02 Free Tracks
Lavender Diamond

The Matador four features an alluring blend of rich piano and earthy tambourines, but Becky Stark's wispy vocals are the star. Earnest and elfin, piercing and resolute, they make it tough to tell whether she's a lost flower child or a canny freak-folker.
The debut album from Los Angeles-based Lavender Diamond is
a tour-de-force of gorgeous melody and uplifting sentiment. Led by the
shining, charismatic spirit Becky Stark, Lavender Diamond
bring a punk-rooted DIY aesthetic to their enormously entertaining and
heartfelt - and vaguely subversive - blend of 60s enthusiasm and 70s-style
songwriting. Produced by Thom Monahan
(Pernice Brothers, Devendra Banhart),
Imagine Our Love pulls together elements of folk, pop, country,
performance art, children's music, and protest anthems to make one of the
most original musical statements we've heard in years.
Lavender Diamond began in 2003 as a character Becky created
for a traveling operetta. As a solo artist, she released a 7" single and full-
length CD (both long out of print). 2004 saw Becky playing country songs with
guitarist Jeff Rosenberg (who left the band shortly after recording
this album), classical arias and tin pan alley tunes with pianist
Steve Gregoropoulos, and voice and drum psychedelic doo-wop with
drummer Ron Rege Jr.; she proposed they all unite and form one
band together, and Lavender Diamond as we know it was born. In
2005, they released The Cavalry Of Light EP (re-released by Matador
in January 2007), which features the live favorite "You Broke My Heart," a
series of vocal and piano crescendos that burns itself into your brain with its
persistence and simplicity.
Becky Stark started singing in church, studied classical singing
as a teenager, and first performed at a rock concert with the children's choir at
the Moscow Music Peace Festival in 1989, opening for the band
Skid Row. She studied Semiotics and Russian literature at Brown
University and left before graduating to join the Merce Cunningham Dance
Conservatory. She eventually landed in LA, where she found a wildly broad-
minded musical community and vibrant theater, film, and comedy scenes. Ron
is a noted cartoonist, illustrator and author of the classic graphic novel
"Skibber Bee-Bye." His artwork adorns the CD cover and booklet. Steve is a
classical composer, and among other feats, played in Boston band The
Wild Stares and composed a full-length ballet for the Oscar Wilde
story "The Selfish Giant".
Though Becky's influences range from Prince to Linda Ronstadt
to Lightning Bolt, her songs have the immediacy of nursery rhymes
or church music. Her crystalline soprano soars over rhythmic, insistent piano-
guitar-drums instrumentation which is striking for both its rawness and its
orchestral sweep. By turns celebratory ("Open Your Heart", "Here Comes One"),
plaintive ("I'll Never Lie Again", "When You Wake For Certain"), playful ("Garden
Rose," "My Shadow Is A Monday"), and stunningly mantric ("Like An Arrow",
"Oh No"), Imagine Our Love carries a common message of hope, change,
thinking with your heart, and the unique emotional power of music.
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