Minneapolis rock ‘n’ roller Christy Costello understands how to put her talents to work. She’s an experienced vocalist, guitarist, songwriter, bassist, producer, talent booker, and yoga instructor – not to mention, a mom. Paired with her chill and kind demeanor, these collective skills have made her one hell of a mentor. There are countless folks she has taken under her wing since the ‘90s, serving Minnesota’s music industry but especially the DIY punk/underground scene. Presently, her bandmate Monica LaPlante might be the most noteworthy of them all. Within the last few years, LaPlante has become a household name in the Twin Cities’ music scene, performing tirelessly around town as an audacious and charming frontwoman.

As a fellow homespun artist with similar experiences in booking, performing and recording, I had an easy and enjoyable time connecting with Costello and LaPlante. We spoke about new music they’ve been collaborating on with guitarist Orion Treon, drummer Austin Cecil, producer Zach Hollander, and others. We also explored words that describe sounds, growing up in rural Minnesota, the benefits of yoga, the difference between playing guitar or bass, talent booking, being a woman in the music scene, and navigating the pandemic as a musician.

Transcript edited for clarity and length.

Christy Costello: Microphone check 1-2, 1-2. How you do, like the freaks that run through my crew. 

Diane: Oh my gosh, you're a rapper Christy Costello.

CC: That was a little Missy Elliott.

D: This is Diane, host of The Local Show on The Current. With me in the studio today is Christy Costello and Monica LaPlante. 

CC: Howdy. 

Monica LaPlante: Hi. 

D: Hi. What a treat. I'm smiling big right now. I have my happy cheeks on because I just admire you two so much. Big time.

CC: It's mutual.

D: Oh, thanks. And Christy Costello and Monica-Laplante -

MP: Monicle. Please, call me by my full name.

D: (Laughs) That's the thing about musicians. They hear every detail of your mispronunciations. Gosh darn it! Have you ever been called that before?

MP: Yes, I have. Monicle. I like to say that's my full name. (Laughs).

D: Oh boy. We're off to a good start. You two are collaborators in the scene. And of course, Christy Costello, you've been around the scene for many, many years playing in different bands including Ouija Radio, Pink Mink ["Hidden Beach" plays in background], Von Bondies – the list goes on. But I started knowing you because of Pink Mink before I even lived here. And then you heard about Monica LaPlante and apparently you told Andrea Swensson (former host of The Local Show), how is this person not famous yet? Then you started working together and I'm already telling your story. But I want to hear a little bit about how this connection happened.

CC: Andrea was on break for baby. And she had me and Paddy, my husband, Costello host her show ... And I played “Can't Stop” and I remember saying on air that this is such a hit.

[Can't Stop by Monica LaPlante plays]

CC: How is she not playing Letterman or something by now? 

D: Oh, cool. What a compliment. 

CC: I don't even think we knew each other yet.

MP: I don't think you were my boss at that point.

CC: Yeah, I ended up working with her and getting in this weird position where I became everybody's boss. And it was an accident. 

MP: Christy was my manager for a while. 

CC: The only time I ever managed anything and I'll never do it again.

MP: We worked one of the worst restaurant nights of our lives together.

D: I read about that. At Red Stag. 

CC: And Fringe Festival Night, wasn't it? Or was it Labor Day?

MP: It might have been one of those things where ... you don't schedule a lot of people on Sunday, because Sunday nights are usually slow. Unless –

CC: It's Labor Day, the next day. 

MP: And everybody has Sunday off. And if you've ever waited tables, and you've had a server nightmare it's that the people keep coming.

CC: The POS system goes down, and it really goes down. 

MP: The computer goes down. The kitchen crashes. 

CC: And it's right at the time where everybody wants to check out, 8:30-9 and the place was full. 

D: I can feel my armpits sweating right now.

CC: I'm getting the cramps right now. My heart is stuttering just thinking about all the handwritten bills ... each server had to go back, and they had parties of 20 at these tables. Think about every drink they had tallied up on that table, every little appetizer, and do it by hand.

D: So y'all were working that same night. 

CC: We were working the same night.

D: And helped to, what, create this bond?

CC: We created the bond in that period of time. Yeah, we did go through that hell night together.

MP: That was a hell night. But it was like, I had someone to rely on. Everything's gonna be okay.

D: I love that. Well, and y'all play a similar type of music or seem to like a similar type of music ["Ju Ju Dolly" by Christy Costello plays]. This mixture of grunge rock, punk, new wave, and –

CC: Art rock.

MP: Love the art rock.

D: Me too.

CC: Weird core. 

D: You're working on a new record and you've released a bunch of singles already. We're featuring some of them today on the show. Talk to me about some of these new songs.

CC: Well, really if it weren't for the pandemic, I don't know if any of this would be happening. 

D: Isn't that something? 

CC: Because I was working so much. And I'm a mom. And I had my own cleaning service, and I think I worked at four different yoga studios throughout the suburbs and in Minneapolis. And I started playing bass for Monica. That fell into place right before the pandemic started. And we were just kicking off and that happened. And then all these things were happening where I needed to learn stuff online. I had Logic on my computer, and I hadn't touched it yet. But I had to start touching it because they were sending me tracks. We had to do this thing for The Current. One of those recorded things from home. So, we had to send each other tracks and videos at the same time, trying to get it all set up. But that was pretty much it. And I was like, wow, I learned how to do something. 

MP: I learned video editing software for that.

CC: And that was it for me. I'd been holding so many songs because I really hadn't written a record since Pink Mink in 2010. And plus, I had shelved two Ouija Radio records to go out with The Von Bondies, so I had all these skeletons, and two entire records that never came out. And I just started playing … These 14 tracks that we've been working on are just part of what's in there. And Monica also is constantly working on songs so she has a million songs too. But it's really crazy, finally piecing them all together, and then bringing them from my own recordings, which were pretty much good enough demos. Logic easy drummers. SoCal.

MP: Shout out to SoCal Kyle. 

CC: Whoever you are. I've been using you. 

MP: I've been using you!

D: SoCal Kyle, I hope you're hearing this. This is awesome – inside baseball kind of stuff. Pro Tools. 

CC: It's just like being in a lab – the manipulation that happens. With me, I love to layer the drums. Slow them down. She's got a drum bot that I want so bad.

MP: I have an old drum machine that – it's one of those things Madonna was using in her first self-titled record.

CC: It gives you that really cool electric slap. And you can mix it into anything you're doing, with all your analog stuff as well. But it gives it another feel.

MP: A drum machine with a real drummer together kind of moves everything forward a little bit. Sometimes it makes it a little more gallop-y. 

D: For listeners ... finding words to describe sounds in music is kind of how you actually end up carving out music in the first place. And having that certain attention to detail is what makes your music unique and cool. It's fun to actually use these certain words. What was the one we said before?

MP: Unexplained marimba.

D: An unexplained marimba. Oh, why would you put a marimba in ...

MP: There it is – boom. Marimba.

CC: I think that we described sounds, I think it's called onomatopoeia. Bam, slash, boom, crash – onomatopoeia.

D: This is kind of a cool thing about both of you too – you're both really good guitar players, and you're also bass players. Describe this difference between being a guitar player and a bass player. Because I remember us having a conversation about this ... I became a better guitar player when I started learning bass. And I would love to hear you talk about that a little bit.

CC: I think, first, for me, I feel the bass in the body more. It's a little bit more physical.

MP: You're moving the song. Nobody knows why the song is moving the way that it does but it's because of the bass. You're kind of subtly, you're not driving the bus, but you're keeping the bus on the road. And it really defines the tone of the song.

CC: Agreed. You got your skeleton right there, right? And she's doing a better job than me, but the moving pieces really rely on the drum and the bass.

MP: Yeah, it's like percussion with notes. Because you're kind of syncing up with the kick drum a little bit.

CC: I have been very fortunate to not ever have had to play with a mediocre drummer or bass player. I am very, very proud of all the drummers and bass players I've played with in my life. They're pretty darn good and it makes your song better. I mean, you can write the simplest song and it can be like, I don't know, this might be just ... too easy. But then you get the drum and the bass in there and you're like, dang, super good. Changed everything.

D: Agreed. Also, it helps a song dance … If you can dance to a song as an audience member, that's how you know your rhythm section is really good. If it's easy to move. 

CC: Yeah, I think I do feel the bass in my body when I'm playing it. I really feel it makes me move.

MP: Yeah, you move a lot more as a bass player. Whereas a guitar player, you’re like, is everything plugged in?

CC: And then you have the pedal dance.

MP: I've stood on the wrong foot, and I have to stop this pedal.

CC: It's so crazy going back to playing guitar because I used to have a whole pedal board and all these crazy sounds. And now I'm trying to find the right amp. Trying to only have five pedals max. Definitely less is more right now. But I want those five pedals to be the greatest pedals and the ones I need the most.

D: Talk to me about the pandemic a little bit more. Because you mentioned without the pandemic, this record wouldn't have happened. And Monica, I know you specifically were doing all sorts of stuff during the pandemic. Y'all were playing on top of vans and rooftop shows and live streaming from your bathroom. Is that what it was?

MP: Yup, we did that for The Current.

CC: We might have played more shows right out of the pandemic than I've ever played locally. I felt like we were on tour in the city.

MP: Yeah, oh my god. It was just nice to get to that point where we were all still at home, but just talking in a group chat. We all were like, I still want to play music. Let's just figure out how we can play music.

CC: There's an empty storefront on Central. We can get everybody to stand outside while we play behind the glass.

MP: Everyone was on the same scheme path for that … And I felt like we all just realized we do music. That's what we do, first and foremost, is we all love music, and we love playing music. And none of us are half-assing it.

CC: Yeah, so I guess basically, we started sending each other tracks for some songs she was working on, and things we had to do for The Current. And then I started putting stuff together. Then I was like, you're gonna be on my songs now. Then I learned that we could start working with other people. So I got my bass player of Von Bondies involved in one, and friend Dave from The Arrivals in Chicago. And we were all on these songs together, which nobody had even met each other yet.

MP: We digitally met.

D: Okay, so you spent a lot of it just through back and forth, sending a recording to someone to work on in a different studio. Isn't it crazy how technology works these days? 

You (Christy) practice yoga. I'm curious to hear about your interest in yoga and how it might even connect to your artistry as a musician. Because I don't practice yoga myself, but the more I learn about it from other people who do it, it's almost like a religion.

CC: It's really hard. You first start doing it, it breaks you down. But you know what? So does everything you learn. When you first started playing guitar, it broke you down. I mean, it broke me down, because I couldn't figure out how to play certain things. But it made me want to do better at it and keep going and be persistent. Almost anything you really want to do passionately; you're going to be persistent. 

But also, I had to find something because right out of my teenage years and into my early 20s, I will admit this, I had some problems with substances and it could have killed me, but I found something else. And I also have family members and people that suffer with depression, especially when you have substance abuse in your life. My dad died at a very young age from alcoholism. So this stuff was haunting me already and I needed something, and I found yoga. I dove in because it just cut the strings of everything and brought me into a place where I was always in the immediate present at that moment. And that just helps you release. That's what I found. I tried to tell people to do it, but it's your own journey and that was mine. It kept me off of antidepressants, and then it cleared me. It also trained me into like, if you want something really bad, you just gotta focus and be persistent and keep practicing. 

And yoga isn't just the physical training of it. It goes into your head and you can walk through life, every second of your life, with the knowledge of yoga. And it is like a religion. I mean, obviously it's related to a lot of ancient Hindu gods and folklore and there's so many stories. They have their own sort of Bible with different stories you can tell with morals, and that relate to some of the names of the postures and some of the breathing techniques and all that. All of it is relatable to religious aspects if you want to go there, too. But for me, it's really learning how to focus, calm yourself down, be in the moment, and use that as a tool through anxiety and your reactionary mind.

MP: I would say your music is very athletic in a sense. 

CC: It can be, yeah.

MP: Where you're doing a lot of things that seemed daunting at first. And there's certain points where you're like, ugh! I quit! No, I can't do it. I don't think I'm good enough to do that. 

D: Like with the technical aspect of playing?

CC: Like the song "Tantrum" I sent you. I wrote this part in it on the bass where it's just like ["Tantrum" by Christy Costello plays]. It doesn't sound like much when you hear it, but when you're playing it, you're like, dang, dang, dang! When will this ever end? It builds and it's what builds the song.

MP: It's a perseverance thing where you can do it. And then you have to almost train and warm up and get ready. And you realize that you can do these things and you accomplish more, and you have to have that same athletic kind of mentality where you're constantly kind of just doing a little bit and getting better every time. 

CC: And it's humbling. I think when I first started doing yoga, I left the class a lot. I cried a lot. I was doing heart openers, camel pose, you just open up and it just releases stuff. And there is a mental and physical thing that happens. And some days aren't great. You beat yourself up. But you come back and you do it again, right? It's the same thing when you're learning how to play music and doing shows. Shows can be really incriminating. An audience can kill you. You can have a really bad show and never want to put on your instrument again.

D: Performing, being a musician, being onstage is such an intense experience. 

CC: It is.

D: I know exactly what you mean. And I admire you both so much because you really both get out there and do it. You're playing shows constantly. You're putting out new music, and it's good. 

Christy, I have to ask about your work as a talent booker. You have been doing it for many years. You were at Hexagon before you started doing Dusty's and Palmer's, two of my favorite bars to go see live music. Dive bars, essentially.

CC: Well, those are the funnest places. 

D: Exactly. 

CC: That's where rock and roll is born. Wild West type places that are unhinged. 

D: Tell me about your process of booking shows.

CC: [I] started at the Turf Club in the '90s. I think I might have played one of the second rock 'n' roll nights ever there with the St. Paul Music Club on Tuesday nights. It was booked by Rob Rule … They only had Tuesday night rock shows, otherwise it was still a country bar. My grandma worked at the bank across the street. So I went there as a kid with her because there was a restaurant and bar. But anyway, so I started with doing festival type shows. Did a couple punk rock proms, Night of the Living Prom, I and II. I think the posters are still on the wall somewhere. And they were silkscreened, so I think they got a frame and everything.

MP: There's like an old Polaroid of you backstage too.

CC: Yes, with my Bettie Page bangs? It was the '90s. Everybody had Bettie Page bags. But yeah, I started with just doing those. And those were four bands upstairs, four bands in the Clown Lounge. One would start downstairs, the other one would start when the other ended, both rooms. And that just got me a feel. I started booking house parties, did some shows in Duluth, where I was from, above the Electric Fetus. I was more of a promoter. And then, in 2007, I started booking Stasiu’s, which is in Northeast which is now Stanley's and that was crazy. It was seven days a week of shows. I met a very young Doug Otto over there. He was a resident player. I think he might have still been in college or whatever. 

D: Doug Otto, the folk musician, right?

CC: Yeah, who's at Dusty's. It came full circle. 

MP: He's my favorite to watch.

CC: I like to consider him – he's like a spider weaving a web on the guitar strings. Just effortless and silky and smooth. 

MP: That guy makes me want to play guitar better.

CC: 2007, Laura Larson's band was Baby Guts, she's now in Scrunchies. She was playing there a lot. Gay Witch Abortion. Can I say that? I mean, it's a real name.

MP: Proper noun!

CC: All of us bookers back in the 2000s tried to get them on Picked to Click, because we wanted to see those words on the cover of the City Pages. They got number two. I really believe they got number one, but they weren't allowed to do it. In my head I was like, well, you know. But everybody was playing there for a few years. And it was a lot of fun. It was the Wild West. It had its problems, for sure. But it was really cool. I had a Troma Film Festival there. I had Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Go's play there.

D: Amazing! You just have a way of finding authentic people, I think. 

CC: Yeah?

D: People who are just true and real. 

CC: Well, and at that point, too, Ouija Radio had been touring since the late '90s, sleeping on everybody's couches across the country so I had made my own connections. So I was primed to be a DIY Booker. I knew a lot of people from other towns, and that was my job, is to connect the communities of rock and roll, whatever musicians from all various places of the country. Then I landed at the Hexagon. I was there for almost three-and-a-half, four years. Then I got pregnant. It’s like I can't – my water broke at the Hexagon. I was working at the Hexagon and something wasn't right.

MP: That's not the strangest thing that's ever happened at the Hexagon.

D: Well, I have to ask, as it's Women's History Month, and being a woman in this industry is more rare. It's a male dominated industry and that gets talked about a lot. I want to know your thoughts on how you feel like you've fit in in this industry, and how you feel like it's progressed, and how you feel like it could be better. 

CC: It's come a long way from when I started. It was really hard to be a girl in a band in the early '90s. But there's people from before me that were in bands when I came here that were super inspirational. I would always see all the girls – I would say Babes in Toyland, Smut - I was seeing all those bands and they were heavy bands. 

D: So heavy. 

CC: I was right out of high school, and I could still see those bands play. And I was like, whoa! These are all girl bands and that was mind blowing for me. Because I'm just so used to being from the Iron Range, I was from the Range. And my boyfriend was in a band, and everybody who had bands - there weren't many girls in bands. None. So yeah, getting here, I was like, oh, gosh, this is great. And all these girls at the time were forming bands, playing in each other's basements and having a good old time. It was still hard, though. There was a lot of mansplaining when you got on stage – you're too loud! Even though you've been practicing more than you could possibly tell them for months. 

D: “Have you ever used one of these?”

CC: Yeah, yeah (laughs). 

D: How has it been for you, Monica? I would love to hear your thoughts.

MP: Oh, nobody wanted to play with me. There's always that difficulty, where growing up in the early 2000s, you didn't have more than one girl in the band, if there was one girl in the band. And the girl in the band just played the girl. Or just played one key on the keyboard or tambourine. It’s like, that's all you were allowed to do. You're like the younger sibling that's not allowed to really play. 

D: Yeah, just stand there and look pretty. 

MP: Yeah, and if you had a girl band, then you're a novelty to people. No one would book me and my friend who's also female because like, oh, you're just a girl band. You're a pretend band. I mean, I think we've all been in that situation, where I was like, you're not talking to me like a person, you're talking to me like a girl. You're just excited that you're talking to a girl right now. And I am your coworker at this moment. We need to solve these problems, we need to play, and you're too focused that I am a girl.

D: Talk to me about all the records that you're – I feel like you have a bunch of different projects with different musicians. Let's hear it. 

CC: We're all in each other's projects right now.

MP: So we've got Christy Costello is obviously Christy's band. Monica LaPlante is me. Extraterrestrials is guitarist Orion Treon's band.

CC: And then when we do Coma Club, which is Christy, Orion, Monica, and Austin. Austin Cecil, our drummer, also writes some songs. So we compile some things into this little project called Coma Club. But also, we did a gig and sometimes we might do a gig as Coma Club where we kind of play each other's songs. 

MP: Sometimes more than one of us are on the bill. Got to do a quick costume change.

CC: Yeah, split the set. I kind of described us as our own little Wu Tang. We all play on each other's stuff. And we just kind of switch it around.

MP: And it's really fun to just get into everybody else's brain for a second. And it's all similar. And we're all fans of each other.

D: (For Women's History Month) On The Morning Show, Jill Riley wanted to ask artists in the scene, who are (woman) artists that mean a lot to them or influenced them? And I would like both of you to talk about who comes to mind?

CC: Well, for me, it's Tina Turner. I mean, that's a showstopper right there. You can't follow Tina. I wouldn't want to follow Tina. I mean, I wouldn't want to play a bill with Tina. I would, but (laughs).

MP: You wouldn't want to play after Tina. 

D: Go on – what song?

CC: Oh, man, there's so many. But I think for me some of those early years when she was with The Ikettes – what they could do on stage is still today, I mean, I don't see much like this. You've got four women. They all can dance and sing the way they do. And they would play multiple shows a day, but keep it going. Impressive. Like the moves, the songs, everything was perfect. I know she was probably put in her place to do that, which is terrible. We don't like Ike (Turner). I'm sorry. We're gonna say Ike is a bad man. But it crafted her skills and made it push – she is an amazing performer. And she went on to be an amazing performer after taking a hiatus, raising a family, and thinking she was done. You know, just her story, where she comes from, is inspirational. You come from really poor America, you come from a really hard place. There's some abuse. Obviously, she had to push through that. 

But then to come back. And like, David Bowie is just like, "You know, Tina, I really like you." ... I feel like he would push his producers to get her to do that "Private Dancer". And I think right now it's one of the most around-the-world sold-out arena tours of all time to this day. She's retired now. But until she did, she could play anywhere to 80,000 people, because she's Tina. Being a girl from northern Minnesota, raised on dry milk living in a trailer house from my tiny childhood years, I feel that story. It was a real hard life.

D: You were raised in the Iron Range.

CC: I was. Yep. And actually, I lived in a trailer court for my very early years. But everybody sort of did up there. A lot of people moved up there for the mines. I can't even tell you how many trailer courts were surrounding the mines. They're all empty now. They're ghost towns. But when I lived in one, there were hundreds of them – hundreds of trailers, kids everywhere. It was fun riding banana seat bikes around, and all the parents cracking cold ones in their yards and having fires. It's just very northern Minnesota. But yeah, my parents ended up buying land, like 30 acres of land, and we would move out of there eventually. But I just remember growing up in those, you know, and I just feel that it's very relatable to living in – my mom lived in the South too. And they're very like places. Parts of Alabama actually have iron ore mining as well, so there's a feel to those areas. That iron energy. 

Monica, who's your pick?

MP: My gut reaction was Kate Bush. I feel like I discovered her quite a number of years ago when my partner and I stumbled on this record collection. And there was an autographed Kate Bush record. And it was Hounds of Love. It's autographed to somebody named Bob. But we can pretend it's not. But I was like, no, we have to keep this. You can't sell it. I'm gonna listen to this all the time. She's somebody that David Gilmore kind of scooped her up. And she was given that kind of creative freedom at a young age. And especially like, at a time in the 70s, where women didn't have that. And she was winning awards for songs that she sang and wrote, which was also pretty unheard of back in that time. And then she starts getting like – she didn't start getting weird, but she was able to just embrace just herself and just strangeness. She got that Fairlight sampler machine, and just started getting even weirder and producing things and making it sound uniquely … you don't go out and see a band and say, that sounds like Kate Bush. That's impossible. She was able to just establish herself and get respect as a musician.