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Lavender Diamond

June 3rd, 2007

Becky Stark, lead singer of Los Angeles-based folk-pop quartet Lavender Diamond, speaks in a shy whisper, loves English tea and genuinely hopes to save the world through music. As a teenager growing up outside Washington D.C., classical singing was Stark’s preferred emotional outlet. So it’s strange and fateful that a hardcore-punk concert (Fugazi) was what led her to realize she could tell her own stories. Stark studied comp lit and art semiotics at Brown University and became involved with the Fort Thunder scene of Providence, Rhode Island (the breeding ground for Black Dice and Lightning Bolt), which helped inspire her to start writing her own music. Upon graduation, she and a friend wrote a punk operetta called Birdsongs of the Bauharoque, in which Lavender Diamond, the character and the band, first took shape.

The character is based on a long and windy creation myth that Stark tells with the out-of-breath intonation of a child, involving a man who discovers a cave of diamonds after being drawn there by its otherworldly hum. “It’s a metaphor to me for a certain sound,” Stark explains. “That sound in that story has become very real to me.” After self-releasing a CD of her own songs in 2003, she moved from Providence to L.A., transformed the character into a band (Steve Gregoropoulos, piano; Ron Regé Jr., drums; Jeffrey Rosenberg, guitar), released the Cavalry of Light EP in 2005 and was picked up by Matador in 2006. Lavender Diamond’s full-length Imagine Our Love, released this month, is a joyous collection of upbeat, operatic folk songs delivered by Stark in an angelic coo. During her live shows, Stark often sings with her hands outstretched to the audience. “I have this idea of sharing love with people,” she says. “I think a lot about the possibility that someone would sing these songs, sing them to themselves, and what that would mean.” Coming from anyone else, these words would sound trite — but from Stark, we feel the love.

Taken from: Papermag.com
MySpace: myspace.com/lavenderdiamond
Web: lavenderdiamond.com

Tonight June 3 - play at Bowery Ballroom NYC

Entry Filed under: Reviews