Words by Maria Holland
Photos by Jason Vaughn
Consisting of former members of Tarentel, Pink and Brown, and even a children’s choir, Lavender Diamond is shouldering the challenge of writing the perfect pop song with tones that range in everything from the cinematic to the classical. Formed merely a year and a half ago, they’ve already released The Cavalry of Light EP, in November 2005, and played LA’s indie-music extravaganza, Arthurfest, just two months earlier. With all four members on hand, vocalist Becky Stark, guitarist Jeff Rosenberg, keyboardist Steve G., and drummer Ron Rege Jr., I sat down to discuss the Southern California quartet’s rapid progress and what exactly makes up their feel-good sound.
How did you form the band?
Becky: Well, I had been performing as Lavender Diamond by myself, but, I had a vision of a band that was, well, a band, and I was playing separately with Ron, and then Jeff and I were playing together, and then Steve and I started playing together. And then I said ‘Hey guys, why don’t we all get together?’ and nobody wanted to.
Ron: We did this weird rehearsal in this rehearsal space. The three of us, that is, Ron, Becky, and Jeff, did something and that didn’t work at all.
Steve: And then they came over to my house and it was like the most magical thing in the world, it was just like, ‘We hit the jackpot, how the fuck did that happen?’
Becky: It was totally instant.
Jeff: It just seemed so open-ended. We just started making the music and allowed it to be what it was.
Give me an idea of what you think you sound like. When you go back and listen to your recordings what do you think of it?
Jeff: I just end up thinking like, ‘Well, this is something I’d listen to.’ I actually sit back and enjoy it and it doesn’t make me tired or bring up bad things. It’s a series of associations for me and has managed to strike a chord for me in a way, that, I think, some of the best folk music does and some of the best big stadium arena rock does.
Becky: Sometimes I crave listening to it, like, ‘I want to hear that music that we’ve made.’
How do you think that sound you’ve created, and I’m speaking directly with comparison to your peers in LA, balances out next to the punk rockers, next to the new-wave kids, all of that?
Jeff: We’re MySpace friends with all of them (laughs). As far as people with spirit that we like, there are a lot of peers and we have a lot of friends in bands that we like to play with here. We’re very invested in the LA music scene.
Becky: I think there’s a lot of great music in Los Angeles. And all the scenes from the outside seem very disparate, but there’s actually a lot of community and connectivity. I think that maybe the musical differentiations are secondary. I think that people are brought together with the impulse to create and celebrate. There’s a community that’s very vital. I feel like if people are compelled to create music, then that’s great. I’m an advocate for more music. I read this interview with John Peel and somebody asked him, ‘How do you feel about music you don’t like?’ and he said that if people took the trouble to make music, it must have meant something to them.
I know that you guys all have separate interests outside the band, like Jeff studying psychotherapy, and Beck acting. Ron does comic books and illustration and Steve does classical compositions on his own. What is it about this project that makes you want to come back together and participate in it?
Steve: I think it’s the kind of popular music that I like. It feels very rare. We stumbled into it. When you write music for a particular opera singer, for a particular combination of instruments, it’s for a thing that has an actual sound that you’ve heard. And, in this instance, I’m contributing music to something that’s there, something that’s resourced, which has this immense amount of power, where it’s just alchemically created. I feel like that’s what keeps me coming back to it. It’s a very rare thing to be offered and you’re sort of greedy and arrogant to throw it away.
