Becky Stark on new Lavender Diamond music, debuts exclusive song

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A short list of what lives forever: Vampires. Werewolves. Cheetahs struck by lightning at midnight. The timeless pleasures of a perfectly ripe fruit. Oh, and Lavender Diamond.

Becky Stark, the band’s frontwoman with just a touch of darkness to her smiling beatitude, attested to as much the other day, sitting outside in the sunshine at Fix Cafe in Echo Park. ‘Lavender Diamond can’t end,’ she said, though there were a few years where even she doubted it. ‘It’s a resonance of love and love is eternal.’

Since 2007, when LD’s album ‘Imagine Our Love’ was released on Matador Records, Stark has kept busy with other projects, like the Living Sisters, her harmonic collaboration with Eleni Mandell and Inara George, and the L.A. Ladies Choir, an ever-shifting cast of women exploring melody and feminine power. ‘For a while,’ she said, ‘I had such a deep need to sing harmony with women. I didn’t want to hear my voice alone.’

But earlier this year, her needs changed and it was time to reassemble the sparkling eternals, including Ron Rege Jr., Steve Gregoropoulos and Jeffrey Rosenberg, who’d been out of touch with Stark for a while. The first spring night they played together again, they wrote something like six songs. It’s been a fruitful bounty ever since, with the band expecting to have a new album of songs out sometime in the fall.

The new songs, Stark said, take a range of identities -- some are dance songs, some are ‘super-operatic,’ some are spare, and some others still are wild country bumpkins. But they are all united by one experience: heartbreak. ‘These songs are really simply expressive of those feelings,’ Stark said. ‘I’m just letting it be that way without trying to create any resolution.’

Download:

Lavender Diamond’s ‘Waiting For’

Stark also pointed out that there is joy in the songs too. ‘There is humor in how outrageously irrational it is to love so strongly and create so passionately.’

In the meantime, in addition to Stark’s recent outings with fellow troubadours Tom Brosseau and John C. Reilly, you can catch Lavender Diamond this weekend playing a rare set at McCabe’s. Stark was kind enough to give one of the new songs, ‘Waiting For,’ to Pop & Hiss for downloading and singing-along purposes. It sounds like it should score the scene where Carole King holds hands with a heavenly sprite and they use a footbridge (the coolest kind of bridge) to cross over a raging sea into an imaginary world that’s sometimes good, sometimes evil. Yes, it’s that scene that’s now in your head too.

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-- Margaret Wappler

Lavender Diamond plays McCabe’s Guitar Shop, 3101 Pico Blvd. in Santa Monica, on Friday at 8 p.m. $15.