Partners in life, as well as in music, Dave Starr and London Wilde are the literal heart and soul of the gifted and accomplished hard rock trio WildeStarr.
Alongside drummer Josh Foster, WildeStarr has carved out a reputation as a metal band that creates music with an appeal to rockers of all ages – those looking to relive the glory days of the early 1980s, but with an up-to-date take on the genre.
Starr and Wilde moved to Texas a couple of years ago. Starr had spent the previous three and a half decades in California after moving to the San Francisco area in his early 20s seeking the rock and roll dream. WildeStarr has been around since the couple began getting serious about collaborating professionally, bringing together Starr’s acumen for composing compelling hard rock music and Wilde’s incredibly strong, potent and expressive vocal stylings, as well as her knack for composing wonderfully imaginative and evocative lyrics.
The couple have been friends for 30 years, and have been married since 2001, but only started working closely together when the WildeStarr project was born. The band’s first album, Arrival came out in 2010, with A Tell Tale Heart coming shortly thereafter in 2012. The band’s new album, Beyond the Rain, was released Dec. 8 on Scarlet Records.
While the music on Beyond the Rain is hard, heavy and powerfully melodic, it is the emotion that pervades it – particularly the lyrics – that is the most evocative feature of the record. Some of this comes from Starr’s gratitude and clear-headedness for his ongoing sobriety, which is now at the 12-year mark, but much of it comes from a tragic family situation in Wilde’s own life. In 2012, her brother Gary, a gifted and promising musician in his own right, took his own life. Devastated by the loss, both Wilde and Starr were inspired by Gary’s passing in both tangible and intangible ways when writing and recording music for Beyond the Rain.
“When Gary passed away London’s lyrical content changed from just writing for a collection of 10 songs to more of a conceptual piece about immortalizing the struggles of her brother Gary. And I ended up using one of Gary’s Fender Stratocasters on the record so we actually would tell people that he became sort of a silent fourth member of the band. And I would like to think that some of his mojo rubbed off with me playing his guitar on all the tracks. I used my Les Paul too, so we split the guitar tracks left and right, so one side is Gary’s guitar and one side is mine. It was our way of including him in the tracking process,” Starr explained.
“Obviously this was a very painful thing for London; losing her brother and then putting pen to paper and having to write lyrics about his struggles and the stories about their upbringing. That meant the songwriting process took longer for this album than for the first two. Normally I am a pretty impatient person but writing something as sensitive as this you have to let things flow at their own pace and take their own course.
“As her husband as well as her bandmate and seeing her day in and day out dealing with this, I think she handled it very well and I do think it was a bit of a healing process for her to tell the story of her brother. I think it’s a case of something positive coming out of something horrific. If you can say that something good came out of something bad, obviously his death was a tragedy, but I think if we had to choose between ignoring it or doing something artistic to memorialize him I think we took the right approach. I think it helped London and it also helped my mother-in-law a great deal too.”
Starr had been at the heart of the Los Angeles hard rock scene for more than three decades, including a lengthy tenure with Vicious Rumors during their late 1980s-early 1990s heyday, as well as work with Chastain on the band’s 2004 album In an Outrage. And being at the heart of that sleazy scene meant Starr got caught up in both the excitement and the detrimental aspects of the L.A. rock lifestyle, and began to have a serious substance abuse problem, something he wasn’t able to kick until 2005.
“The whole concept of how WildeStarr came about as a positive creative outlet for both of us – for me in particular early on. I was battling some very difficult substance abuse problems and around the time I got clean sober was the same time as London and I started to get serious about wanting to write music together and make this a reality. And there is no way that I could have done it if I didn’t get clean and sober. First off, I would have been dead, and secondly I wasn’t that good of a guitar player. My career up until then had strictly been as a bassist,” he said.
“Part of my recovery and rehabilitation, part of my outlet, was to play guitar and write songs and explore this potential of writing. I was also battling depression at the time and there is no way I could have done it – music is what got me through it. I didn’t think at the time when we started doing this that, wow, 10 or 12 years later we would have three albums out. That was a crazy pipe dream back then. I was just trying to get off the booze and get my head on straight. But it all worked. I know it sounds really corny but music saved my life and continues to keep me happy and fulfilled and sober.”
The most focused, consistently energizing and emotionally complex of WildeStarr’s three albums, Beyond the Rain sees the band continuing to create music that both hearkens back to the early 1980s metal heyday, but with modern sensibilities and forward-thinking production vibe.
“I would say if you put together classic Judas Priest, classic Queensryche and Dio in a blender, put it on high and pour that into a glass, it’s going to be full of WildeStarr. That’s kind of the world where we come from. London has a very strong voice and gets compared a lot of classic Rob Halford and classic Geoff Tate. She has that kind of vocal ability and range. And I think what makes her special as a vocalist is that you have to do more than just sing. I have heard people who can sing really well but they can’t write or interpret lyrics and they don’t have much of a command of melody and structure. London is a master lyrical writer and storyteller and also has lots of experience in a studio as a producer and engineer,” Starr said, making observations about someone for whom he obviously has a biased perspective, but all one needs to do is listen to any of the tracks on Beyond the Rain and understand that he’s bang on about Wilde’s voice.
“And as for our style, the roots are in that classic era but it has modern production. It has a female singer, but one that doesn’t sound like a lot of the other female metal singers today. And I also do a lot of harmony guitar work, which is why bands like Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy were influences on me. So I do a lot of guitar harmonies and orchestrated guitar parts. We call it a wall of sound, but it’s our unique take on the wall of sound concept.
“We also don’t hide from our influences. Some people have ragged on us and try to say in a negative way that we went into a coma in 1985 and just woke up. Well, I am 56 years old: my influences are all from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. You can’t hide from who you are and who you were listening to. I am not ashamed of it. All my musical heroes are 70 or pushing 70 and the music that those people made, and are still making in some cases, is classic and timeless. It was a different era and a different sound that we’re preserving that and carrying a torch for it, and that’s just fine with us.”
An interesting thing to note about WildeStarr is that it is a studio-only band – they don’t play live shows. Much of this has to do with personal and business circumstances, while some of this approach has to do with the fact that Starr has been through the rock and roll touring wars for the vast majority of his adult life and really doesn’t see the appeal any more.
“This band just exists in the studio and exists on the internet and videos. People can say ‘well, why is that the case when everybody else is making a record and going on tour?’ First of all, we’re not like everybody else. We do our own thing and we make our own rules and we do what we want to do. There are several reasons why we don’t tour. One is that we have had a really hard time finding people to play with us, people who believed in the vision that London and I had. So we ended up doing this as a duo with Josh on the drums,” he said.
“London and I also have two businesses that we run from home and we also have London’s elderly mother living with us. She moved in with us from Las Vegas earlier this year. So we have to take care of her. We have so many things that anchor us to our home, but we don’t mind. There are things I do miss from touring because I did some pretty extensive tours with Vicious Rumors, including Europe, Japan and all over the U.S. and Canada. And I know we have people who want to see us play, so I am really torn between wanting to do that but also cherishing and respecting the private lives that London and I have in our home here in Texas.
“We have a really beautiful home on a four-acre forested plot overlooking a golf course not far from Houston. We have our own recording studio and we are making great music. If it doesn’t go anywhere beyond the studio, I am at peace with that because at the end of the day, I just want to stay clean and sober and make great music with London. If that means we just do it in the studio and release albums, then that’s what we do. And I remember having this conversation with Dave Chastain, because we’re friends and talk regularly and he doesn’t have any interest in touring any more either, but is still making music. He doesn’t have any desire other than working in the studio and my feelings are kind of the same.”
For more information on WildeStarr and Beyond the Rain, visit www.wildestarr.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
