From Starlight – Thanks for Asking!

From Starlight – Thanks for Asking! – by Liam Sweeny.

RRX: What was the very first reaction to your music, from the first person to ever hear so much as a practice jam or the demo of your first song?

FS: I remember sending out a few demos and the response was complete shock. It was too good to be us. We got comments on social media how we sound like The Juliana Theory, Angels and Airwaves, and Jimmy Eat World. That’s great company to be compared with.

Yet, there’s also a lot of confusion. I think we’re closer to the pop-punk, power pop, or alternative style of the late 90’s and early 2000s but with added textures and sound effects from other inspirations like Pink Floyd. That throws people off a bit who like the genre, but to us music has always been about the collective finished work. The albums I love the most have all of these little details you can keep discovering years later. I feel that’s part of what we do as well, but it doesn’t always fit with the DIY, bedroom recording, get it out there in a raw state that the scene is really responding to. We’re often told by indie musicians that we sound “too good” on the record. I’ve been on a lifelong journey to make the most sonically beautiful recordings I can so it should come as no surprise that my own work does sound like it came out of a major studio.

RRX: “The best laid plans of mice and men…” I don’t really know the quote, but I know this one; sh*t happens. When we least expect it, calamity befalls us. Sometimes just comic inconvenience. Please tell us a story about some comic inconvenience that happened to you whilst performing?

FS: I am thinking about the show we’re playing tonight (July 25 at VFW 420 in Saratoga). That show was first at the El Dorado in Troy, but they had a fire. We moved it to a 2^nd location, printed flyers, posted on socials, but it fell through for other reasons. We salvaged the show by finding an open VFW Hall. Then we collected as much PA gear from everyone we knew to build a sound system with lights to put on the show. The only problem is when you change venues 2 times and move cities it’s tough to keep momentum going to get people there.

RRX: My singer punched my drummer out. Memorable moment, though nothing to brag about. But we have these things that, when summing up your endeavor, an incident comes to mind. What do you got?

FS:We played at the Silhouette in Allston, MA and it’s a legendary underground venue in the Boston area. We’re from out of town and the headliner goes on first, plays for 90 mins. The next local plays the longest set I’ve ever seen. They were pushing past curfew and we had to negotiate with another local band to get time on stage. We had 4 songs, but when we hit our first chord that place filled up so fast it was unbelievable. The timing was perfect because down the street at Fenway Park a massive Fallout Boy show ended and we got spill over crowd. We felt screwed by the bands that went on early and stuck us at the end, but we had a lively crowd for our set.

RRX: We have to play somewhere, and sometimes those places have more going for them than a stage and a power outlet. What is a memorable place you played, and bonus points if it’s not a well-known place.

FS: From Starlight hasn’t played a ton of shows, but in one of my previous bands we got to play CBGBs in NYC. It was everything you’d thought it would be and it was legendary. You feel like you’ve done okay when you land a show like that. The Social in Orlando, FL and the Cat’s Cradle in NC are other standouts.

RRX: Playing out is tricky because you never know what’s going to happen when you get there. Sometimes everything goes wrong. What was your worst show like?

FS: Hearing yourself is always critical for our band because we’re largely syncopated and we have 3 part harmonies we perform live. When one of the vocalists can’t hear things can get bad fast. We had that happen at a show last year where the harmonies got waaaay off track and killed the vibe. In particular there’s a slower song (only available on the CD version of Stars and Satellites out July 25, 2025) we play where the main driver are the vocal harmonies. We stopped playing it unless we have full control over the sound. We invested in 2 different monitoring systems that are flexible enough for any club and this has helped prevent this issue from happening again.

RRX: Would you rather have one of your songs blow up and make you a one-hit wonder and household name, or would you rather have all your songs be solidly received, but no chart-climbers? (You have to pick one or the other here.)

FS: Look at bands like Violent Femmes, Fountains of Wayne, or Jimmy Eat World – whose collective catalogs we love, but go see them at a show and they have one song that pops off. We saw Jimmy Eat World open for Fallout Boy last year and the crowd was dead. They closed with the Middle and the arena erupted. You can’t overstate how massive that song is. It came out in 2001 but every person sang every word of that song. You can tour forever on that one hit and if the goal is to always have an audience then we’re okay only writing one good song.

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