Lavender Diamond

Lavender Diamond - Now Is the Time

When Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark stepped off the music industry treadmill roughly eight years ago, she wasn’t sure she’d ever return.
“All I knew was that I couldn’t proceed with business as usual,” Stark explains. “There was just too much at stake, and I didn’t want to put my energy into anything that wasn’t actively, directly contributing to the healing of the Earth.” Now, after almost a decade spent exploring the intersection of art and environmental activism, Stark is back with the first new Lavender Diamond LP since 2012. Aptly titled ‘Now Is The Time,’ the record is eerily prescient, grappling with hope and despair in the face of ever-deepening crisis, staring into the abyss but refusing to give an inch.
The songs are defiantly optimistic here, with lyrics insisting on unity and reconciliation in spite of all that divides us, and the album’s stately, cinematic arrangements are similarly resolute, rising and falling with a gentle yet determined grace. Stark and her bandmates—pianist Steve Gregoropoulos and drummer Ron Regé, Jr.—captured the core of the album in just two days, relying on gut instinct to guide their every move, and while the material was written well before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the result is a particularly timely, vital collection, one that couldn’t have come along at a more necessary moment. “I didn’t understand why at the time,” says Stark, “but I felt an undeniable urgency around these songs. Something told me that I just needed to sing again.”
It was that same intuition that brought Stark from the East Coast to LA in the early 2000s, when she began growing Lavender Diamond from a solo vehicle into one of the city’s most buzzed-about bands. Mixing elements of traditional folk with classical orchestration and vintage pop, the group’s 2007 debut, ‘Imagine Our Love,’ was a critical breakout on both sides of the pond, with Entertainment Weekly hailing the record as “a melodic sunbeam of jangly instrumentation and sweet sentiment” and the BBC calling Stark’s voice “a rare instrument indeed, capable of recalling Karen Carpenter, Linda Ronstadt and even Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins within the same song.” Suddenly, Stark was everywhere: profiled in the New York Times; singing to Bill Murray in the Tom Hanks-produced film ‘City Of Ember;’ even appearing between Joni Mitchell and Judy Collins in Vanity Fair’s “Folk Music Heroes” spread, shot by Annie Leibovitz. The record helped earn Lavender Diamond dates with Beck, Rilo Kiley, The Decemberists, She & Him, and The New Pornographers, among others, as well as high profile fans from John Waters and David Byrne to Miranda July and Sia, who directed the video for lead single “Open Your Heart.” The group’s 2012 follow-up, ‘Incorruptible Heart,’ was similarly well-received, with Pitchfork praising its “brighter, sexier, spacier palette” and the LA Times raving that “the results sparkle…brilliantly.” Despite all the success, Stark couldn’t help but feel that she was participating in a system to which she was diametrically opposed. Touring was inherently bad for the environment: all that travel consumed fossil fuels and emitted greenhouse gases, and any large gathering of people was a sure-fire way to generate massive amounts of landfill waste. Music was Stark’s life, but every day she felt less and less comfortable with the means by which it was shared and consumed.

“I just had this feeling that I needed to retreat,” she explains. “Everyone I was working with was amazing, but I reached a point where the only way I could participate in a concert in good conscience was if it was braided together with some sort of concrete action aimed at sustainability and inclusion.”
So Stark walked away from touring, instead joining in the launch of an organization called the Earth Activation Group, which created cultural events that were paired with direct, tangible action. Through EAG, she helped facilitate everything from the planting of pollinator gardens and habitat restoration for migrating monarch butterflies to the creation of community compost sites and the building of rainwater collection systems. It was challenging but rewarding work, and for the first few years, Stark didn’t seem to miss her old life much at all. But then, after the birth of her daughter and some profoundly moving experiences singing with the LA River Choir and elders from the Standing Rock Reservation, she began to notice a subtle shift somewhere deep inside. “I came to this realization that there’s medicine in the music itself,” says Stark. “It can lift people up and heal them and point them toward transformation, and that led me to this tremendously powerful need to start writing and recording again.”
Back in the studio for the first time in years, Stark and her Lavender Diamond
bandmates tapped into their old chemistry almost immediately, as if tuning into a frequency that had never stopped broadcasting. Though much had changed for each on a personal level (Stark, for instance, often found herself holding her three-year-old daughter in her arms while recording vocals), the group’s creative bonds proved as durable and potent as ever. Regé, a gifted illustrator and graphic novelist who has contributed artwork throughout the band’s history, laid a subtle yet solid foundation for the record, adding weight and body to Stark’s airy performances, while Gregoropoulos put together the album’s ornate chamber-folk arrangements, coordinating the remote recording of each orchestral part during quarantine and assembling them all into a cohesive whole.
“Each of these tracks is a living, organic thing that came together in its own unique way,” says Gregoropoulos, whose orchestrations draw on everything from Schubert to Earth, Wind & Fire. “I didn’t think of the arrangements as finishing songs off, but more as an integral part of this magical alchemy that happens with Lavender Diamond.” That alchemy is thoroughly palpable on ‘Now Is The Time,’ which opens with the gorgeous and expansive “Look Through The Window.” Like so much of the record, the track is a meditation on healing, harmony, and overcoming isolation, offering up a vision of a world in which we’ve learned to cast aside greed and selfishness in order to live in cooperation with the world around us. The prayerful “Ocean and Ground” invokes the perfect beauty of the Earth as a metaphor for the purity that resides in each of our hearts, while the jazz-tinged “In The Garden,” which features Stark’s partner, Nate Walcott of Bright Eyes, on trumpet, celebrates the infinite power of nature’s abundance, and the waltzing “Plant The Seeds” is a reminder that mass change begins with individual action.

“I’ve always felt like the small role I’m supposed to play in this life is to create
something that can help guide the way,” says Stark, “something that can point people toward a new way of living in communion with the Earth and each other.” That new way of living, though, is only possible if we’re willing to take the time for serious self-reflection, to admit our painful shortcomings and embrace the difficult road that lies ahead. The lilting “This Is How We Rise” reminds us that there’s just as much beauty and meaning to be found in the lows as the highs, while the pulsating “Flashback” asserts that in order to heal the madness, we must face it head on, and the dreamy “In The Middle,” one of several tracks to feature Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, affirms the importance of finding and appreciating moments of bliss, even in the midst of chaos. “How could we be so delighted / When the world is so divided?” she asks on the utterly hypnotic track. “I could feel my heart was rising / I could see the new horizon.”

“Recording this album was a transformative, transcendent experience for me,” says Stark. “It was the first time I’d experienced the healing of my own soul in the process of making a record. I hope it can offer that same healing power for others, too.” As America grapples with the fallout from a global pandemic, a long-overdue reckoning on race, a seemingly endless string of natural disasters, and the most vitriolic political climate in decades, it’s hard to imagine anything we need more. ‘Now Is The Time,’ indeed.