Although Starlight Girls have spent the last couple years building a strong buzz in Brooklyn’s bustling indie scene, they’ve spent fairly little time in traditional recording studios before stopping through Baltimore to record with us. “It’s interesting to be in the modern age where production is so important, and so immediate to us, that we’ve recorded almost everything ourselves. This is actually a pretty new experience for us, to be in a studio at all,” guitarist Shaw Walters told WYPR’s Aaron Henkin in an interview after the session.
Starlight Girls joins us in the studio for a BSide (September 29, 2013).
We first crossed paths with Starlight Girls when Mobtown co-owner and producer Mat Leffler-Schulman mixed two songs for the band’s “7×3” single, which was produced by Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu and released earlier this year. But the two new songs they recorded for BSides, “Red Rover” and “La La Lune,” were their first experiences tracking songs in the studio, which they praise both for its atmosphere and its acoustics. “I like how it’s like a haunted house,” says Walters, “also it has a space echo, and I only record in places that have a space echo.” Though he may have been joking, it’s true that echo and reverb play a prominent role in Starlight Girls’ dreamy, nostalgic sound, though the BSides tracks have a more crisp and physical character than the band’s previous recordings.
The band’s principal songwriter, Christina B, brings together sounds and lyrical inspirations from a broad array of sources. “I tend to gravitate towards Edith Piaf, people that aren’t singing in English,” she says in explaining her vocal influences, also citing Portugal’s Amalia Rodrigues and India’s Lata Mangeshkar. The lyrics, meanwhile, seem to originate from tangential trains of thoughts – “Red Rover” was initially sparked when she saw the phrase on a sticker, and “La La Lune” began one night when the moon caught her eye. The exact meaning of the lyrics, however, are more ambiguous. “It changes over time, as I sing it.”
Credits
Recorded on September 29, 2013 at Mobtown Studios
Keyboards and vocals by Christina Okay
Guitar by Shaw Walters
Bass by Tysin
Keyboards by Sara Mundy
Drums by Karys Rhea
Produced by Mat Leffler-Schulman, Nick Hughes and Sean Mercer
Mixed by Mat Leffler-Schulman and Paul Mercer
Engineered by Sean Mercer and Paul Mercer
Filmed by Justin Foreman, Joe Austin and Nick Hughes
Edited by Nick Hughes
Photography by Tedd Henn
Interview by Aaron Henkin
Written by Al Shipley
Thanks to Christy Merriner
