DYLAN COSGRIFF | INTERVIEW + TRACK REVIEW
What begins as the story of an ordinary hospitality worker slowly unfolds into a devastating reflection on violence, empathy and the lives we so easily overlook. Built from real experiences, real workplaces and real people, the track blurs the line between personal storytelling and social commentary, proving that some of the most powerful protest songs don't begin with slogans, but with deeply human characters.
As the opening track from Dylan's upcoming concept album Develop, the song sets the tone for a record built around growth through adversity, where intimate songwriting collides with unfiltered alternative production and fearless honesty. We caught up with Dylan Cosgriff to discuss writing from inside the story rather than outside it, why artists have a responsibility to use their platform, and how Simple Waitress became one of the most confronting and emotionally resonant songs of the project.
TRACK REVIEW - Simple Waitress
Some songs don't rely on big moments to make an impact. Simple Waitress quietly draws you into its world and keeps you there.
Opening with a sombre acoustic guitar, Dylan Cosgriff immediately establishes an intimate atmosphere. The subtle double-tracked vocals add a beautiful sense of depth, giving the performance an almost dreamlike quality, while a soaring low-end, somewhere between a warm Moog synth and a lightly fuzzed bass, gently carries the song forward. It's understated, but incredibly effective.
Cosgriff has the voice of a storyteller. Every lyric feels lived-in rather than performed, allowing the emotion to unfold naturally without ever feeling forced. There's an honesty in their delivery that makes it easy to believe every word, pulling you deeper into the narrative as the song progresses.
Then, around the two-minute mark, the track quietly reinvents itself. Electronic drums begin to emerge, accompanied by beautifully textured keys that lift the production into an entirely new space. It's a subtle shift, but one that keeps the listener engaged and gives the song a fresh sense of momentum. Just when you think you've settled into one direction, Simple Waitress opens another door.
One of my favourite moments arrives when the line, "But, that night..." returns. It's a small detail, but it's delivered with such conviction that it instantly grabs your attention, acting like another chapter in the story rather than simply another lyric.
Simple Waitress is a beautifully crafted piece of songwriting that never chases unnecessary complexity. Instead, Dylan Cosgriff trusts the strength of their melodies, their storytelling and the thoughtful evolution of the arrangement, creating a track that continues to reveal something new with every listen.
You say the "Simple Waitress" in the song is based on three women: two co-workers and yourself. That's an unusually honest admission for a songwriter to make. What made you write yourself into that group rather than write about it from the outside?
I believe that presenting a personable artist voice strengthens the message of the song. By inserting myself into the narrative, the listener is no longer listening to faceless, digital information coming through their headphones; they’re listening to a real person singing about real things. I love observing and analyzing the relationship between the art and the artist, and have found the age-old trope of ‘writing what you know’ to be perfectly true for my own writing. Because of this, I try to write about characters that I either am or know, to ensure that what I’m writing about sticks, and sticks well. On top of this, I feel as though the subject matter of this particular song struggles to stick when it’s observed from the outside, which is why I felt the need to write from the inside. It’s very easy for someone to read a throwaway news article or hear a meaningless statistic and continue about their day, but it’s much harder for them to move forward when they’ve come to know and like this character personally, such as the Simple Waitress who ‘painted her room so [that] it’s never dark.’ While it’s commercially risky and stressful at times, I’ve come to understand that my job as a punky, alternative songwriter and artist is not to please the comfortable; rather, it’s to tell the truth, even if the truth causes discomfort.
The bar review that triggered the song was written before you worked there but you didn't read it until you'd been on staff for a while. Does discovering an attack on your workplace from the inside land differently than it would have as a stranger, and did that time delay shape the song's edge?
Discovering that attack certainly hit in a much more personal and hurtful way than it would have as a stranger. By the time I’d read the review, I’d built up strong personal relationships with my co-workers and managers, as well as a sentimental connection with the venue itself - a second home. While my initial reaction was defensive, I soon saw that it had an unreliable and disagreeable writer, shown by language like ‘simple waitress’ and sarcasm such as ‘It’s my fault for expecting hospitality from a chick In doc martins [sic] and a leather shirt,’ which could imply that one’s dress code and sex affects their ability to serve to the extent that one should write a poor review about it. The time delay did affect the song’s edge, but only in the sense that I wanted to place more emphasis on building up the character of the Simple Waitress to be a more likeable and innocent character. It encouraged me to ensure the audience was effortlessly on her side, which ultimately presented her death as much more extreme and heinous, as well as conversely characterising the ‘Pig’ (‘Develop’s’ main figurative antagonist) as being much more heartless and extreme than initially perceived - harbouring the ability to murder such a sweet character.
The final verse was written in the same week two women were killed in Melbourne's southeast. Most songwriters would either lean fully into that or leave it out entirely. What made you decide to let it live inside a song that started as something else?
I saw the opportunity to use my microphone. As artists, we have a platform, and I’m a strong believer in using that to say something. While the main part of the song presented a playful song about the experience of hospitality, I couldn’t help but feel like I was wasting my breath when I heard about not only the two murders, but also the horrifying statistics behind it. At the time of writing, the death toll due to male violence has risen to 46, most of these being women and girls. As someone in the unique position of having a louder voice and an audience, I decided to fully lean into the atrocity, hopefully causing someone - anyone - to sit and think about what losing these women truly means. However, I chose to let it live partially inside the song because of similar reasons stated before: I felt that the song would only perform its purpose if the audience really understood exactly who was losing their life, and to do that, I had to put in the time building her character. Her death at the end happens similarly to how many of these murder take place: Sudden, random, and completely unjustifiable.
Writing about male violence puts any songwriter in a strange position where the wrong tone becomes worse than silence. How did you calibrate what to say and what to leave in the negative space?
I believe that, while the topic of male violence is extreme and sensitive, it’s much more harmful when left in silence. I always try to write about it with a tone of absolute seriousness, to ensure that nothing I sing about regarding that topic can be joked about or manipulated out of context. I can’t speak so extensively on behalf of others writing about such subjects, but with my own writing, I go into the writing session with clear intentions: ‘This is a serious matter that needs to be addressed, so let’s address it seriously.’ To be perfectly honest, I didn’t feel like I had to leave much in the negative space at all - the listener learns about an innocent character who is brutally murdered, in the same way that many of our girls lose their lives to violence. I didn’t feel the need to dramatise or skew the course subject matter, as it does it on its own. In saying that, my music, especially the lyrics, certainly has the potential to be seen as overly harsh or dramatic, but I firmly believe that that’s what it takes sometimes for people to sit up and listen. Furthermore, if there are any listeners who listen to the song, sit up, listen, and feel called out or targeted within the song… good. That’s the audience I’m trying to make feel called out, targeted, and uncomfortable.
Your listed influences are Jeremy Zucker, Twenty One Pilots and Slipknot. That's a triangulation of quiet vulnerability, arena scale drama and pure extremity. What do those three actually share for you when you're writing?
The connecting factor is, in fact, the vulnerability you mentioned. Jeremy Zucker encourages the listener to lean in and truly pay attention, with his signature ‘quietness,’ which encourages the audience to focus on the pain he’s putting forward in his lyrics. This requires a level of bravery from the artist, to reveal their innermost suffering in an intimate environment. Similarly, Twenty One Pilots also don’t hesitate to put forward the rawness and realness of singer Tyler Joseph’s own pain and suffering. However, Twenty One Pilots take one step further; instead of quietly, shyly whispering about their troubles as Zucker does, Twenty One Pilots claim their suffering outright, and put their entire soul on their sleeve through the medium of a planet-sized, multi-media arena, where there’s nowhere to hide - a whole different level of vulnerability. Slipknot aggressively takes this ‘nowhere to hide’ method and pushes it to its most extreme. The pain within their lyricism cannot be missed, and singer Corey Taylor forces the listener to reckon with their own mentality and struggles, an experience that is matched with the sheer force and power of their music and live shows. All three artists put their hearts on their sleeves and while their methods differ, I regularly look to them for inspiration on how to put my own heart on my sleeve.
The album is called Develop and it's about developing after adversity. Was "Simple Waitress" the moment that unlocked the concept, or was the concept there first and this song fit into it?
‘Simple Waitress’ definitely helped secure the album’s concept and cryptic plotlines, but interestingly, the concept of ‘Develop’ started emerging well before ‘Simple Waitress’ and the rest of the songs (except ‘The Rat Trap’) were even written. I’d hit a new rock bottom while living in a rough sharehouse in 2024, and been forced to move out within a few hours’ notice with no backup residency. I somehow found and moved into a tiny apartment alone in January, 2025, with nothing but myself, a guitar, and a piano, so I started writing as many songs as I could, as I had not much else to do. Struggling with finances, depression, alcoholism, gender identity, and isolation, I realised that I would have to make some significant changes to my life if I was going to get better, thus igniting the idea of ‘developing’ after adversity. Weirdly, none of the songs I wrote in that apartment made it to the final album, as ‘The Rat Trap’ was written beforehand. However, after moving out of that apartment and drastically improving my situation, I found that I could afford to focus less on myself and more on the world around me, and, with my mindset still adjacent to its ‘developing after adversity’ phase, I naturally began writing about other characters and real events that explored the idea of changing and recovering after significant events and struggles, which eventually birthed ‘Simple Waitress.’
You made every sound on this record yourself in a studio apartment. That level of isolation is unusual for a song about people being hurt in public. Did being alone in the room while writing about a public wound change what came out?
It did, but not to a large extent. While I was alone in the apartment, I still had access to news and social media, which kept me connected to the outside world. However, after playing the songs for a few friends, I realised that many of the lyrics I had written were fairly unfiltered, even distasteful, which pushed me into editing them a little. That makes sense, as social media has a tendency to camouflage the reality of many situations in extremity, to ensure their audiences are somewhat afraid and unstable. Going back to writing oneself into the song, I think writing myself into the song helped ground me into reality, instead of writing myself away into a terrifying, disconnected musical landscape fueled by social media and fear generated by newsreaders and politicians.
"Simple Waitress" is both the second single and the opening track of the album. That's a strange dual role, halfway to a mission statement. Was that sequencing decided in the writing, the recording or the mastering?
I agree, it certainly is a strange dual role! ‘Develop’ (pardon the pun) has developed in an odd, almost non-linear way, which is a new, deliberate method for me, given the lore and narrative of my last album ‘Tailing Naivsag’ - also a concept album - was very much refined and ready before the bulk of the recording started. By the time I’d gotten to recording ‘Develop,’ the majority of the song’s music was written, but only a few of their lyrics were completely finalised. This was a deliberate decision; I’d noticed that while writing ‘Naivsag,’ the best ideas, the concepts I was most proud of, almost always arose ‘on the fly,’ during impromptu writing sessions at 4:00am or written in my phone’s notes app on the tram. This is how many of ‘Develop’s’ ideas made their way into the album, which is a creative risk I’m honestly proud of. I got to witness the storyline construct itself in realtime, and I was able to gauge the quality of the ideas from an external position, which made it easier to keep my perspective grounded, and not create something too alien for my listeners. I chose the order of the single releases (excepting the upcoming single ‘Morphing Into Light,’ a dark love song that sits partially separate to the core narrative), based on how excited I got as I layered sounds upon sounds, as well as their overall darkness and extremity. I knew I wanted ‘Parasomnias’ to be the first single, as it came together very fluidly and naturally, and doesn’t dig so deep into darker topics. Furthermore, as its name suggests, it was written in the small hours of the morning during a period of insomnia, which I thought was an accurate summation of how this album should feel: Dark, quiet, and heavy, with an ever-present distorted sense of reality lingering behind, waiting to jumpscare you. ‘Simple Waitress’ was the next obvious choice, as it rises to much higher energy levels than its predecessor, especially towards the outro.
My decision to make ‘Simple Waitress’ the opening track was motivated by the song’s energy and urgency. While the single ‘Don’t Scream’ presents much darker, graphic imagery with harsh, distorted, industrial sounds to perpetuate its grit, I feel it doesn’t have the loud, wailing cry for help that ‘Simple Waitress’ does. While a specific genre within the album seems to be elusive (even for me!), ‘Simple Waitress,’ does, I feel, harbour the right energy to kick the listener in the face right away; from its sporadic opening strums, to its crying guitar solo in the outro, it was the obvious choice to follow the quiet ‘Parasomnias.’
The Hoist on SYN FM called the song "very good and needed." Needed is a strange review word. Do you agree that it's needed, and if so, needed by whom?
I do agree with The Hoist that it’s needed, and I’m shocked that I’m not seeing more artists take the wheel and lead the charge in socio-political change and inspiration. I think that, in the context of The Hoist’s review, the conversation was in regards to the inspiration of the song, and host Callum Drage further encouraged listeners to ‘look out for one another’ and to ‘speak up’ if they felt unseen and in need of help, whether it was because they were in impending danger, or saw someone else in impending danger. I believe the song is primarily needed by the people who are of the mindset of ‘I’m not doing it, so it’s not my problem.’ This is simply not the case. I myself used to be of that mindset, and if I’m being brutally honest, I did know a man who showed clear signs that he was capable of violence, especially towards the women in his family. A few months after I last saw him, it became known that he had physically assaulted a woman after a gig. I reached out to her personally, and thankfully, she’s recovering, and I felt it important to inform her of what I’d seen of this man behind closed doors. I’d heard others adamantly state the misleading nature of ‘I’m not doing it, so it’s not my problem,’ but that incident certainly saw a change in my mindset. Would I have had any influence on his behaviour? I believe it’s possible. Do I regret not pulling him aside and calling out his behaviour? Absolutely.
If a listener picks up Develop in five years without knowing any of the story behind Simple Waitress, what do you hope they hear in that specific song that stands on its own?
Mainly, I’d hope they hear an old story, one that’s not heard by them in modern life. I hope they hear a perspective of someone who is seeing problems that simply don’t exist anymore. If not, I hope that the ‘Pigs’ still feel called out by the song, and that they look into the mirror and have a brutally honest conversation with themselves and their behavior and that of their friends. However, God forbidding the callout of violence is lost within the song's meaning by then, I would hope, at the very least, that someone finds relatability within the song regarding the menial job experience. The feeling of dealing with a rude or aggressive customer who doesn't understand the feeling of a 2:00am finish, the connections you make with co-workers that outlast most other friendships, those little snippets of joy after a closing shift with your family; I hope someone can find joy in this song, the same way every hospitality worker can hopefully find that in their own position.
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