LAVENDER DIAMOND
Issue #32
Becky Stark is here to bring love, peace, and celebration to your world. For real.
By Kristina Francisco
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
hello dear friends,
wow! i am writing here from nottingham! tonight we played at the university here and the faces of the crowd were so bright!!! i’ve never seen such bright faces!
This is how Becky Stark, Lavender Diamond’s frontwoman, writes to her fans on the Internet. On the phone from her Los Angeles homebase in March, she is very much the same way: a complete charmer, talkative, idealistic, excited, and apt to use words like “peace,” “love,” and “celebrate” when describing Lavender Diamond’s music
and the world at large.
But when we begin our two-hour conversation, she’s doleful and a bit distraught, reeling from the departure of Jeff Rosenberg, Lavender Diamond’s guitarist and her close friend, who decided to leave the band a week before our interview and a month before the release of the quartet’s debut, Imagine Our Love.
“I think that maybe we’re all kinda shocked. We weren’t expecting it,” Stark mournfully says of the friend who first encouraged her to start Lavender Diamond. “Maybe he felt that giving his whole life to the band would mean he would have to give up so much of his family life. [Rosenberg has a then-10-month-old baby.] [But] for me there’s no other stability [other than music] in my life.”
there’s some important news to tell! this is going to be a long message! i’ll have to start writing more often so that the messages don’t need to be so long.
There are lots of stories Stark will tell if you let her — and she’ll apologize plenty for “blathering on and on.” She loves to talk to strangers. She didn’t say a word until she was 3. Her mother and grandmother were both ministers, though, she says, “At a certain point, I felt so utterly disgusted when I came to consciousness about the fact that we were praying to the Lord and that the Lord was a man and what was divine was being characterized as a masculine entity.”
In high school, Stark, tired of “instrumentalizing songs about patriarchy,” quit singing, and didn’t start again until she attended Brown University, where she found a strong community that inspired her. A few years later, she started Lavender Diamond. “I wanted to hear a woman’s voice really singing,” she says. “I wanted to hear the body of that sound. I wanted to hear melody, lyrics, and a feminine voice.”
Yet Stark’s onstage persona — whimsy, frilly — doesn’t portray what most people consider to be a feminist. “To me, the balancing and equalizing of strengths between men and women is the most important aspect of creating peace. It’s a funny thing to say that a person can’t be a feminist and be totally celebrating. I wear great gowns and flowers in my hair and it’s really ultra feminine, [but] it’s a very conscious effort to strengthen that feminine element.”
i had a realization today about the nature of love! very important — sometimes we talk about love energies — but what i realized today is that love is energy.
“Lavender Diamond is very service-oriented,” she says. “To create a sound that’s a healing energy and love. My purpose is to be a part of bringing peace to the planet. My platform is that we all should celebrate our equality and strength and this wild gift that we’re together.” When you talk to Stark, you actually believe that can happen.
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