Best Coast, Wavves ready to play Philly

In 2008, Bethany Cosentino moved from Los Angeles to New York to study creative writing at the New School. With the help of the Beach Boys and surf-rock songs on her iPod, she did make it through one winter.

But before the second semester was over, she had moved back to sunny Southern California and began writing the fuzzy pop songs on Crazy for You, the likably low-fi debut by her band, Best Coast.

"It's no dis of the East Coast," says Cosentino, 24, who leads Best Coast on a headlining tour with Wavves, the band led by her boyfriend, Nathan Williams, that comes to the Starlight Ballroom on Monday. "This band really was inspired and started because I was so homesick living on the East Coast."

As a teenager, Cosentino led the indie band Pocohaunted that made a fan out of Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore. While she was in New York, however, she put music making aside and concentrated on writing nonfiction, after the manner of her literary journalistic hero, Joan Didion.

Once she got back to California, though, songs started to come to her right away. "I started writing the day I got back," she says, talking on the phone from her home in L.A., where she lives with Williams, who chimes in to say that the Best Coast/Wavves tour will be "like a carnival."

The first song she wrote was "Boyfriend," the captivating Wall of Sound nugget that kicks off with a drum intro that's a dead ringer for the opening of "Badlands," by Bruce Springsteen, who declared himself a Best Coast fan in an interview last year.

"My creativity was back," says Cosentino, who can also be heard on vocals on "Buy Nothing Day," the new single by British indie pop consortium the Go! Team. "I really thought that was something that was handed to me by being back in California. So I wanted to name this band something very evocative of my love for my home.

"And I thought 'Best Coast, that's got a ring to it.' And it's also a widely used West Coast hip-hop reference. Tupac uses it in a lot of songs. Plus it's my initial. So it kind of has multiple meanings. It's interesting because I grew up here, and I never really learned to appreciate it while I was here. It's like that telltale cheesy quote: 'You don't know what you got till it's gone.' "