COSTLY


Upcoming Releases:

I Do What I Do (Single)
11/20/26

Loathing’s One Hell of a Drug (Single)
12/4/26

Cowboy Record (LP)
12/18/26

Past Releases:

I Just Wanna Be Good at Something

EP - April 1, 2022

As They Come Along

EP - January 1, 2022

Label: Rue Defense
Genre: Indie/Folk
Influences: Dear Nora, Cindy Lee, David Berman
Location: Philadelphia, PA 

Management & Press Inquiries:
Graham W. Bell
whoisruedefense@gmail.com

BIO

Costly is the solo project of Amy Carson. Hailing from a small Rust Belt town on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border, where she grew up singing in the church choir and learning to make things with her hands. Carson now resides in Philadelphia, where she spends much of her time noticing, noticing, noticing...

COWBOY RECORD

In 2022, Carson recorded an album by herself on the floor of a 200 sq. ft. studio apartment, collaging noisy pop songs together from Tascam Portastudio tapes, found sounds, and laptop recordings.

“At the time, I was 22, awfully alienated from the world around me, and thinking a lot about the loneliness I saw inherent to American culture,” she explains. The songs draw from images of endless and isolating highways; melodramatic 60s teen heartbreak songs; predatory financial schemes; lounge singers in empty cocktail bars; - and all of the fascinating artifice that wraps it just under the surface in images of nostalgic, mid-century Americana. “I was working through that fundamental loneliness, and I referred to the collection of songs to myself as my Cowboy Record.” What better symbol of idealized and imagined American individualism than a cowboy?

Life kept getting in the way of a proper release for Cowboy Record until now. “It’s very odd to have a snapshot of what you were feeling and thinking at age 22. I am still fascinated by all these things, but these songs helped me to parse out my feelings on the subject, and I’m happy to say that I certainly feel less of that fundamental loneliness these days.”

SINGLE - I DO WHAT I DO

‘I Do What I Do’ is about how fruitless being a musician can feel, the insular nature of the process, and the compulsion to create. Carson notes, “I’m still sort of uncomfortable with getting attention from others for something so personal and internal.” Keying into the album’s themes of loneliness, she embraces the solo aspects, explaining that “it made it feel kinda spiritually important that I recorded, produced, and mixed it all by myself at home.” This song incorporates the space of her home/studio the most. The percussion is all recordings of the artist hitting various surfaces around her apartment, and it’s recorded over the bed of a field recording of Carson going about her normal morning routine.

SINGLE - LOATHING’S ONE HELL OF A DRUG

Written about Carson’s complicated relationship with her hometown, Loathing explores the realization that despite never feeling comfortable in that environment, those experiences still tend to alienate her from others that she meets elsewhere, keeping her from feeling truly comfortable there as well.

SINGLE - I WANNA BE YOUR GIRL

At its core, ‘I Wanna Be Your Girl’ is a blueprint for the entire record. This song was recorded as a one-shot improvisation on the Tascam that Carson did while sitting on her apartment floor at 2am.