I say “sit down” because although we were sitting looking across from each other, we were actually thousands and thousands of miles away, I in Seattle and she in Sydney connecting via Skype. Right out of the gates and just by the sheer use of the Skype forum, Becky was able to take me to an amazing story she holds near and dear to her heart.
The Voice Project
“I used Skype for the first time a couple years ago, I started a women’s choir in Los Angeles (the LA Ladies Choir), and worked in collaboration with an exchange through the Voice Project. We did an exchange with the Gulu Women’s Choir in the Congo, which is a choir that was formed in a refugee camp, where these women wrote all these beautiful songs asking their children to come home from the war.”
“One of the things The Voice Project does, is help build radio towers, and broadcast these songs. It’s mind-blowing the way that this music is actually working to create peace. This whole movement of forgiveness through music, that’s so incredibly beautiful.”
“So the first time I actually used Skype, we used it with the choir in Africa, where some of the women walked five hours to a location with a computer and a generator. They were teaching us their songs, and I studied phonetics in college, so I was able to teach the songs to the LA Ladies Choir. They were so amazed that we could learn their songs, and then they were trying to learn our songs too. It was one of the craziest, most beautiful experiences to be with these women Skyping half way across the world.”
“Ever since that first experience, Skype has been magical.” Becky mentioned that the song “Oh My Beautiful World” off the new record Incorruptible Heart was written for the choir.
The birth of Lavender Diamond
I had heard that the birth of Lavender Diamond had come from a play, so I had asked Becky to expand upon this for me.
“Lavender Diamond came from this idea I had for an opera, called Echoing in the Diamond Cave. I had this vision, a sound vision of what it would sound like inside of the very first prime evil crystal cave before anyone had ever found them. It would be this beautiful place of resonance and harmonies in earth’s first crystal cave.”
“I had this whole idea to make an opera of that, but then this whole other story unfolded. I had this idea for a whole fairytale about it, where a man is walking along the forest, and heard this beautiful crystalline resonance. He followed the sound to the mouth of the cave, where he discovers this beautiful astonishing world of light singing through the crystals. So he enters the cave and there’s one stone above him at the center of the cave, the Lavender Diamond, and he takes it and breaks it because he wants one. When he breaks it, there’s a horrible shattering sound, as he’s disrupted the unity of the cave, and he runs away with the Lavender Diamond.”
“Centuries follow, and the stone separates and is dispersed. Part of the stone becomes a ring on a medieval lady’s finger. She loves to sing by her balcony, and has the soul of the stone in her voice. There’s a magpie that lives in a tree outside the balcony, and magpies love shiny objects, but they don’t sing. One day the magpie swoops down to try and steal the ring, and they get caught in this crazy battle, both falling to their death. The ring is lodged in the magpie at the base of the tree, and centuries pass once again until the soul of the stone is reborn again into a songbird named Lavender Diamond. Lavender Diamond lives in the tree, and loves to sing, and there’s a little bit more, but that’s the idea.”
The depth of Becky’s work
The depth of work Becky has engaged in is truly remarkable. Before Lavender Diamond was a band, it use to be Becky and Elvis Perkins (previously profiled artist on Music Outside the Umbrella), he played guitar on the first 7”, and she’s sang on both of Elvis’s records.
Just like Music Outside the Umbrella, Becky doesn’t confine herself to one genre or style of music. “Every time I say this, it’s so funny to say, but I play country music also…in a band with John C. Reilly.” Becky played with John at the Gorge this year, but it wasn’t her first Sasquatch rodeo, she had also performed with The Decemberists (and on their Hazards of Love rock opera album) for a few weeks which included a mainstage set at Sasquatch. “When I think about that whole experience, that I was in The Decemberists for awhile, it was just such a gift to be a part of that adventure.”
Another one to throw into the mix is Zooey Deschanel, Becky and her had recorded a duet when the first Lavender Diamond came out, and Zooey also wrote the bridge to “Teach Me How to Waken”, the final song written on the new album. A song that Becky holds near and dear, that she couldn’t fully hatch out, until a string of the utmost intricacies tied it all together in the end.
“I’m writing hundreds of things out, reveal yourself song, what the hell, writing and writing and writing, why can’t I figure out the lyrics to this song, I’ve been writing this song for five years. It’s the last night before our last chance to mix it, and finally I just went to sleep. It was the night of the “supermoon” back in late spring, when the moon is as close as it ever gets to Earth. I wake up in the middle of the night and I just went downstairs to sing, and I had all these images come to mind, I felt like myself in communion with so many people. I just started to sing and sing and sing, the song again again and again, and right as the sun started to come up, the lyrics that I had been puzzling out in my mind, just came into place and started to describe exactly what was happening, and suddenly it just totally made sense. It was very emotional, and finally I felt I had sung and the song was complete”
The emergence of the new album Incorruptible Heart
Becky revealed to me the paradigm shift that occurred and all that went into the emergence of the new album, Incorruptible Heart, which came out this past September.
“We made Imagine Our Love in 2007, and then we didn’t make a record for another 5 years. I always knew the eternal principle, but I couldn’t really get back to giving voice to what Lavender meant or was. I had these very sad songs that I didn’t think I could share because I thought they were too sad. They were outside the voice of what I thought would be good to share with the world, they were too sad.”
“Your intention with music is to uplift people, but I felt like I had to express these songs to move through the experience, for my own self. I’ve learned a lot of things in the making of this record; why sad songs are valuable, healing, and uplifting. The most magical and transformative force on the planet, is compassion. When someone feels something with you, that allows it and is the mechanism for it to change and shift. When you are in a very painful difficult experience, it can cause you to reconnect.”
Source:
http://musicoutsidetheumbrella.com/2012/12/11/a-look-inside-interview-with-becky-stark-of-lavender-diamond/