a puzzle for myself. It was probably the main character’s theme that I was most focused on at first. The movie is about cartoons and it has this animation element, so I remember talking to the director about wanting to make Al’s theme kind of like Charlie Brown-ish. I feel like when I got Al’s theme, I was like “this is it.” And it’s used a lot throughout the movie. We did a happy version of Al’s theme and a sad version, just making different ways of arranging it to bring out different emotions, but they all felt like that character.
Do you remember the first thing that was pitched to you about this project that made you want to work on it?
I remember I really was like “I’m not an actor,” and [Andy] was like “Don’t worry about it; you’re going to be great.” My main lines in the film are about wanting to learn how to draw penises. So it was that speech that I auditioned with. I just thought it was funny and awkward, and I just liked it. I think acting for me is much lower stakes because I don’t want to be an actor. There’s no career riding on it, whereas when I make music, it’s representative of my career path. I wasn't nervous to audition. It’s just awkward and the character is awkward. It was fun.
The film is premiering this weekend. Can you talk about your thoughts and feelings while watching it for the first time?
I’ve seen it twice now. I was really happy with it; it’s such a funny movie. I really laughed out loud in my apartment watching it. I think the main character is so touching and the relationships are really interesting, particularly the best friend relationship that the movie is about is really interesting to me. It was sort of my north star writing the song for the credits. I think anybody can relate to it. I don’t think you have to be a trans man to relate to the feelings in the movie; they’re really universal about growing up and finding yourself and your people. There’s so many awesome parts to the story. It’s a really sweet movie. For me to watch a movie two times and still laugh out loud and cry: it’s working.
What do you hope other people are thinking and feeling while watching it for the first time?
I would hope people feel how I felt watching it: it’s moving. It’s a fun rom-com to watch and makes you think about your relationships and your friendships and projecting on people. I think the friendship is a really weird and chaotic relationship. I don’t want to spoil any of the film, but I do think there’s something really beautiful and intricate and fragile about the friendship in it. I would hope that people watching it can just enjoy it without politicizing it. Because yes, it’s really cool and people are really excited that it’s a trans rom-com, but also, it doesn't have to be the only one. I hope that nobody who’s ready to hate it is going to watch it, but if they did, I hope that it would open their mind a little bit.
Is there a most valuable thing that you learned from this new approach to your music?
I really like making instrumental stuff; it was a cool challenge. I’m interested in being challenged artistically. It’s easy for me as a writer to make an album in my way that comes naturally to me, and I also think it was a nice reminder that it’s also really fun to challenge my expectations of myself and what something I make can sound like. Expressing something without words was just a really different thing. And thinking about visuals while writing music is very different. Usually when I’m making an album, I don’t know what the album art is going to be like, I don't know what the music video is going to be like, that’s not part of the writing process. So it was just a reminder to be open-minded about my artistic process, because it can be fun to not have it be the most obvious thing to me.
Has this experience given you other ideas for different projects you might want to do going forward?
Not in any specific way, but I think it’s a really cool reminder that we can just book four days and make a whole hour and a half film score. It’s all about setting your mind to working on something. Sometimes it’s really daunting to think about buckling down and making another record, and it’s like actually, you can just go in for a day and record something. It was really cool to see these little keyboard demos I sent come to life in a matter of days and then be the score of a movie. It’s a nice reminder that I have the skills at this point in my life to produce something at this scale and it’s not so out of reach to do a big project and do it swiftly.