Francis and the Lights Like a Dream Album Art
The Dandy Read
Francis and the Lights, Pop Star Interrupted
3 days in the creative wilderness with Francis Farewell Starlite, the reclusive muse to Kanye West, Bon Iver and Drake.
The musician Francis Farewell Starlite was once a male monarch of downtown New York. At present, he's more isolated, and unsure of his artistic hereafter. Credit... Peter Prato for The New York Times
SEBASTOPOL, Calif. — On the morning of Dec. 1 final year, the musician Francis Farewell Starlite posted an declaration to his nearly 28,000 followers on Twitter. The bulletin wasn't an apology, per se, only its pointed brevity and dispassion conveyed a certain corporeality of heartache and embarrassment.
"Hi. I'm not gonna release music today. I believe in the future."
Two days after, I collection to a small cabin he was renting at the terminate of a long, rocky road in Sebastopol, a leafy, vineyard-choked town in Northern California 20 minutes from the coast. In more a dozen years of releasing music under the name Francis and the Lights, Starlite, 38, had never sabbatum for an in-depth interview. Basic facts of his life (Who were his parents? Was that really his name?) remained a mystery, fifty-fifty as his sound and aesthetic sensibility, as a songwriter and producer for transformative acts like Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Drake and Bon Iver, seeped into the cloth of modern pop.
When I arrived at the motel, perched on a hill overlooking the Sonoma Valley, I half expected to find it empty. Instead, Starlite came to the front door with a shy smile. He was wearing a faded purple sweatshirt, black sunglasses and camel Yeezy boots, which made for a stark contrast with the home's faux-frontier décor. He had arrived only the solar day before, only he was a gracious host, and answered every question I could throw at him in 12 hours of interviews over 3 days.
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In an earlier life, Starlite was a fixture of downtown New York and played the same stages from which the Strokes and Arcade Fire made their storied leaps toward the mainstream. Claiming a lineage of singer/showmen that included James Brownish, Prince and David Byrne, his music — especially the start two Francis and the Lights EPs, "Striking" (2007) and "A Modern Promise" (2008) — distilled the precision and drama of '80s arena popular into a sleek, serrated package.
When I start heard it, the vocalisation is what got me. It was saturated with yearning yet fantastically suave, heedlessly skidding from ecstasy through agony and back, like a NASCAR racer who'd severed his own brakes. A serial of single-accept music videos, directed past Jake Schreier, enhanced the thrill.
In "The Top," from "A Modern Promise," Starlite appears alone in a half-lit room, looking similar a 19th-century inventor — black arrange, gaunt skin, precarious pompadour — and dancing like a young Elvis. Its masterful climax is a sudden torrent of prop lights, which shatter on the floor at the precise moment that Starlite, in a kind of full-body rebellion against gravity, departs from information technology.
Every bit his legend spread, fueled by rapturous live shows and an enigmatic persona, other artists with grand visions came calling. Justin Vernon, of Bon Iver, who sings on the Starlite songs "Friends" and "Have Me to the Lite," compared Starlite's all-around musical acumen to Prince, and his mastery of the piano to Randy Newman. "I've never met anyone more destined to be a pop star," he said.
Due west, for whom Starlite co-wrote and co-produced "I Idea About Killing You," among other songs, called the artist "a truthful original with an unorthodox fashion" in an email.
Erykah Badu, another friend, introduced herself to Starlite backstage at one of his concerts in 2017. "I hadn't felt that inspired or stimulated in a long time," she told me of the show. "Information technology's his freedom — in his movements, his singing, his songwriting. Not anybody is in tune with that frequency, but he's on it, and he'due south sharing information technology with the rest of us."
Simply Starlite himself never became a marquee proper name similar the ones he channeled onstage, or assisted in the studio. After his kickoff album, "It'll Be Improve" (2010), and a tour opening for Drake, he went quiet for years at a time, with just 2 further albums released over the next decade.
At the cabin in Sebastopol, we were supposed to be discussing a triumphant render — a new project called "Same Nighttime, Different Dream." Information technology had been planned every bit the culmination of a busy twelvemonth, in which Starlite, who has no record label or publicist, had contributed to new albums from West, Bon Iver and Gamble the Rapper.
Only after two canceled release dates — the last on Dec. ane, the 24-hour interval of his non-apology amends on Twitter — it was unclear when or if the music would come out.
Epitome
Starlite fabricated mint tea and sat downwardly at the kitchen tabular array. He had simply a scattering of half-finished songs where he'd hoped a consummate thought would be. For months, he had been haunted by a dreadful feeling that a critical opportunity was escaping him, that they'd been escaping him his entire life. And yet he couldn't figure out what he should practice now.
When he thought about his career, he didn't experience "unorthodox," or like an inspiration to anyone. He felt lost.
"It was harder to do it this way," he said. "And I didn't do the things that I wanted to."
At the beginning, Francis Farewell Starlite, born Abe Morre Katz-Milder in Oakland (he legally changed his proper noun in 2004), was a dancer. Every bit a 6-twelvemonth-former at summer campsite, he discovered his body had an automatic reaction to music, that this reaction was dissimilar from other people's, and that seemingly everyone loved to scout.
Summer camp begat dance army camp, where choreography set to pop hits of the day, like "U Tin can't Touch This" by Thousand.C. Hammer, taught a young Starlite to temper his wild free energy with formal rigor. Francis and the Lights music videos are ever a balancing act between the ii. But the immoderate 6-twelvemonth-old remains his default setting.
In a recording studio, where artists and their cheerleaders often piece of work in a fog of self-delusion, Starlite'south collaborators said he can act every bit a kind of human compass.
"When he likes something, he goes crazy — he'll knock over your keyboards and mics considering he'due south and so afflicted by it," said Benny Blanco, a producer known for his work with Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran. "But as soon as he hears a audio that he doesn't similar, he completely shuts down — it's impossible for him to listen to bad music."
At 8, Starlite was put into guitar and and so piano lessons by his mother. He excelled at piano, simply he felt cursed, even as a child, by long periods of what he called writer's cake, usually accompanied by crippling self-incertitude.
As an adolescent, Starlite was a classroom cutup who played Gollum in a pupil production of "The Lord of the Rings," performed in a mentor'due south soul cover band, and wore a tuxedo equally the self-appointed host of a school talent bear witness. But the highs that he felt onstage could be wiped out by debilitating lows elsewhere. Even small perceived failures could send him into spirals of despair and cocky-consciousness, sometimes lasting for months.
"I call back walking around literally cursing myself out loud, just yelling all of these crazy things," Starlite said. "I was convinced I was a loser who couldn't exercise anything correct, and that I had to change schools because anybody knew it."
In middle school, a physician gave Starlite a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (later, another doctor said he had depression) and prescribed psychiatric medication. At summertime camp, he threw information technology out, unused. "I was agape it was going to make me into something that I wasn't," he said.
When he's not feeling depressed, Starlite has long stretches of happiness and relative stability, unremarkably accompanied by surges in musical productivity. During these phases, his zealous pursuit of his creative vision tin exist exhilarant.
Jake Schreier, the music video director (he now works in motion-picture show and television), grew up with Starlite and is a erstwhile keyboard player in Francis and the Lights. He recalls the euphoria of the band's early performances in Brooklyn, after Starlite had spent all of his coin to move there in a mail truck he'd filled with music equipment.
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"He would have these champagne chandeliers at the shows, and people would be drinking out of coconuts and eating strawberries and chocolate," Schreier said. "Information technology started out with just a few people in his loft, but eventually at that place were hundreds of kids losing their minds."
Aaron Lammer, another babyhood friend of Starlite'south and a keyboardist and songwriter in the band, calls Starlite'due south philosophy of absolute devotion to his music "knees to the floor," an expression that after became a vocal championship and the name of Starlite'due south visitor (KTTF Records).
"Information technology refers to a video of James Brownish he used to watch where Brown keeps dropping to the floor, full torso weight," Lammer said. "At the end of it, his pants are skinned and he's bleeding from both knees — that's Francis in pretty much everything he does."
From the outside, the ups and downs of Starlite's career — including the six years between his first album and his second, "Farewell, Starlite!" — had seemed to fit a familiar script: tortured artist, capricious muse. But learning of his struggles with mental affliction suggested a more complicated i.
Starlite recalled meeting with a psychiatrist who cited the symptoms of a manic episode ("exaggerated self-esteem and grandiosity") to imply that his conviction to emulate the achievements of James Brown and Michael Jackson was a manifestation of his delusion. If information technology was, then the engine that had powered his career and sustained him through his darkest days was a kind of delusion, no more real than the nagging thoughts that had tormented him as an adolescent. Was information technology? If so, where did that leave him?
"In my worst moments, I experience like I don't know who I am," Starlite said. Later years of going on and off medication, he'd recently decided to start once more.
On my second day in Sebastopol, I took Starlite to encounter virtually renting a piano. It was too rainy not to turn on the windshield wipers, but not rainy enough to really need them, turning the world into a smear of greens, browns and yellows.
His plan for the adjacent few months, he said, was to practice piano. Besides: to go far shape. Both of which seemed easier than writing — or acknowledging the necessity of writing — a batch of new songs.
Merely Starlite didn't actually feel much like practicing. He was depressed, and preoccupied with regret.
Since 2008, he'd declined several opportunities to sign with record labels — including XL Records, Kanye West's Thou.O.O.D. Music label, Drake's October's Very Own imprint and others — that many other artists dream of, opting instead to cocky-release his music.
This has had definite upsides. Starlite controls his recordings and collects all revenue. Only there are downsides, besides. If he'd had the resource that a characterization could have provided, if his songs were on the radio and in soda ads, if his music video budgets were three or 5 times what they were, could he have been as large as his idols?
"How many shows have I played since 2011?" Starlite asked, ruefully. "How many videos have I made? A few, but not nearly as many as I would have wanted. What pains me is that people wanted to help me. They wanted to take me in. And as soon equally information technology was at the door, I ran abroad — again and again and once more."
His most enduring collaborations have been with other artists, including Bon Iver, Blanco and Due west, with whom Starlite has grown specially close in recent years. The two start met in 2007, while Starlite was working every bit a runner at the SoHo restaurant Bluish Ribbon Brasserie (he used the office computer to burn down a CD of his demo), but they didn't become friendly until 2016, when both worked on the Chance the Rapper vocal "All We Got."
They connected over a digital vocal production technique Starlite had discovered called the harmonizer (or "prismizer"), in which the notes on a keyboard are used to create a real-time, five-office harmony with the singer's voice. (He subsequently showed it to Bon Iver and Frank Body of water.) Soon afterward, an invitation to West'south ranch in Wyoming arrived. Starlite lived there on and off in 2018 and 2019, helping W, whose every interview he can quote on command, to arts and crafts the albums "Ye" and "Jesus Is King."
"We merely started working immediately," Starlite said. "I couldn't believe it. He was validating everything I'd always thought about myself."
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Information technology's like shooting fish in a barrel to encounter why Starlite would see in Due west an reply to the questions that bedeviled him in Sebastopol. Not only has the rapper and provocateur managed distinction on his own terms, he has also said he is bipolar.
Just while he was orbiting his hero, Starlite'south own mental wellness deteriorated, and his music, including the songs he had hoped would make up "Same Night, Different Dream," languished.
BJ Burton, a producer and friend Starlite met through Justin Vernon, suggested that absorption into West'due south universe had a corrosive effect. "He started to become paranoid and difficult to talk to," Burton said. "I don't retrieve being around that level of fame was a good influence on him."
Starlite rejected that theory. "That whole feel was astonishing for me," he said. "I had some of the best moments of my life."
On the third twenty-four hours at the cabin, Starlite tested out his new piano, playing an ethereal melody for a song he was working on chosen "Witness." He was sitting in front of a picture window, side by side to a wood-burning stove fireplace, which filled the room with the sharp, sweet odour of oak.
"Witness" is about a friend named Jim, who is suffering from retentiveness loss, and to whom Starlite planned to dedicate "Same Night, Different Dream."
In times when/You don't know who's listening/I'll be your witness.
Jim helped raise Starlite after his parents' divorce. Thinking of his friend gave the artist a sense of urgency to terminate the project. But it also deepened his guilt over the time he felt he'd wasted.
"Information technology'due south easy for me to get into that state where I experience similar I'm already besides sometime, and the touch is gone," he said.
Every pivotal conclusion he'd made in his career replayed in his listen on a punishing loop. What was he thinking when he'd said no to all those record deals?
Caius Pawson, a friend and the founder of the record label Immature Turks, who'd twice tried to sign Starlite as a scout for Forty, suggested the musician'southward fear of not making it had led him to avert situations where he could fail. "The closer he got to a partner who could realize his vision, the more he wanted to disappear," he said.
Blanco, who'd also tried and failed to forge a deal with Starlite, blamed his contrarian nature: "Francis is the kind of person where if there's ii hallways and you tell him to go down one of them, he'll back flip down the other one, exercise a dissever at the end, and and then look back at you lot and smile."
But the artist himself was working toward a simpler theory: "hubris." As a beau, he had thought that accepting help meant admitting weakness.
"I used to feel like if I did something on my own, and it went well, information technology would prove how valuable I was," he said.
Now he was recalculating, and because what he might gain by relinquishing control — if not to a tape company, then to the supporters around him who had been there all forth.
"The most painful role is times like this, because you're in the nighttime," he said. "Yous know there's something on the other side, but you don't know what it is."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/arts/music/francis-and-the-lights.html
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