Stardeath interview

So while Stardeath’s latest album The Birth sounds about as Lips-influenced as any Oklahoma City-based rock band should be, it’s the sonic differences, and not the similarities that jump out at you. Then again, Dennis is a fan of rap…

Very few bands name themselves so creatively that the first thing I want to ask them about is the name of their band. I’ve got to ask you how you come up with a name like Stardeath and White Dwarfs.

I wish I had a better story for you, and I wish I could remember completely, but when we named our band, we just had to have a name because we were playing a show. I don’t think we ever thought it would stick. I just remember us looking through these space books, these movies, and going to bookstores, and spending a couple days of just looking for names. Of course, any time you have something like that, it gives you an excuse to get fucked up and do something fun. So we may have gotten too fucked up to actually remember where the name came from. I just know we had this big sheet of paper that I still have that we woke up one morning and looked at the piece of paper, and that was the biggest name on there. There was like four or five circled but that was the biggest one, the most badass sounding one to me. I didn’t even know what it meant, I just thought it looked cool, and we ended up keeping that one. So I wish I had a better, crazier story for you, but that’s about all I can remember from that name.

You grew up in Oklahoma City. There seem to be a few more bands coming out of Oklahoma than there used to be. Is there more of a scene there now?

I think Oklahoma City maybe not as much as the college towns like Norman and Stillwater. All American Rejects are from Stillwater which is one of the big colleges here, it’s about an hour north of Oklahoma City. And then half of our guys live in Norman, which is about twenty minutes south, and that’s where the big university is in the State. And the Starlight Mints are from Norman, some of the Lips guys are from Norman, so I think there is a music scene here, but it’s probably not unlike a lot of college towns, except we do have the Flaming Lips here and the Starlight Mints, a couple bigger bands that have been successful for a long time. I think that kind of helps the scene because people are able to see their friends succeed, that kind of thing, and I think that makes more people want to do it.

The scene here is weird though, cause I was always curious as to why we were the only band that seemed to sound anything like The Flaming Lips. You’d think with the Lips being from here and being here for so long that there’d be ten Flaming Lips-sounding bands in the scene, but more so it seemed like people gravitated toward sounding like the Starlight Mints.

We seemed to gravitate more toward the Flaming Lips, the more psychedelic stuff, and that was always curious to me about the scene here. But it’s always been a good scene, a changing scene.

Wayne tells me you were a roadie for the Lips at one point, and that you grew up in and around the band.

First and foremost, I totally grew up in and around their band. I started to hang around the local studio they were at when they were recording Transmissions from the Satellite Heart when Steven first joined the band and stuff like that. And I started hanging around quite a bit then, not because I was interested in music, just because I was interested in what my family was doing, and what his friends were doing.

But then the roadie thing started kind of simultaneously with me starting to do some of my own music. It wasn’t because I wanted to get into it and see what it was like, I just started to work on this Christmas on Mars movie with Wayne, and started to get close with him doing that stuff, and just started saying oh, I’d like to go with you guys and help you out and see what it’s all about. And then I started to record some music of my own, going out with them and watching them set up every day, doing all that stuff was kind of the other side of things, and I became really interested in that too

When you signed on to help with Christmas on Mars, did you have any idea that was going to turn into like a seven year project?

When I started helping him with that, it wasn’t like it is now where the Lips now have a full time crew in Oklahoma City that always works on ideas. Any general Lips work that Wayne used to do by himself, he has a crew to do now. So back then, when he first started doing Christmas on Mars it was right after Soft Bulletin had come out, it was really just a small crew that he had, and none of them lived here. So he was doing most of the Christmas on Mars stuff, painting the sets and gluing stuff together and hauling stuff around by himself. And since I had been over at his house starting to work on some of my own music and stuff, I would just go with him and help him.

We started shooting that thing when I was still in high school and we didn’t finish it until I was twenty-six years old. That’s how long we worked on it.

You’re into rap music. Is that true?

That’s totally true. I few of our guys in our band are really into rap music. We grew up, especially me and Casey, our bass player, kind of grew up in what would be considered inner city Oklahoma. It may not be as bad as inner city California where you were running around when you were little, but it was bad enough. I mean it was right there at the beginning of gangs and everything like that, and all my friends in the neighborhood, including me, all just loved whatever the new rap music was, and at that time it was like OutKast and Dr Dre and Notorious B.I.G. and all that stuff. Those were the biggest things, and it was real fresh then. So instead of me being into Nirvana and Pearl Jam and stuff like that that was big on the other end in the early nineties, I was more into the gangster rap stuff in the nineties and I think that just kind of carried through to now. And I still love that music, we still listen to probably eighty percent rap in the band while on tour.

How does that influence Stardeath’s music when you go to make an album, or does it?

I think it does a great deal. I think that’s one of the strange things about influences is I think rap is, although it may not come out in our music, I think it’s a major influence just on the whole. I think some of my favorite things about rap music is probably some of the attitude. And I like the hookiness of rap too, the choruses.

Tell me about your bandmates.

I mention Casey the most just cause he started the band with me. His thing is he plays bass, he plays keyboards, he plays guitar, and he writes a lot of music in our band. And the way he writes it, it varies from a ten second drum loop with some instruments on it, or a five minute intricate piece of music, and that’s really the way that we end up writing songs most of the time. Either I’ll come up with some quick song on the piano or the guitar and we’ll work from there, or it’ll be something that Casey does.

Matt is our drummer who we met just working at our manager’s office in the mail room. The best way to describe him would be he’s a super technical rock drummer. He can play anything that we’ve ever wanted him to play. We met James just a couple years ago when we were finally trying to get a guitar player that we liked. You know, it’s hard to find guitar players that don’t have egos the size of their guitars. He would be more of your just standard classic rock guitar player.

What can you tell me about the Dark Side of the Moon project?

We started to talk about this when we were on tour with the Lips at the end of the summer. We’d played three or four weeks of shows with them, and iTunes came to our manager, who’s the Lips manager as well, and wanted us to go into the studio and record six or seven new songs. And the Lips just off of recording their whole record, and us just off of recording our new record, the last thing that we thought we could do is write six good songs. Everybody was tapped out. And I don’t know exactly where Dark Side of the Moon came from, maybe we were just listening to it the night before or we were talking about it. But it kind of happened by chance that right at the time that iTunes came to us with this idea, we had been talking about doing these kinds of things where we get together like we did with the Madonna song last year and record a cover version of a song. So we just threw Dark Side of the Moon out there thinking wouldn’t that be cool if we could do a cover of this great record that everybody knows, and give our own take on it. But we had no idea that iTunes would let us, that Pink Floyd would let us. So when we first said it was just in passing, like wouldn’t that be cool if we could do that. And then once they all said yes it was just a dream come true to be able to do something like that. And then it just became scary to try to go in there and redo your favorite songs.

Learn more about Stardeath and White Dwarfs at StardeathAndWhiteDwarfs.com. The Birth and Dark Side of the Moon are available in iTunes.

About Bill Palmer

Bill Palmer is Editor in Chief of Beatweek Magazine. His editorial contributions include interviews with musicians and iPhone industry coverage.