STARLA STARSHINE

THE EARTH SAYS HELLO TO THE SOCAL BASED SINGER-SONGWRITER AND MENTAL HEALTH ACTIVIST – A BOHEMIAN FLOWER CHILD IN LEATHER, WHOSE DANCEY-TRANCEY DEBUT EP ‘RED LAGOON’ SOUNDS LIKE JIM MORRISON MAKING LOVE TO A HOT GIRL FROM PORTUGAL

It’s time for the earth to say hello to Starla Starshine, an emerging singer, songwriter, mental health activist and former rock and roller whose music is trippy modern indie dancey-trancey but whose lyrics are pure bohemian poetry from someone who wants to love you on a level like no person could ever.

Her music, which she introduces in gripping, soul-transforming fashion on her edgy but otherworldly three-track debut EP Red Lagoon, sounds a bit like what might happen if the brooding Jim Morrison was making love to a hot girl in Portugal. “Red Lagoon is my sound, my vibe, my child, what my soul would sound like,” she says. “When you listen to these three songs, you’ll know my aura, and who I am.”

In Review: Red Lagoon is a hypnotic and provoking track, trance and transcending, with lyrical content that seem to be the musings of a love drenched and spiritually vibrant being. A love song from beyond this plane drawing you deeper into the looking glass, it is a major accomplishment in music and lyrically sublime.

Starla may be from Orange County, California, but she’s more like a time traveler, an anachronism from the hippie era whose punkish edges and teenage years as a rocker make her music sound as much the future as the past.

Starla wrote her first song at 13 for John Lennon, her first muse, her first love, the “first time I ever felt butterflies,” and “my rock and roll Jesus throughout.” She identified most with men who were loud, misunderstood, raw and intensely alive, a la Lennon and Bob Dylan. These legends helped her find her true soul, which she likens to a poet boy filled with rage and love, both extremes always competing for the light. Though a flower child at heart, she’s never worn a flowered dress. She’s forever the Bohemian clad in leather, fishnets and thigh high boots.

The music was stirring in the artist who would become Starla Starshine long before adolescence. She would listen and day dream about being on stage and what she would be wearing. “My little soul was filled with visuals that turned out to be prophecies that came true,” she says. She began writing lyrics borne of teen angst and the pain of youth at 13, and launched her first successful rock band, Rebel Heart, at 15. She attracted the interest of iconic DJ Rodney Bingenheimer, aka “The Mayor of Sunset Strip,” who played “War of Life” and other original tunes on legendary station KROQ. Her first record also did well in England and Japan. Then at the end of her teens, she took a breather. The music she was making wasn’t truly her. The music she’s making now in her 20’s totally is. The listener must be prepared to be mesmerized, hypnotized, seduced, sonically, lyrically, body and soul, every which way. She sings about love, the good, bad, ugly and groovy.

The three songs on Red Lagoon are the perfect gateway into this grounded yet surreal Starla Starshine experience. The infectious, playfully swinging “Bad Boys” is about falling for that person you crave even when the Universe tells you to brake and steer clear from that harmful idea of love. It’s real life – Starla falls frequently for dudes who look like Jesus but roll like Lucifer. The fuzzy trancey “Lover Man” takes the opposite approach, a fantasy fulfilled where she falls in love with a real man. The moody, murky and immersive “Red Lagoon” finds her losing herself and literally bleeding so that someone else doesn’t have to.” 

A passionate mental health advocate, Starla is putting the finishing touches on a book called “Emotional Overdose,” a semi-autobiographical book which reveals her deeper, more vulnerable story and the ultimate source of her life’s hard-won truths. “I’ll go to Congress with my book and ideas,” she says. “It all comes down to one simple thing. Listen to the children, talk to the children, love your children and do not hate or resent them when they are individuals and not just clones of yourself. If we all listened to the thoughts and hearts of kids, we would be better human beings. They’ve got all the right answers and we need to stop programming them to not feel as they authentically do.”  

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