Any artist’s willingness to share the custody of their music must not be taken as a sign of it being impersonal. “It’s not mine, it’s ours,” Kline tells Radio TinTin, reflecting on releasing her music to the public. Kline has made a career out of confessional songwriting, creating lyrical and musical projects that are diary-like in tone — a diary that was never meant to reach millions of people. Reaching millions of people is exactly what happened, however, when her 2016 song “Fool” went viral on TikTok in early 2021. It has now appeared in 367 thousand total videos on the platform, and counts over 220 million streams on Spotify. “It wasn’t even a single on the record; I didn’t pick it out to be a huge hit,” she says. “I’ve never really trusted my own gauge of what’s good or not. [The success of Fool] is just further proof that I have no idea, and that all [I] can do is make the art – what happens to it after is out of [my] hands.” Kline drew inspiration for “Fool” from two sources: a poem she wrote in high school, and the then-recent experience of being stood up at a restaurant by a friend. The chorus showcases that experience, Kline repeating the now well-known refrain: ‘You make me feel like a fool / waiting for you.’ “[Writing lyrics is] like writing in your diary,” Kline explains. Except that when you’re writing in a diary, “you’re ideally not thinking about how cringey it’s gonna be in ten years when you read it.” The popularity of “Fool” has seen Frankie Cosmos maintain 1.4 million monthly listeners years after its release. This calls into question how truly “personal” her music can be. Can a project that acts as a diary maintain its unfiltered and raw feel when the confessions held therein have the potential to be perceived by millions of people upon release? The unexpected success of “Fool” has forced her to re-examine what it means to make personal music. “Knowing that people are listening makes me hesitant to even claim my music to be personal. Because it really just is not — once you share something, it isn’t personal, it’s public,” Kline explains. This internal reflection has had tangible impacts on Kline’s musical process and the creation of her later projects. Cognisant of the now-wider breadth of her audience, she consciously dials down the literal nature of her lyricism in favour of more abstract, poetic songwriting. Her songs’ resulting ambiguity allows listeners to find their own meaning in the music, better fitting their individual realities. “I’ve had so many times over the years where people say something to me about one of my lyrics that means something to them, or maybe people have a tattoo of a lyric important to them,” she recounts, “and I’m like, ‘I don’t wanna ruin it for you by telling you what it meant to me in the moment that I wrote it,’ because it’s not important. At that point it’s not mine; it’s ours,” Kline asserts. “It’s not for me to control what the song is about.” “Fool”’s virality epitomizes on a massive scale Kline’s general philosophy of music. The song has taken on a life of its own, venturing miles away from its original personal backstory and becoming much bigger than Frankie Cosmos itself. On TikTok, for example, the song has commonly been used by those looking to process their own experiences of feeling like a “Fool”. Whether it’s being broken up with by a romantic partner or having a best friend not text back, Kline’s song has provided a space for people to make sense of their own experiences – ten years after she first used it to make sense of hers. Despite her newfound, sizeable audience, however, Kline is intent on continuing to make music on her own terms.“It’s funny, it definitely still feels like we’re making it for a small group of listeners. Even smaller than that, it does still feel like I’m ultimately making it for myself.”