Colonel Starr’s Relentless Storytelling

From Concord, Massachusetts, Colonel Starr is stirring up the music scene in the city through their raw storytelling. Whether you’re at a house show listening to Rio D scream at the top of his lungs to a packed crowd or enjoying their softer tunes on a sunny day in Boston Common, people are greeted with intricate stories and more passionate storytellers.

With Teddy Beamer on guitar, piano and backup vocals, and Alicia (E) Benavides on bass and backup vocals, the band feels more complete than ever.

Frontrunner met with Colonel Starr in Boston Common during the first spring days of this year to talk about their journey, their drive and more. 

Where did that passion for storytelling come from?

Rio D: As long as I can remember, the music that drew me in the most was music focused on human character. When I was really young, my dad introduced me to Silvio [Rodriguez], ike the early kind of Cuban music, and half of it is about heartbreak, and the other half is about revolution. That early stuff for me was the first time I was like, “these stories have threads, like, these are the kind of songs with ideology.” After that, I got really into this band called The Mountain Goats, and they have this record called “All Hail West Texas” and it’s really just poetry of a bunch of people that live in Texas at a similar time and I remember thinking like, “well, what is the point of music if not to have a narrative?” If not to point to things that exist in the world and characters that do things and the complex nature of human relationships like that. That’s where that passion came from for me. Then all of us together, just sharing tons of music back and forth, and life experiences.

E: I like how we’re making that because all three of our families aren’t from this country. I think it’s something really special to bring the very historical, very powerful influence of Latino music in the storytelling, in the vulnerability, in the lyricism. It creates a world in your head where you can feel everything that these people have felt, and no matter what they say, you feel it’s as if it’s your own. Rio’s an incredible translator of the human experience into song and. It’s really something special to be able to write in an American fashion, but to be able to carry a cultural perspective on each of our individual cultures and individual experiences; experiences as first or second generation Americans as well. That’s the thing that connects us all. we’re living and learning as the youth does.

What kind of music or artists have influenced you or inspired you in any way?

Rio D:  I’m really into public radio. I really like the storytelling  [of] people going to forgotten American towns and forgotten places in the world and having conversations with people. I really love Ira Glass, This American Life, the Moth Radio Hour. One of the things that I think is so great about these little radio snippets is the economy of storytelling. I mean, they have 25 minutes to create a compelling story that makes you feel something and leaves you a little bit uneasy, and a song is that, but dissolved.  I make movies, so I really love French—not even the new wave— like, after that. There’s this filmmaker called Eric Rohmer. His movies are just of beautiful people in beautiful places, talking about how there are no beautiful souls, and there are no beautifully good people, where it’s just people making a series of decisions, and ending up in places where the water is always kind of muddy and everyone’s kind of frightened.

E: I personally am inspired by a lot of writing in literature as well as my own. It’s always been a part of my life, and I come to Rio a lot with poems and experiences and  lines that I like; that pertain to my experience, or just things I notice in life, and then I’ll make a story around it. like I know “Airplane Song” we sat down and wrote that song in two hours one night because [Rio} was telling me that he wanted that narrative storytelling, and I presented the subject I have, like a friend who really likes taking photos of airplanes, and then I took that concept, and wrote a line in my journal that said something along the lines of “Airplane watcher, why are you so obsessed with people coming and leaving?” 

I also, recently, am into physical art as well. One time I was feeling quite overwhelmed, and I wanted to produce something physical but I didn’t really have any medium at my disposal. I’m into photography and all that as well, but I really enjoyed making physical art for a lot of my childhood, and I ended up throwing water on my wall and photographing it. And while in moments that I deemed beautiful, and I think that stands true for a lot of photography. What moments do I want to keep from this instance where things are constantly changing, and what do I deem is beautiful? Beautiful enough? And what do I want to frame, not only in photograph, but in my memory? To remember a moment by, to remember a person by, to remember a situation, or anything along those lines by, it’s like specific moments, and I attached that way of thinking into the airplane photography, and then we wrote a song about, a father who was conflicted about his relationship and the emotional turmoil that that creates In him and his actions and the people around him, how he views them, and how that affects him, his actions and then we like tied that to a theme of like travel and airplanes. And there’s just a lot of moments like that.

Rio D: it’s just kind of about filling a world with characters. Hopefully, by the time this band is through, and however long that is..

E: Never! When we die!

Rio D: When we die!  There’ll be a whole world of characters that are friends, maybe, and they’ll all be hanging out at the Cowboy Community Center, which is the mythical place they hang out.

What is the Cowboy Community Center?

Rio D: The Cowboy Community Center is like a YMCA, but it’s like the last saloon in the West, but it’s a YMCA. Now the West is being filled with Eisenhower’s highways and the American highway system. So, the last bastion of things that makes sense in the cowboy world.They all ride their horses in the Cowboy Community Center. That’s where they chop up their stories of Old; the things still make sense for them. That’s all it is, some weirdos who miss the old days.

Where did the story for Marcy’s Kid come from?

Rio D: I was having one of those moments where, and I think everyone, especially every young person, has felt this, probably pretty recently, where you just kind of feel like you’re a passenger in your life, and you’re just kind of watching everything go by, kind of complacent. Marcy’s kid was this guy who’s a voyeur in his own life in a little town, doesn’t really want anything. You got everything, you can’t fail, so you’re comfortable, so you don’t want anything. He’s kind of defined by his mother.

That’s kind of what it was, just a way for me to think about that thing that we all feel. Like man, maybe I’m not doing enough  as a person, and I’m just kind of gonna grow old and be stacked in place and just never do anything. That’s the thing I was trying to emote because you probably know a Marcy’s kid? You’ve been that, there’s someone at your high school now who never left your town.

Teddy:  Before I ever played with Rio, or before we played live, I heard that song, and I was like, Oh my God I want to make a music video for this. To me, Marcy’s kid, he’s a high schooler, and he’s on a baseball team, and he’s going up to bat. He’s last at bat, there’s nothing really going for him. He’s kind of a wimp, he’s not athletic, and his mom is watching him from the stands. You know, she has sunglasses on, she’s super prim and posed, and [put] together. She’s not the most interested in the game or in her son either, and the enemy team wants him to lose so bad, and his team doesn’t believe in him either. You don’t know if he wins his baseball game or not, but that’s who Marcy’s kid is. It’s that person who somehow found himself in this position to be up at bat. He has to hit a baseball, he has to perform. He has something to do, and you don’t know if he’s ever able to actually do it, and you know that not everyone else is there really for him to see him do it.

So if anybody wants to make that music video, I made a storybook for it. I never made it, though. So we should say if someone wants to make that, please hit us up and come be the cinematographer for this music video!

What does music do for you?

Teddy:  Music is a way that we can translate these emotions that we feel, that we process in our own heads, into ways that other people can understand the way we feel about them. There’s this really deep sense of irony that I think is expressed across our music; this really deep, I think, unknowing, but also kind of pointing out this kind of hypocrisy or loneliness, or just the ubiquity of the human condition. I think that’s what all art does; It’s one person’s perspective, and how you can translate that into a form that other people can understand, your own understanding, or your own your own meaning, into whatever they’re seeing.On a very base level, that’s what art does for us. It’s a way for us to spend time with each other in a way, and to create and to get to know each other better, and I think even more powerful that we can all witness these things and process them and create art out of them, and we all understand that within each other. It creates deeper bonds among us as human beings, even deeper than just as friends. 

Rio D:  (sarcastically, slipping into a tight red “Mr. Rogers” cardigan) Music is a money making thing for me! That’s why I do it. Just for the money, the women, the drugs! That’s why I keep writing sad songs. 

Music is just my best friend. It’s always been a dream to write songs. One day I decided I was just gonna write songs and for some reason, like that is my purpose. For us, it keeps us going. There’s a testament to that, that I existed on this earth, I felt these things and I did these things, and it’s mine. It’s just the tradition and the way that you got to the point where you did, the reason we all started playing instruments.

At the end of the day, I’m so happy I’ve met all these people because it’s inherently a really lonely thing, and it’s a lot less lonely when you have people that are like, I know you had to be lonely enough to get—

Teddy: (laughing) To be friends with you.

Rio D: Okay, all right. I should be kind one second, I invite you to my neighborhood, and here you are.

E: If you know me, all I ever say is music saved my life. And that is 100% true. Music came in and gave me a purpose. What I thought was temporary became an unmovable force in my life, and it created a connection to a world that I could not imagine living without, in the sense that it has connected me with so many people that see the world in a similar way that I d and I thought was something that was inherently wrong with me for so long, until I discovered this entire world of people and minds and creation and language, I think it serves incredibly well as a language, apart from having things recorded and having things out there, it’s the act of simply playing with other people. I have always been a very introverted person; very reserved and shy was in all my teacher’s notes in elementary school, middle school, high school. Music just served as a language where I didn’t have to speak to feel close to other people. I feel like I speak in some sort of language that is hard for me to translate to others that don’t know me or don’t connect with me on an incredibly deep level that comes with all the ups and downs of like, any sort of relationship. There’s been very few people in my life that have been able to connect to in that way, and who I feel that truly understand me, regardless of what I say, and the people that I play music with, I feel like are either there or they see that through the way we just play with each other. And it’s not necessarily when we make great things like a song or an album or whatever, but also just in the act of playing together, it is a savior for me in that way.

Colonel Star will have many shows lined up and an album coming out this summer. They’ve also announced a single and four EPs that will come out soon.