Staying Up Late with Stargazer Lily - P.A.W. Print

A week passed since the night this Lily bloomed for me at NXNW and I sat in the living room of bassist Jim Miades' Manayunk home admiring the dark brown hardwood floors imagining them as the nurturing soil.


photo, SGL

I spoke to Miades and the rest of the four-person lineup about choosing a career in music, and Miades' subsequent choice to sell many of his possessions, mostly vintage bass guitars, on e-Bay.

We discussed the benefits of the online auction house when his dogs barked to announce the arrival of the bands' vocalist pairing of Hayes and Rosetti. Hayes entered the house carrying a case of Budweiser pounders and beaming a smile.

Rosetti entered next, passing through the unlit dining room and into the glow of the living room, where I was seated across from two Ansel Adams posters- talk about natural beauty. We chatted and waited for the fourth member of the band, Scooter. Once everyone arrived, a round of cans hissed.

On May 14, the band took the stage at North by Northwest in Germantown, worked out some sound problems, and burst into the energetic and catchy Middle America, the first song on their 2002 release The Lift and the Drag. Last October, Stargazer Lily returned to Studio 4 to record their upcoming album, again working with Grammy-winner, Phil Nicolo.

"Our original intention was to go into the studio and record it and just put it out, but we weren't happy with it," said Stephanie Hayes, who added, "We weren't feeling it completely, so then we went back and starting picking out the songs that we liked and throwing to the side the stuff that sucked."

Since October, Stargazer returned to the studio several times to rework and fine tune the new album.

Stargazer Lily may have some difficulty getting an album together because they work with so many types of music. During a set, you'll hear light acoustic songs, heavy rock songs, harmonicas accompanying country songs and even some beat box (yeah, beat box). There is no single word to define the type of music Stargazer plays.

"I think for most bands, they form out of some sort of unified thought about, it's going to be this type of band," said Hayes, who continued, "I think we've actually succeeded in creating something that sounds just like us."

Hayes has a strong country/folk bent and Rosetti creates what she calls "pop songs." Jim Miades plays a funky bass in the tradition of local music legend Jaco Pastorious and Scooter grew up playing in the jazz band before matriculating to Temple University's Jazz Studies program.

"We're too rock for folk festivals, but we're too folk for Y100," Hayes said. "When rock and roll was younger, it used to be something very complimentary to say about a band to say, 'They have their own sound,' where now it's more like, 'You have your own sound, what the fuck are we supposed to do with that'?"

It seems what you're supposed to do with that is play as much as possible. On June 5 in Elmer, New Jersey, at the Appel Farm Arts and Music Festival, Stargazer played with Ani DiFranco and Shawn Colvin, among others. On June 11, they returned to Philly's North Star Bar with Sexambulance and The So and So's with one more show in the Philadelphia area on June 18 at Triumph Brewing Company in New Hope, before bringing their folk rock sound to The Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 25.

For more information about Stargazer Lily, visit www.stargazer-lily.com. For upcoming events and details about North by Northwest, visit www.nxnwphl.com.