Best Coast have reworked their breakout hit, “Boyfriend” for the track’s 10th anniversary to have more inclusive pronouns. The reworked track was released as part of Bandcamp Friday, and will only be available on August 7. All proceeds from the track will be donated to The Trevor Project, a non-profit focused on crisis intervention and suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth.
“When I was 22 years old I wrote a song about a guy I was quite literally, obsessed with, called ‘Boyfriend,” Bethany Cosentino said in a statement. “This obsession took up a lot of my time and mental energy. In the decade since writing this song, I have had time to reflect on not only that obsession, but the way in which I have at times, glorified obsessive and toxic romantic relationships in my songwriting. This song in particular started to feel problematic to me around the time I really started working on myself at age 30. I would listen back to my lyrics and think about how much I was neglecting myself and how I made this guy the protagonist of my own life and story.”
Consentino switched out several of the lyrics to say “girlfriend” or “partner,” as well as utilizing the pronouns, “he,” “she” and “them” throughout the entire length of the track. Best Coast sticks to the original sound of the track other than the change in lyrics, Consentiono’s voice bounding over each lyric as her catchy voice singing, “I wish she was my girlfriend/ I wish he was my boyfriend/ I’d love them ’til the very end but instead they’re just a friend/ I wish they were my partner.”
“Somewhere down the line, I started noticing that this song in particular seemed to be a bit of an anthem for the LGBTQ+ community,” Cosentino said in a statement. “I would get tagged in social media posts of guys proposing to their boyfriends with the song in the background, I would get countless messages from Queer fans about how they put this song on a playlist for their crush and then their crush became their partner, I met lesbian and gay couples at shows who told me they had their first kiss to this song. Suddenly I realized that it had a whole new meaning than the one it did when I first wrote it. That is one of the most special parts of art – what the artist creates can be interpreted in so many different ways by the people who experience it – and the experience of this song through the eyes of the LGBTQ+ community of Best Coast fans, is truly the way I want it to be experienced.”
The guitar riffs and upbeat tone of the track stay the same, while the track is a bit clearer and higher. Consentino’s voice comes forward with the new recording of “Boyfriend,” the drums clashing remaining the same. Each instrumental is brought slightly upfront during the course of the newer sound, as if the song had also been remastered.
Best Coast released two new tracks back in March as part of Record Store Day, the tracks being recorded in the same session as their last album, Always Tomorrow, which had come out this past February. Back in November, Cosentino joined Lana Del Rey onstage in Chicago during Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell tour. Best Coast also worked with Fred Savage last year, serving as the house band for his show “What Just Happened.”
Photo credit: Ekaterina Gorbacheva
Leave a Comment