4 to Watch: Lavender Diamond

Hometown: Los Angeles, Calif.
Fun Fact: Lavender Diamond is singer Becky Stark’s “mythical identity,” the origin of which involves dancing furniture, a cave of diamonds and the Queen of the Indoors. For the full yarn, see the unabridged Q&A below.
Why They're Worth Watching: The band signed with Matador in the U.S. and Rough Trade in Europe on the strength of a 16-minute EP. One listen and you’ll see why.
For Fans Of: The Carpenters, Vashti Bunyan, Joni Mitchell

When a classically trained singer finds herself knee-deep in the macho noise scene of Providence, R.I., with no record contract and a bad case of pneumonia, the time is probably ripe for change. "I just didn’t really feel like I belonged," recalls the eternally buoyant Becky Stark, who packed her bags in search of warmer climes and kinder hearts. Oddly, she headed straight for Los Angeles, a town better known for its bumper-to-bumper traffic and Tinseltown façade.

"The external glow of Hollywood is so totalizing and so corrupt," she explains, "but the musical underground is really tight-knit and weird and amazing."

This open-minded community proved a wide enough talent pool from which to recruit her future bandmates. With too much material to tackle on her own, Stark began playing country tunes with Jeff Rosenberg, classical arias with Steve Gregoropoulos and psychedelic jams with Ron Regé, Jr. Not long after, these three projects coalesced into one big happy family keen on sharing its bottomless well of peace, love and understanding with human beings the world over.

The songs on Lavender Diamond’s appropriately titled debut Imagine Our Love are as joyful as they are gorgeous, as simple as they are universal. What's hard to believe is that such striking music still gets made in the midst of lofty expectations and hype. "I had so much passion to make this record that I just felt like I needed help to make it come to be," says Stark. "After all, a stone gets made from pressure."

Well put—diamonds aren’t just the toughest stones around, they’re also the most beautiful. As Stark urges, "just imagine a Lavender Diamond!"

Unabridged Q&A

MG: You signed with Rough Trade in Europe and Matador in the U.S. essentially on the strength of a four-song, 16-minute EP. What sort of pressure is there to deliver a masterpiece with Imagine Our Love?

BS: The record’s actually completely finished now, so the pressure’s off. But the pressure never really felt like bad pressure. I hate to say this and sound totally corny, but after all, a stone gets made from pressure. Sometimes things just need to be made and they need to be born, and I really felt with this record that it just needed to be born. I could hear it so clearly in my mind. I could feel the energy of the songs and the meaning that needed to come through, and so for me having the pressure of working with Matador and Rough Trade really just felt like what I needed because I had so much momentum and inspiration and I had so much passion to make this record that I just felt like I needed help to make it come to be. I never felt any kind of negative pressure. I just wanted to make this record so badly, and I could feel it so strongly. I feel like it was a collaborative effort. I mean, it certainly was. We made the record with the help of Rough Trade and Matador. When we met both record labels, it was on the strength of our EP but also on the strength of our performance because we had been performing the songs from the record for I guess a year and a half now. When we met Jeff Travis and when we met Chris and the people from Matador, they also had heard the songs live. And we talked about the vision of the record. Working with Matador and Rough Trade both felt like a really collaborative, really really ideal circumstance. I felt like both companies were just incredibly supportive. It just felt really ideal and I am so grateful. I feel like we all made the record together. In the best sense of the word, I think in the best way that artists and music companies can work together in the most idealistic sense. I really do feel like we worked together on this, though.

MG: What are your own expectations for the new record, given that Imagine Our Love is your first release with any sort of mass distribution plans?

BS: I guess it’s funny the difference between when you make a record and then when it actually gets sent to the world and distributed. That’s really what’s been interesting for me because now the record’s made, and I feel like we gave all of our love to it, and I really love this record, and I’m really proud of how it came out. I’m really looking forward to the life of this record when it goes out into this world. It actually just hit me like yesterday that working with these companies we have the chance for a lot more people to hear this music. I mean, I know that’s kind of obvious, but for me to have never made anything on this scale before, it’s just really starting to dawn on me how we could really reach a lot more people, and I think that’s really exciting and beautiful. That’s my hope for the record and our hope as a band. It’s what we really believe in is the possibility of sharing music and sharing love with as many people as possible. The whole infrastructure of pop music just seems like it gets used in ways that are so insulting to the heart and spirit, so we just hope that this record will find its way to the radio. I love the Top 40 radio. Ever since I was a kid I’ve listened to the radio, and I feel like in my grandest dream for the record, people will hear it far and wide over the radio and over computers. I just really love hearing songs of people’s and sharing our music with people. And my experience so far is that good music has a healing power. It makes people feel happier, and that’s great and that’s exciting. I hope we get to the radio and share our music with a lot of people.

MG: To what extent do you owe the musical success of Lavender Diamond to the classical singing you studied during your teenage years?”

BS: I think probably a lot. It’s funny because I never really believed I was able to use my voice for the service of something I really believed in. I think when you align your skills with something that feels meaningful, that it creates a very very powerful current of energy, so for me I’ve really experienced that to be absolutely true. And this project is finally where I decided to totally use my skills the best that I possibly could, all of my skills as a singer, as a vocalist, in the service of something that I really really believe in and love. So I guess the answer to your question is I think it’s half skill and half purpose, like devoting your skills or using your skills to serve a purpose.

MG: What effect did your move from Providence, R.I., to Los Angeles, Calif., from the East Coast to the West, have upon your evolution as a musician?

BS: Well, it had a big influence because, you know, in Providence I got really into the noise scene, and it was very masculine. It was very dominated by a really heavy, masculine sound, at least when I was living there. So I was really inspired by writing music and playing, but I didn’t really feel like I totally belonged somehow, whereas in Los Angeles there's a really open-hearted music scene, it was really weird, there was a real hybrid, with a mixture of classical, soul, electronic style. Los Angeles was the place where I was actually able to just start playing music all the time in a community, and it’s hard to explain it if you’ve never been to Los Angeles, I think because the external glow of Hollywood is so totalizing and so corrupt, but the underground is really tight-knit and weird and amazing, and so there’s a ton of music that you wouldn’t think at all would be closely related or in the same family, but the family of music in Los Angeles is so varied and so close-knit, so when I first started playing shows as Lavender Diamond it was in Los Angeles playing at a punk club called The Smell where there would be punk shows or noise shows or experimental electronic music, and I would play with other noise bands. That was really the place where I found the totally open-hearted community. So that community has really grown in Los Angeles. It has grown a lot more open, and there’s people really listening to each other in a way that’s very, very open-minded and open-hearted.

MG: I know you’ve played guitar on past records. Do you do anything besides sing on Imagine Our Love or do you prefer to leave all the instrumental work to Jeff, Steve and Ron?

A: I leave all the instrumental work to Steve, Ron and Jeff, although there’s some I do. I played a little bit of the board parts, electronic keyboard stuff, on the last song, "Wake for Certain." And actually, also, if you want to know a secret, on "Wake for Certain" I did some rhythm tracks just with my mouth. I did some beat-boxing. We were listening to the track, and I was waiting to call my producer because I was doing like another texture, and I was like "we could do a 'whish, whish, whish,'" and we recorded that.

MG: The first music you ever wrote was for a story opera called "The Well Wall." Are there any common threads between those operas you once wrote and the songs you now compose for Lavender Diamond?”

A: The one probably most common thread is that the songs come out of the character. For me, Lavender Diamond was first born as a character and it came to me in a dream about this whole myth, actually I had planned to make into an opera at some point called "The Well Wall," which is this really, really beautiful story, basically the story of Lavender Diamond. Because the thing about Lavender Diamond is that it’s a story opera so when I got the story and I started writing the songs and then I started writing the songs in the voice of Lavender Diamond, Lavender Diamond is in some respects always the character I play, the character of me that’s rooted in the story itself. It starts with a diamond cave, a cave of stones and there’s a man who hears a sound when he’s walking in the forest and so he follows it, it’s a beautiful, beautiful harmony, a resonance, just the sound of infinite harmonies singing together, and he follows the sound and it leads him to the mouth of this cave, which is a cave of diamonds that’s never before been discovered by humans. And so he comes upon this cave and it’s so beautiful, shimmering and also singing because the stones also have a resonance, so he sees one particularly beautiful stone, and he takes it down and that’s the Lavender Diamond. When he takes it down it silences the resonance of the cave, and so he gets really afraid and runs out of the cave and takes the Lavender Diamond. So it’s hundreds of years later and Lavender Diamond is a ring on a medieval lady’s finger and she loves to sing and always sings, and there’s a magpie outside her window that lives in a nest that’s in a tree by her window, and magpies don’t sing, you know, but they do like shiny objects. So one day the magpie swoops down to steal the Lavender Diamond’s ring off the medieval lady’s finger, and they got into a fight and magpie’s mouth got stuck on the ring, so they’re like struggling, and the magpie can’t free himself, so the both of them, the magpie and the medieval lady, fell to their death – they fell off the balcony and they died. And the stone, it turned out the magpie bit off the lady’s whole finger, and so the stone’s inside the magpie, and the magpie was buried at the foot of the tree, and then hundreds of years later the stone, which had gone into the roots of the tree, the soul of the stone was reborn in a bird called Lavender Diamond, and it was songbird, and so Lavender Diamond sang beautiful songs and made her nest in a tree near the window of a lady who had an apartment and she was the Queen of the Indoors, and the Queen of the Indoors enchants all the furniture to dance with the lady, so Lavender Diamond and the Queen of the Indoors become great friends, and the Queen of the Indoors enchants Lavender Diamond to stay inside and be happy and they have these great musical enchantments. That was the story that came to me about Lavender Diamond and I was just, I just fell in love with the story, and I started writing an opera about it, and I started writing all these songs in the voice of Lavender Diamond and I really felt like Lavender Diamond was my new identity in some ways, she was my mythical identity, you know, so in that way the Lavender Diamond album is very connected to the other works I’ve been writing for story operas because Lavender Diamond tells a story. But the songs on Imagine Our Love are not really telling any story, they have a, the album’s not a narrative, although we were thinking about imposing a narrative on top of the story and taking the album and making a film out of it and sort of weaving the songs into a narrative, it could be really fun, but they weren’t written for any narrative, they are written from this character Lavender Diamond would know, in this band we made the character being the description of a resonance of the sound, the tone, the sound, feel the sound that is the sound of love and the sound of joy and the sound of healing. And so I do think a lot about the story, though, and I hope we’ll one day get to make that opera. That’s the Lavender Diamond mythology story.

MG: Between the songs you now write, the image you promote and the comics you and Ron create, Lavender Diamond seems to be all about peace, happiness and, in a word, love. How did you happen upon such an optimistic world view?

A: Well, I’m not quite sure. I think because actually, I was just thinking about that today. I was talking with my girlfriends last night and we were talking about being optimistic, and I think it’s really a matter of being whole which is a way of balancing what’s negative or egregious or what’s painful with what’s positive or joyful. Bad and good and pain and joy, they don’t really make any sense except as part of a wheel of experience, you know turning a bit of metaphorical form, if you enjoy abstract references. For me, being optimistic or being committed to sharing love is really what it seems like for me. You know, just through necessity. I have a lot of sadness in my life and I felt like I really had to find a way that I felt that I could find the stream, the force of my energy, my life force. And I really really had a clear discovery in that the real force of my energy and the force of my strength is just in a very simple way sharing love and sharing joyful experience with other people. I think it’s kind of strange that that’s like an unusual perspective, to tell you the truth. I guess that we are living in very difficult times. Sometimes it’s hard to be optimistic, and it doesn’t seem to make any sense. But to me being optimistic is really the only sane way to be, the only rational way to be. You have to remember that a hundred years ago, if you and I were having this conversation we wouldn’t be having it on a telephone, obviously. If we were having this conversation a hundred years ago and I was like, "You know what, in a hundred years we’re gonna be a thousand miles apart and we’re gonna be talking through machines." There’s always things that happen in a hundred years that if you were to go back and time and say they were going to happen then nobody would ever believe you, you know. I think it’s the same thing with being optimistic about the future or how things could change or how humanity could evolve. If you look at any point in the past and what they’re projecting for the future, people who are having ideas about how things could change have always been called crazy. If you were to go back a hundred years and I was to say in a hundred years there’s going to be a machine that goes a hundred miles an hour and can fly. I personally think that at this point in time, sure being optimistic might be weird or seem like it doesn’t make any sense. But to me, it totally makes sense. Because you have to remember that the whole nature of humanity, of our existence, is totally changeable. It’s always changing so rapidly, so it’s very very important that we really stay rooted in the power of our imagination. It’s the most practical power for creating the future, you know. Because it really is possible in an absolutely practical sense that there could be peace on earth. You know, the world is gonna change. It’s always changing rapidly, I just think that the more people catch on to the fact that like it’s our responsibility. It’s in our hands. We can shape it in any way we choose, and we can have a present and a future that’s shifted into any kind of new path we want. To me, it just makes sense. I just feel like the world is such a beautiful place. I mean, sure there’s suffering and horror in the world, and I know that, and that’s why it makes me compelled to actually more than anything to believe that there can be peace and that things can be better and you know to want to celebrate the world. Because I feel like the gifts of the world are so profound the gift of all the sense and the beauty of nature, so I feel like the way that we waste these things and waste the gifts of the earth through war and degradation and devastation of the environment makes me so angry, and also it’s so stupid. I just fundamentally believe that humanity is a more intelligent species and so I feel like we’re on the brink of evolution. In the future we’ll be able to like look back and say, "can you believe they had war and they destroy the environment for profit," things like that, where I think we could be on the verge of some kind of evolution of our species where we just kind of like leave behind all of these stupid ways that are vestigial to our life here and get on to the meat of things, to the matter of things, which is celebration and expression and communication and love.

Well, what I hope to accomplish and what I think we really are accomplishing is sharing love and building strength in the world. I think that when we see that this is already happening, it’s a really simple goal, it’s that music is some way that people can share strength with each other, and I really feel like our music, the possibility of it reaching people and making people feel stronger and making people feel better, have a stronger capacity to love, to let it come from their heart, that’s really all we hope for, and I see that happening in now, already, so I feel like that it’s, I think that we should continue because I’ve seen that our music does make people feel better and it does have that capacity to make people just feel a lot of joy, and I think that that, it’s funny that we talk about the energy crisis on the earth, you know, planet earth, I think that hopefully Lavender Diamond will be part of the beginning of solving the energy crisis as we disconnect our energy from fear and reconnect our energies to love and move toward sustainable energy sources. That’s what we hope, that we’ll be part of a massive wave of, a massive energy shift, a massive wave of sustainable energy, and that spreads, and energies from our music can be part of inspiring people to move away from fear towards love.

MG: Imagine Our Love comes out May 8. Do you have any plans to tour the U.S. in support of the new record?

A: Yeah, we’re going to tour the U.S. We’ve just finished up that tour plan. We’re going to move around a lot during May and June. I think our tour begins May 15, and we’re going to be touring for two months. So I’m really looking forward to that. We played in Atlanta a couple of months ago with the Decemberists in that big old church. That was a crazy place. It’s amazing. I can’t get over it, it was so beautiful.