For the last decade, many queer singer-songwriters have doubled down on laconic melancholy, so itâs pleasant to hear Garrison Starrâs new album, Girl I Used to Be, has the ease of Dave Matthews or Sheryl Crow, but Starr is more open about her sexuality on this album than her previous work. At 45, she is older than a cluster of younger generation of performers (some queer, some writing about queerness) who are still working through experiences of gender, sexuality, and religion.
Listening to her new album, one can hear connections to work like Semlerâs âYouth Group,â a small, pointed folk song about discovering that you are queer after a youth group lock-in, or Stephanie Lambringâs lacerating attack against homophobia, âJoys of Jesus.â There are also echoes of the joyous call for selfhood in some of Katie Pruittâs best work. Starr has written with Pruitt, and âThe Devil in Meâ from Girl I Used to Be was at first intended for her.
âI was sure that would be a song for Katieâs upcoming record,â Starr tells BGS in an email interview. âBut she didnât take to it like I did, and truthfully, Iâm happy because I realize how much that song really is a biography of my experience and of my questions as well. I love the curiosity in it and the sense of breaking away from something that doesnât serve me anymore. Iâm not sure where I fit in with Christianity at this point and even if Iâm drawn to it, really. The hypocrisy and elitism, at least in the evangelical church, is repulsive to me, and though I think the story of Jesusâ love and redemption is the best thing about any of it, Iâm still searching. I believe in a power greater than myself that I choose to call God â thatâs all I really know.â
Lyrically there are places where Girl I Used to Be points to the woman she is now, while still drawing on the memories of her childhood in Mississippi, trying to fit in. This merging of past and present give Starr an authority which leads to a commitment to declarative sentences via a voice that is often plainer and clearer than younger queer performers. She is most declarative about issues of sexuality and geography, particularly on her best West Coast songs.
On âDowntown Hollywood,â Starr tells the story of a runaway that gradually shifts from third-person into first-person. She sings about how âthey were raising and they were failingâ and trying to âcash it all in.â It has a jab against kids with so much privilege that they didnât need to grow up, and thus, is a grown-up song, almost burnt out, almost jaded about a town Starr still claims to love.
âMy only advice to anybody is to find your authenticity, lean into it and never look back,â she says about her adopted hometown. âLos Angeles is a funny place⊠itâs changed so much and it hasnât changed at all. The homeless situation here is definitely worse since I came in the late â90s. Some of my favorite old haunts arenât there anymore, but new stuff has popped up in its place. The hustle, the funkiness, the freedom and the hills havenât changed, and thatâs really what made me fall in love with it in the first place.â
Starr grew up in the Deep South, spending some of her undergrad years at Ole Miss, where she was in a sorority. Feeling restricted in that environment, she moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s. Her major label debut, Eighteen Over Me, was released by Geffen in 1997, and the sudden attention was complex for this queer songwriter. She has mentioned in an interview with Mississippi Today that in her mid-1990s heyday she was told by handlers not to butch it up too much, to avoid the tomboy aesthetic.
Her subsequent career was as an independent touring artist and a successful jobbing musician. She has sung back up for Mary Chapin Carpenter, worked with Josh Joplin, covered the Indigo Girls, and ended up on the soundtrack to multiple television shows, including The Fosters and Greyâs Anatomy. In 2019, her song âBetter Day Cominââ was featured in a trailer for the Oscar-nominated Mister Rogers biopic, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. In addition, her production credits include Margaret Choâs Grammy-nominated comedy album, American Tragedy. âMargaret is one of the most generous and down to earth people on the planet. I am grateful to know her and have had the opportunity to work with her,â Starr says.
Girl I Used to Be builds upon all of this complex history, while at the same time, provides a way into the future.
âIâve spent a lot more time in my studio, working on production and mixing, and Iâve been able to continue to create content,â she says about the past year. âMy business hasnât been dependent on touring, thank god. I realized a while ago that if I want to make a living in this business, I gotta figure out how to diversify. So, I write a lot of songs with a lot of people, and I make sure some of them make it into TV and film so I can afford to be an artist for a living.â
Like many contemporary singer-songwriters, a paradox exists between the authority she shows in her music and the helplessness she felt about the political situation as she was writing the record. She says that the song âDam Thatâs Breakingâ is a response to the administration of the 45th president. He was, she says, âempowered and embraced by evangelicals, even though they knew it was wrong. Itâs definitely about religious hypocrisy as well as greed and power, cowardice, selfishness and everything else that makes you feel like the walls are closing in on you and you are powerless to stop it.â
What Starr has to say about long-won battles, about landscape, and about power, through the lens of knowing, has something to teach younger queer artists, and can be an example for a young artist striving to write with a strong sense of place, delicate emotion, and a talent for observation. For example, her song âTrain Thatâs Bound for Gloryâ is inspired by a remark by her late grandfather at his birthday party.
âHe loved to goof around and he loved to pick on you,â she says. âThey were singing him âHappy Birthday,â and he carried on about not being around for his next birthday and that it was âprobably gonna be my last birthday. ⊠He ended it with, âYep, I can hear the whistle on the train thatâs bound for glory, calling me home.â I knew of the Guthrie song, but I had honestly never heard it until after I wrote my version.â
As a whole, Girl I Used to Be answers the question of who the girl is now: a queer woman attempting to reconcile her history and her present. She embodies a queer desire to reinvent oneself in another space. You can have a career anywhere these days, and stories of the Midwest and the South have become central to new LGBTQIA stories â and so the exile motif in Starrâs work might be another kind of lived-in quality. Her experience shows that finding home does not mean exile.
One such example is âMake Peace With It,â among the albumâs most trenchant moments. Starr says, âWell, the lyric is, âIf Iâm ever gonna live this life, I gotta make peace with it.â I was thinking in that moment about how much I was struggling to hold onto blame for the rejection I experienced in the church, for the way I felt like my career wasnât working like I wanted it to, and name whatever else I felt victim to for a long time in my life. I finally got to a place, through what Iâm calling grace, and Iâll explain that in a second, where I realized Iâd rather be happy than be right. (Thank you, Alanon.).â
She concludes, âWhat I mean by grace is that there have been so many times in my life where I have been accepted, as I am, by people who truly love me, when Iâve been at my absolute worst. That is what I mean when I say grace. Grace is love, no matter what.â
Photo credit: Heather Holty-Newton