STARSAILOR returns with Where The Wild Things Grow, their first album in six years, produced by Rick McNamara and set for release on 22nd March 2024. Today, they release the sublime title track, giving fans a long-anticipated taste of what’s to come.
“I wrote it in my old flat at night,” says Walsh of the title track, which has that slightly uneasy, otherworldliness reminiscent of those early Bowie or Pink Floyd recordings. “I could hear the pipes creaking. I was thinking of Maurice Sendak and Stanley Donwood’s Radiohead art. There’s an early Ed Harcourt song called ‘Beneath The Heart Of Darkness’ that’s an influence too. The brooding otherworldly darkness.”
Check out the video for ‘Where The Wild Things Grow’ – BELOW:
Formed in and around Wigan at the start of the millennium and featuring James Walsh (guitar, vocals), James Stelfox (bass), Barry Westhead (keyboards) and Ben Byrne (drums), Starsailor have released five albums to date, including Love Is Here in 2001, Silence Is Easy in 2003, On The Outside in 2005, All The Plans in 2009 and All This Life in 2017. A greatest hits compilation entitled Good Souls: The Greatest Hits surfaced in 2015, featuring all ten of their UK Top Forty singles to date, including their biggest hit, “Silence Is Easy”, which reached No.9 in 2003.
Produced by Steve Osborne and recorded at Rockfield Studios, 2001’s Love Is Here, in particular, was a breakthrough release for the band – it’s sold over a million copies – peaking at No.2 in the UK. Contemporaneously affiliated with the New Acoustic Movement and ever-present entities like Coldplay and Travis, Starsailor proved to be much more than the sum of their parts. However, a fact picked up on by insightful commentators at the time, the Guardian heralded the band’s debut as “an intricately produced tempest of a record,” while the NME noted, “an edge that pushes them way beyond the feathery, big-eyed, hatchling indie of Coldplay.”
When Starsailor reconvened to Los Angeles to record their second album, success surely beckoned – except success sometimes arrives with a caveat in the form of Phil Spector. “I feel uneasy revisiting that chapter given the tragic events,” says Walsh. “It was a huge honour to work with him at the time but it feels different now.” Spector first heard of Starsailor after his daughter Nicole saw them playing live in the US in late 2002, then fell in love with the band’s “Lullaby” single before agreeing to produce their new record.
It was an uneasy alliance. “Working with him was a tale of two halves,” says Walsh now. “The first sessions we did were great, and we got ’Silence Is Easy’ and ‘White Dove’ out of them which still stand up. When we reconvened, it became more difficult to work with him. It was a stressful time for the band because we really wanted it to work at the time given the pressure on the second album and the hype around a Spector-produced album.” After an aborted stint with Spector at Abbey Road, the band ended up co-producing the rest of the album with Danton Supple and John Leckie, although the title track – one of the two surviving Spector-produced tracks – would go on to be a Top Ten hit in the UK in September 2003.
Where The Wild Things Grow – the album – features additional guitar work by Tony “Doggen” Foster from Rick McNamara and Travis’s Andy Dunlop, as well as backing vocals by Lucy Joules (Sam Smith). Rick, himself, who produced the album, is now unofficially ‘the fifth Starsailor’, or, as Walsh puts it, “another creative in the room who really cares about the songs and pushes us to our limits.”
Over the past two decades, Starsailor has been compared to everyone from Neil Young and Van Morrison to Wigan compatriots, The Verve – Walsh cites the latter’s homecoming show in front of 33,000 people at Haigh Hall on 24th May 1998 as a revelatory experience – although, concurrently, perhaps we should add Tim and Jeff Buckley, as well as Arcade Fire to that increasingly debatable list. Whatever your pronouncements on the matter, one thing’s for sure: Where The Wild Things Grow bears up to candid analysis, repeat listens, proving it to reveal layer upon layer of casual observations and quiet reflections on life being loved and love being lived. It’s also an album that has no right to be as good as it is – and yet here it is.
“In spite of all that we achieved back in the day, the feeling of being the underdog has never quite left me. I’ve changed a lot as a person since the early days of Starsailor. I feel much more grounded and have a better perspective on things.” – James Walsh
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