With big smiles, she talked to them in her friendly and humble manner outside the backstage fence, as Jakarta rock unit Jirapah played on the smaller stage nearby.

“I’m very excited to be here. We’ve been on tour since mid-September and we’ve played like 50 shows in the last couple of months. I’m feeling a bit under the weather actually, but we’re feeling positive that it’s gonna be a great show,” she told The Jakarta Post as she sat down for an interview.

As she talked, she put on a white jumper that somehow highlighted her face’s pale yet rosy complexion. Her short brown hair was clipped with several red, star-shaped plastic pins.

With her childlike, quiet demeanor, almost whispering twee sound, Greta's music has touched the heartstrings of many girls (and boys) listening to the most segmented side of indie today. Her fandom might be small, but they are sincere and keep her universe cool and underrated.

Greta, a daughter of successful Hollywood actors, Academy Award winner Kevin Kline and one of the biggest stars of the 1980s, Phoebe Cates, said she was lucky she could afford making sidestream music without the pressure to sell out, thanks to her upbringing.

“Because my parents are successful and supportive I don’t feel the same pressure to make something really digestible musically, whereas somebody who’s a starving artist might feel like they need to make a pop hit so that they can eat, you know, so I think it affects the way that music sounds too,” she said.

Read also: Joyland Festival: Being horizontal, getting up, dancing, repeat

In the early stage of her career, Greta was known to refuse her parents’ offer to connect her to big producers in Los Angeles and instead chose to kickstart her musicality in Manhattan’s humble but lively indie scene. 

Last month, the Indonesian Twitter timeline was flooded with a discussion about privilege after writer Ika Natassa tweeted her take on gratitude when seeing other people staying poor and stagnant for decades, triggering a public debate on structural poverty.

Greta, on the other hand, humbly acknowledged her background for how she can afford to sound the way she does.

“Even if I’m not working with big producers and having my parents pay for me to make an album or something, even so I think privilege plays a huge part of why I’ve gotten to play music at all,” she said.

Greta added that music is not part of the formal education and people have to pay to take music lessons.

In previous interviews, Greta said she took classic piano lessons for 10 years before learning bass from her ex-boyfriend and she said she figured out guitars by herself.

“So I think being knowledgeable about music theory at all comes from a place of privilege and also just having a time and the resources to play a tour or make songs, or having a computer to make songs on. Access to the internet and stuff like that is obviously instrumental,” she said.

She also acknowledged that the ability to choose being indie and underrated is in itself a privilege.

“I think there’s all kinds of diverse upbringings in the music scene but I also think it leans towards privileged people that end up making indie music because that’s who has the internet and time and doesn’t have to be working after school to support their family or whatever and it’s just more like a gamble to do a job like this and it doesn’t work for everyone,” she said. 

In Indonesia, lively music scenes flourish easily at big student cities like Yogyakarta, Bandung and Malang, but in this economy not everyone is lucky enough to make a living only being a club musician. Many bands that started as student bands typically have to stop playing as their members switch to more promising careers.

“It’s tough because [...] everybody has a voice and everybody wants to be able to make music, but it’s obviously not accessible to everyone, so it’s hard,” Greta said.

She said the Joyland Festival was the only festival she played this year. 

“We’re more of a club band. I don’t think we’re playing other festivals this year,” she said.

“Festivals are weird: Never not as good as playing your own headlining show like in a club or something, but we’ve played a couple of really good festivals. This is one that is great. You can tell that everybody here knows what they’re doing and it’s well planned and everyone is very nice. That is what makes a good festival for me: that everyone is really nice.”

Frankie Cosmos played 19 songs at Joyland that night to a bunch of fans. She was not very talkative on stage and did not play any encore despite the audience pleading for one. 

Greta might prefer playing at clubs rather than at festivals, but her set that night was a nice quencher for the screaming young girls and boys who had waited for the band to come to Jakarta for a long time. (kes)

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