Mondo Cozmo’s meteoric rise
Joshua Ostrander scores a huge hit and an ACC date
AUSTIN, TEX.— Last August, I sat in the living room of a friend who works for a record label in Los Angeles. He played me a five-song demo by his pal Josh Ostrander, a one-man-band effort recorded under the alias Mondo Cozmo anchored by the monstrously hooky song “Shine,” and confidently predicted, “This is going to be huge.”
Seven months later, that prediction appears to have been highly accurate. Influential L.A. radio station KCRW started playing “Shine” — a Dylan-esque anthem built around the pseudo-spiritual stoner chorus “Let ’em get high/ Let ’em get stoned/ Everything will be alright/ If you let it go” — in September, instantly forcing the folks at Universal Republic to scuttle its intended January release date for the sake of striking while the iron is hot. By January, the tune had sufficiently caught the temper of the anxious American election times to reach No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Songs chart. In the meantime, KCRW managed to leak two more Mondo Cozmo tracks, the Beck-esque sample-delic ballad “Hold On to Me” and another entitled “Plastic Soul” that the label wouldn’t allow to be released because it didn’t want to pay for an uncleared sample featured therein. Ostrander responded by giving the tune away for free to anyone who would email him, and it’s since become one of the most popular songs on KCRW in recent memory.
Now, after making the rounds at the South by Southwest festival in Austin last week — including a charged date at Stubb’s on the Friday that saw him concluding with a ballsy cover of the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” — he’s about to embark on his first tour as Mondo Coz- mo, opening arena shows for Bastille. He’ll be making his Toronto debut Friday at the Air Canada Centre, after bringing a choir and a horn section to accompany him on the Jimmy Kimmel show on Thursday evening.
“Jesus Christ, man, my cables aren’t long enough. I’ve gotta go buy cables and sh--,” laughs Ostrander, pausing for a drink in an Austin hotel lobby swarming with SXSW delegates. “My cables are, like, 12 feet long. Honestly, I’m hoping that isn’t a total sh-- show because I’ve never played in a venue that big.”
“So I’m just gonna be super laser-focused and hope it goes alright. We’re playing the Barclays Center in New York, the Greek in Berkeley. I’ve got a bus. It’s crazy. Dude, I’ve only been on a tour bus (previously) to smoke weed with Krist Novoselic.
Mondo Cozmo’s sudden rise is vindication for Philadelphia-born, L.A.-based Ostrander, who quit his last band, Eastern Conference Champions, after 10 years specifically because he wanted to put music his way and at his own pace and was sick of seeing entire albums’ worth of material languish in limbo while record labels hummed and hawed over whether or not to release it.
“I write a lot. That’s my superpower,” he says. “So I’m quick and I turn it around quick and I just want to get it the f--- out. So that was really tough, to quit that band. I lost a lot of friends and it sucked, but I knew I had to make a change . . . I was working, like, two landscaping jobs and I really just wanted to make music. That was it, man.
“‘Shine’ came from a place almost of desperation. You can hear my voice crack on the bridge because that was the last vocal take I did. It was just so f---ing intense. I knew I had something great on my hands and I was, like, ‘If people get this, I’m not digging holes anymore.’ ”
Ostrander, who played in La Guardia previous to a decade spent in Eastern Conference Champions, has been in the game long enough — “I told my wife ‘It’s a 20-year plan and this is Year19,’ ” he quips — that he has little patience for the business end of the music industry anymore.
As such, he’s been a perpetual thorn in the side of his label. He sent “Plastic Soul” out into the world on a Friday afternoon at 5:15 after everyone had left the Universal Republic offices in New York and could do nothing to stop him, for instance, while he responded to a request from the label to send them a few acoustic performance videos “so we know you can play live” in hilariously novel fashion.
“I was, like, ‘F--- you.’ I’ve been playing since high school, however many hundreds of shows,” he says. “I set up my phone with my TV behind me and I put some really classy ’70s porn on behind me and I got really liquored up and then I played three songs acoustic. And while I was playing them, I thought, ‘This sounds really good. I know they’re gonna release it.’ So what I did is, I loaded it all into iMovie and I (added) the names of everybody I knew who worked there and their email addresses and their home phone numbers across the whole f---in’ thing . . .
“I used to be signed to my label as a kid. They signed me outta high school and dropped me. And then when I wrote ‘Shine’ they had a big f---in’ bullseye on their head. I was, like, ‘I’m gonna go sign to that label, I’m gonna spend all of their f---ing money and I’m just gonna crush this.’ And it’s been working really well.”