WildeStarr Interview; London Wilde and Dave Starr on Crafting ‘Beyond The Rain’; Writing Guitar Riffs on the Couch, and Sobriety

Powerhouse metal band WildeStarr released their new album ‘Beyond The Rain’ on Friday, December 8th via Scarlet Records. Featuring ten new songs – intertwined with heartfelt lyrics and emotion stemming from the death of Wilde’s brother, a struggling musician who passed away when this album was starting to come together. Lyrically, the songs touch on the struggles of pursuing one’s dreams, mortality, and mourning loss. The album is a wonderful body of work, featuring numerous anthemic tracks that will surely please fans of bands like Judas Priest, Queensrÿche, and Dio. London Wilde and Dave Starr took 20 minutes out of their schedules to chat with PureGrainAudio about their new album. That dialog follows here:

How did you both originally meet?
London: Dave and I originally met in the late eighties.

Dave: It was about 30 years ago. 1987 or 1988.

London: We met through my boyfriend. Dave was a friend of my boyfriend at that time. So he introduced me when we were out at a club in San Francisco. I can’t remember the band that was playing. Some metal band was playing. I went on a few double dates with Dave and my boyfriend and Dave’s girlfriend back then. We stayed friends for about 15 years before we got married.

Dave: Yeah. We’ve been married for almost 16 years and friends for 30. I was playing in Vicious Rumours at the time. So things were really on the up and up for us. When we met, we’d just kind of hang out. She used to come and see me play in VR. We struck up a really good friendship. We just stayed close. And uh, got married eventually.

So what was your first collaboration together then? You must have had some discussions about that over the years, that you are mixing business with pleasure together, right?
London: Well at first it wasn’t really so much a collaboration. But Dave was doing bass tracks for Chastain. In 2000 and…
Dave: Yeah, Dave Chastain hired me to do the bass tracks on the In an Outrage (2004) album.

London: Yeah. I recorded those tracks for Dave because it was being done remotely. And while we were working on that, Dave brought up that he had all of this material that he had written on guitar. He had a demo of just the rhythms, and he said that he was thinking of putting a band together. And I said, “Can I sing on it?” And he said “sure!”. He’d actually never heard me sing before. But he still said sure. So that is how it started.

Now would you say that it was an easy process? Putting together that material that would become your first album together?
London: I think it was. Dave, I don’t know if it was easier for him, or why. It’s really easy for me. What I get from Dave, it’s easy because he’s so experienced. When he makes a demo of something he’s got the whole song arranged intelligently, and it’s a piece of cake. It’s really easy to write the melodies and lyrics to what he has given me because it’s really clean and really put together. I leave it to Dave to answer how difficult it is to come up with those tunes.

Dave: Well, the difficult thing for me was that I was known professionally as a bassist with either Vicious Rumours or Chastain before WildeStarr started. But before we could really do this, I had to deal with some inner demons, and that meant me getting clean and sober. And I did that in 2005. So it’s been a little over 12 years now. And once I got clean and sober I started focusing on guitar work and writing heavily every day and practicing the guitar. I just got real good real fast. It just kind of took off from there.

Did you find that was an easy thing to do? Flipping from playing bass to leads? Did you struggle with that at all?
Dave: Not really. The whole is a bit surreal the way it all came about. I had really not played guitar on a professional level. I’m 56, so I didn’t really start playing guitar on a serious level until I was 43 or 44. I always played guitar a little bit, but never to the level that you hear with WildeStarr. But it came together very very fast. We got into the studio to start recording the first album, Arrival, I’d only been clean and sober about 2 or 3 years and that’s also about how long I’d been playing guitar seriously. I’m very grateful but it’s almost like a divine intervention situation. I had to get clean and sober just to stay alive., yet along picking up a guitar and starting to bang out tunes with London. But it all worked out the way it did. And we’re really grateful, we’ve done it over three albums now. It’s just been a great experience personally and professionally for both myself and London.

Nice. It feels like you’ve managed to take a terrible tragedy and turn it into something cathartic with “Beyond The Rain.” Did you and London discuss that? That’s a pretty significant life event, losing a brother to suicide, and you were writing new material when it happened. How did that all go?
London: Well, we were just starting pre-production when this all happened. I wear everything on my sleeve. I tell everybody what I’m thinking. I don’t hold anything back. That’s just the kind of person that I am. I’d shared this with Dave before it happened. He was aware of my brother’s situation, and the back-story behind what was going on, and so was Josh, our drummer. And when I told both of them what I wanted to do, they were both really on board with it. As a struggling musician, Gary’s story is something we could all relate to. There are certain challenges that are unique to being a musician and certain feelings that are hard to overcome. This is almost a universal story, really. It’s something that they could relate to, so everybody was on board with what I wanted to do. Lyrically I think I’ve told my story but I think that my brother had an impact on the music as well. Dave picked up my brother’s guitar as his second guitar. We always have two guitars when we create music. Dave usually uses two different instruments, so he said that he wanted to play my brother’s guitar on this album. That was his idea. It definitely had an impact. There’s this element of Gary’s spirit or soul being a part of this album.

I think that life events tend to steer musical output for any artist. So regardless of whether you decided to do your album like this, A lot of how you felt about Gary would have made it’s way into this album. So it’s interesting that you decided to talk about it with Dave and Josh and turn it into what you did.
Dave:Well when we first started out writing for this record, Gary hadn’t passed away. I’m always working ahead on stuff, so when the second album A Tell Tale Heart came out in 2012 I probably already had half the music for the next album, what would become Beyond The Rain. So it didn’t really affect my songwriting process for writing the guitar and bass stuff and arranging the music. It was more a situation where Gary tragically passed away, and London wanted to go in this direction lyrically and telling a story. I thought it was a great idea. Maybe some people might want to run from it, it all being too painful, and maybe that’s why the album took four years, honestly, because it is a painful thing to deal with. I did end up playing one of Gary’s Fender Strats. I’m mostly a Les Gibson / Les Paul guy. But I decided to split the tracks left and right on this album and used his strat on the one side and my Les Paul on the other to try and give everything a bit of extra dimension on this record. Also getting to use one of Gary’s treasured guitars, with his DNA on it, so that maybe we would get a little bit of vibe and mojo off of it.

Can you tell me a little bit about Josh? How you met him and started working together? Aside from the production, maybe what he brings to WildeStarr’s music?
Dave:Well it’s interesting. I was doing some guitar repair work back in California. I’ve always kind of done that. And he came into my shop one day, and he had kind of drifted in from time to time. He came in with this demo for this band – Josh is a lot younger than we are. He’s in his early thirties. My daughter is older than he is. (laughs) So he played me this which I really didn’t care for. It was kind of this death-metal-Cookie-Monster stuff, I don’t know how you’d class it, but I didn’t really dig it at all. I was polite to him about it. I told him we were looking for a new drummer and he piped right up saying we had to let him demo a song. I initially thought it was going to be a match made in hell and that it wasn’t going to work out, so I was going through the motions a bit with him. I gave him a song to try out, not expecting much and it just worked out great. He brought a kind of a different perspective to what London and I were doing. I think it was really beneficial. He’s a lot younger. He’s got a different level of enthusiasm. A different perspective on the kind of music that he listens to. He wasn’t really even that knowledgeable in the kind of stuff that we were talking to him about. We’d say a song was going to have a groove like “Desert Plains” by Judas Priest and he wouldn’t even know what I was talking about. He’d pull up the track on YouTube so he could hear what I was talking about and then we’d go at it. It was a good thing. It brought a fresh perspective and a kind of a clean slate to our stuff. That’s how we met, and it ended up working out. I didn’t think it would work and it’s ended up being a great fit now for two albums.

Do you tour WildStarr?
Dave:No we don’t. We just strictly work in the studio. We work out of our home studio. Our original idea was to put together an actual real band or whatever you’d like to call it. A lot of people call what we are doing a project, and I kind of hate that word. I guess it is kind of more of a project than a band. I don’t really care. People can call it whatever they want. We just go into the studio and make music. We had a really hard time trying to find people who were on board with what we were doing and shared the same vision. I was initially just going to play guitar and we were going to find a second guitar player and a bass player, and I finally just said that I was sick of looking around for them. I just decided to play everything myself and make it more personal for London and I. it’s more from the heart. We don’t have to worry about people telling us what we should try. It just ended up morphing into starting a band and getting sick of people who were holding us back to becoming what I guess you’d call a studio project. We could hire musicians to go out and tour, but we just really like being at home. (laughter) We have two businesses that we run from home as well aside from WildeStarr. London’s elderly mother moved in with us and we help take care of her – she has been here a year. We have a lot of things that keep us anchored around home. And I say that as a positive thing. We have a really beautiful home on a beautiful four-acre forested piece of land. We have six dogs. We have a recording studio. We are just really private people who just have chosen to do things the way that we do them without being apologetic about it. The only time it’s frustrating is that we get asked all the time about touring. Bands ask us to go out with them. It’s kind of tough to tell people no. or quasi-lie about and say “well, you know, we’re thinking about it. We’ll let you know.”

I’m sure some of these people are pretty envious of your decision quite frankly.
Dave:Also, part of the problem for me is being clean and sober, I remember all of the touring that I did with VR and I just don’t have a desire to be in that chaotic, crazy, drug and alcohol situation again. I’m not saying I couldn’t man-up and deal with it, but I think anybody who has been in the situation that I’ve been in doesn’t want to put themselves in bad situations to make them susceptible to temptation. I rarely even go to clubs around here. I just kind of stay away from everything. We’ve kind of turned into home-bodies. But it’s all good. It’s just the way we work and the way we live.

Musically, there is a lot happening on this new album. There are some really cool moments of heaviness. There are some quite delicate moments; some powerful lyrics. I’m going to songs like “Undersold”, which has great riffs and good lyrics, and “Down Cold” which has some amazing sweeping vocals from London.
London:“Down Cold” is my favourite track on this record. And I think it’s because the music is so open that you can focus on the vocals more. Normally there’s so much going on in our material, the subtleties of my vocals are completely lost. That song is nice and open, and I was really able to thread a lot of emotion in it. It ended up being my favorite track on this record.

Dave:My favorite is the last track on the album, “When The Night Falls”. I like them all, but that one is my favorite.

What makes “When The Night Falls” stand out for you Dave?
Dave:We put it up on our Facebook page as a promo track last year while we were in the middle of trying to get this record done. We just wanted to let people know that we were still alive and that we were working on this album, which took us quite a long time to make. People loved the song. And I think that response really triggered something in me. The song is just so majestic, it’s got a great vibe. I just love everything about it. It’s a strong track and we got a strong response from it that I think it anchors the album. It’s my favorite track.

Can you tell me if you have an approach to writing your riffs, Dave? Is there a pattern that you feel you have gotten yourself into where you can get good output if you do certain things?
Dave:Yes. Here’s my routine. Are you ready for this?

Yup. I’m ready.
Dave:I sit on the couch in my bathrobe every night watching sci-fi and horror movies, surrounded by six dogs, playing the guitar. That’s how I write our music. (laughs)

Watch the band’s official video for their single “Beyond The Rain”.

That sounds like you are living the dream.
Dave:I don’t set aside songwriting time. I sit on the couch every night and watch movies. I don’t know if it’s ADD or what, but I can’t sit and watch the TV or watch a Blu-ray unless I have a guitar in my hands. I’m just constantly writing and coming up with riffs. And that is how I’ve come up with everything that we have ever done. I don’t know if there is anything that we have ever come up with in the studio. There may have been some minor tweaks and changes here or there. But I’d say 95% of the stuff that I’ve ever done has just been sitting on the couch watching movies. And I’ve already got enough material for another two albums already written for the future. But that’s just my song-writing. That’s how I do it.

I took a look at the video for “Beyond The Rain.” Can you talk a little about putting that together? How you got some of the effects and montages in it together?
London:Um, well, I just put it together. I used some stock footage and Creative Commons footage. Except for Dave. We had a deadline for that lyric video. Our publicist told us we should have one. I don’t watch lyric videos, and I’ve certainly never made one, so I was sort of panicking about that. I was working really hard putting it together, and I realized for the solo that I just wanted Dave soloing. What else BUT that would belong there? I had two days left to finish it, so I pulled Dave into the studio real quick and filmed him playing guitar. It was literally “Ok Dave, are you ready? Let’s go!”

Dave:I had to re-learn that solo. I couldn’t remember half of it. (laughs) I was ‘guitar-syncing’to it. And then I realized that I had to re-learn the solo so that it looked convincing. Because I’d probably laid that solo down three years ago, right?

Let’s finish off with where people can grab the music from? I was on your website, and it looks like people can order it there and it will come autographed.
London:Yeah, if you go to our website wildestarr.com you can order the CD, and you can get it on iTunes. It will be available at all of the usual outlets. Digital; Physical copies, streaming. Amazon. From our website, we’ll autograph it for you, so that’s probably a good way to go.

Dave:We are literally like a mom and pop thing. We do everything. Everything except the drums. London does the website and the videos. I was just on our PayPal account and saw that we have a whole bunch of people who have pre-ordered it. It’s all coming together, it’s great.

When you are putting these songs together, is it all done in stages then? Everyone works individually on their parts? and it’s put together on the computer afterward?
London:We’ve actually done both. When I’m writing, I like to be alone. When Dave is writing, he’s alone. Josh is alone for his initial ideas as well. But we come together and put it all together as a group. We all have input on what is going on. It’s definitely a group effort when it’s all coming together. We’ll make changes based on group discussion about songs. It can be vocals, guitar, and drums. It’s absolutely a group effort once we have the parts sorted out.

Dave:Basically I come up with a rough idea on the guitar. We record it in the studio with a click track. And then we give it to Josh.

London:Give it to me and to Josh. And we all come together on it.

Dave:Then there might be some tweaks back and forth. London might want to double a chorus in a spot. I might decide to lengthen or shorten a solo section, based on what we feel is right for the song. We just tweak it as it goes along.