By Dylan Welsh
A few weeks ago, I did a piece on composer/producer Christopher Tyng and his new endeavor, The Grow Music Project. The goal with Grow is to take artists with strong potential to succeed, and give them an extra helping hand by flying them to Chris’ studio for three days to fully record and produce a single, all for free.
One of the artists that had Chris excited more than any other was New York-based group Star and the Sea. They were one of the first artists to participate in the project, and their song “Captain and the Map” is the first that has been put out by the Grow team. I had a chat with songwriter and bandleader Dominique Star about the band, the single, and her experience with Chris and The Grow Music Project.
Berklee Groove: Tell me about how Star and the Sea came to be.
Dominique Star: I started Star and the Sea last year, in January. Ultimately it’s a solo project because I write all of the music and words, but I worked at Columbia and I knew a lot of musicians so everyone in my band was somebody I was friends with beforehand from Columbia. I just asked them to play out with me and I sent a few crappy homemade demos to some local venues in New York and got some dates there, so we started playing out around the Lower East Side. Songwriting was relatively new for me at the time, I had just started maybe a half year earlier, so from there I’ve just been refining my songwriting technique.
BG: Have you been in any other bands?
DS: This is definitely the first thing I’ve been in where I am the leader. I played keyboard in a band before and I used to do a lot of covers, just going to open mikes, but nothing where my creativity was central.
BG: Where was the project at prior to the Grow Project?
DS: We were still at a point where pretty much only my friends knew me. What I sent over to the Grow music people were those laptop demos and I definitely had not really recorded at all just because it’s so expensive and doing it all on my own is not really feasible at this point.
BG: How did you get involved with the Grow Project?
DS: I think I saw an ad in the Deli magazine, which is a music magazine/blog. I went to the website and checked it out. It seemed really really cool and like an interesting and new idea, so I applied right then.
BG: How did you feel when you heard that you had been chosen?
DS: It was amazing! I remember getting the call from Chis and we had a really long conversation about his ideas for the song, because the demo I gave him was just an acoustic guitar and vocal track. He had a lot of ideas about the instrumentation and the theme behind it. It was really exciting to hear his perspective on it and when we had the conversation, I knew it was going to be something special.
BG: What was the experience like?
DS: It was unbelievable. I had never been to Santa Barbra before and was also really nature sick. Even though I live in Brooklyn and I love New York, I need nature sometimes. I remember when Ryan picked us up and we were driving out to the studio and it’s unbelievably gorgeous. When we got there, it was working non-stop, but it was incredible. It was so much fun. I was still a really laid back atmosphere even though we were tracking for like ten hours at a time. We’d have breaks for lunch and dinner and Chris’ wife would make awesome food. It felt like just hanging out with your friends, but also working in a beautiful environment. It was the perfect combination of work and vacation.
BG: How did you decide which song to record?
DS: Well, Chris felt really strongly about “Captain and the Map” as opposed to some of the others, because he thought that it had the greatest potential for reaching a wide audience, and he already had a lot of ideas for it. We had actually talked at one point about doing other songs and I definitely want to go back there at some point and maybe just record and write stuff on my own, separately from the Grow Music Project, based on the experience.
BG: Has your involvement in Grow led to any exciting opportunities so far?
DS: It’s still pretty early. We just released the single a few weeks ago, so no opportunities yet, but it’s been really fun to finally get to hear our single because playing out for a year now and to not have anything to give people has been frustrating.
BG: What’s next for you?
DS: I’m a super goal oriented person; if I don’t have a goal, I go sort of crazy. I’m going to South by Southwest this year but it’s mostly just to see my friends’ bands and to meet new people and network. I’m going to be writing a lot this year and basically just focusing on getting enough material together for a really well-rounded album.
BG: Would you want to go back to Chris’ studio to record the album?
DS: Maybe! I hadn’t thought of that, but I definitely plan on going back to do some writing and record some demos.
BG: Ultimate goals as of now?
DS: I have always known that I wanted to do music and that I wanted to do it full time after I went to school. For me, I just want it to be something sustainable that I can do all the time because nothing makes me happier or feel more fulfilled than music. So I just want to be able to afford to eat and pay my rent.
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Check out the first episode of the Grow Music Project’s “Session Diaries,” featuring Star and the Sea
