Artist Profile: Star Moles
Star Moles, the fantasy-driven singer-songwriter from New Hampshire, has always opted for the conceptual, the pure, and the melodramatic, and, with the upcoming release of Snack Monster, her second studio album recorded with Philadelphia guru Kevin Basko, she has taken this potent combination to new heights, amping up her instrumentation and deepening her conceptual spirit.
Growing up, Star Moles was trained vocally through her involvement in choir and theater: activities that shaped her voice and also her performative roots. Surrounded by her parents’ tastes of classic rock, she grew up under the influence of groups like The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and The Rolling Stones.
Yet, by the time she got to high school, she had discovered Pandora Radio, a music discovery app that preceded modern streaming, and, through the platform’s nascent algorithm, her own taste began to blossom. Over time, she fell in love with groups like MGMT, Arcade Fire, and Vampire Weekend, ultimately feeling compelled to try her hand at her own songwriting.
She began by attempting to re-record her favorite songs onto the memory bank of her digital keyboard, toying with chord progressions and song structure and, in the process, grinding through the initial difficulties of music theory.
Then, when she took a gap year prior to beginning college, she made her first concerted attempts at song-writing: a process that she details as a long period of trial-and-error.
“During that year, I would work and then I would just come home and not sleep and work on building songs in my parents' basement. And [I did that] over and over and over again until something clicked. I feel like it's a lot of imitation; you just imitate and imitate until you have something that weirdly sounds like your own. You imitate people, but, when you try and recreate something, it's never actually quite [like the original].”
Eventually, Star Moles found a sound that she could claim as her own: one rooted partially in pop and indie-inspired songwriting and partially in the off-kilter, folk-influenced instrumentation of her favorite self-recorded artists.
After uploading multiple singles and EPs to Bandcamp, she was given the opportunity to work with famed indie artist and record producer Kevin Basko, and from their work together Camelot, her first studio album, was born.
Basko introduced an analog zeitgeist to Star Moles’s songwriting and sound, one which helped transform her approach to recording into an unavoidably honest and transparent process.
“When you're recording to tape or to cassette,... you can't do too many takes. Whereas in the computer, you have infinite ability to track, with tape and cassette, it literally gets worn down, like and starts to degrade. So it was this whole thing of capturing the performance with the right energy… It's also a really good mentality to have for recording in general,letting the performance be what it is. Not overthinking it and not being too self conscious of… because, most of the time, what you have is a really natural, honest performance that people will like more than something that's really over-processed.”
Now, with the release of her new single “Fate”, Star Moles has begun the roll-out for Snack Monster, an album which explores the oddities and strange truths found in the 15th century treatise “Rules of Courtly Love”. Through Star Moles’s inspired vocals, medieval commentaries on love and romance are transformed into melodic, modern love songs, taking root in a strange, and surprising, connection between the two periods of history.
A project over three years in the making, Star Moles’s next addition to her discography, insofar as it encapsulates and enhances the motifs that have formulated her sound to this point, is certain to be another step forward for the young artist.
