October 28-November 3, 2004

music

Aim High

Things are looking up for Stargazer Lily, Inc.

by John Vettese

Of the four members of Stargazer Lily, bassist Jim Miades easily makes the most convincing yuppie. At a photo shoot this summer, the typically laid-back band donned stuffy business couture as a tie-in to its latest record, Young Professionals. In resulting shots, singer/guitarist Sue Rosetti came across casual in a suit jacket and white turtleneck. Steph Hayes, also a singer/guitarist, seemed downright punky in a vest, loose shirt and necktie, straddling the boardroom table with her electric axe. Drummer Scooter looked like, well, himself.

But Miades, who also went the semicasual route with a button-down striped shirt, somehow pulled off the look in spades by trimming his hair and goatee, doing the tie thing and wearing reflective sunglasses. All of a sudden, he looked like he should be closing accounts or firing subordinates, not playing bass in a loose Philly rock band.

"We thought about whether or not we should really go all out," Miades chuckles. "You know, wear the full suits and ties and everything. But then we realized we'd wind up looking like The Hives. So we went for something in the middle, something we could wear at a show."

Over a three-cheese panini and Thai salad lunch at The Point, the members of Stargazer Lily say there is a bit of contention as to whether the thrift-store corporate garb would actually become their stagewear. But for Hayes, the motif isn't a huge stretch.

"I've always worn ties," she snips.

Rosetti giggles, "She's just mad because Avril Lavigne stole her look."

Hayes figures it all goes back to Annie Hall. "But I'm pretty sure I started bringing it back around before Avril did."

It's true; you could spot her rockin' the tie at Stargazer's early Grape Street gigs in 2000, not long after the band had a real life run-in with the corporate world.

Rosetti and Hayes, who have been friends and songwriting partners for almost a decade, piqued the interest of Arista Records in 1999 with their upright-bass driven, folky pop band, Cory. But by the time they made it out to Los Angeles the following year for a six-month development deal, the group had dissolved and restructured into Stargazer Lily, and they found themselves working with "hit songwriters."

"Our attitude was pretty negative at the time," Rosetti says. "We thought a development deal meant you go and develop your good points, not you have other people write your songs for you."

She and Hayes agree the byproduct of working with professional Top-40 scribes like Billy Steinberg was essentially a string of Natalie Imbruglia-clone songs that "weren't really us, that didn't represent us as people."

"This was right around the time I joined the band, and our manager gave me all these songs, the co-write songs," Miades says. "Ugh, terrible. It was just cheesy, poppy, dumbed-down songs."

One song Steinberg wrote for the duo, "The Need To Be Naked," was recycled when Hayes and Rosetti vetoed it, later becoming something of a hit for German pop diva Amber. Miades says, "Tell him some of the lyrics."

All groan, and Rosetti, blushing, timidly recites a couple lines: "I feel the need to be naked with you / take off my pants, my shirt / my socks and my shoes."

Yeah, that's, um, pretty awful.

"Damn integrity getting in the way!" Hayes says.

Ultimately, they found out they had been dropped. The Stargazer record that came out of the L.A. days, That's Okay, I Can Sleep At Work, was essentially unusable since the label owned the recordings.

Looking for a fresh start, the band rerecorded the best moments from That's Okay, as well as a few Cory songs and some new ones, for 2002's The Lift And The Drag. This new album of mostly old material perplexed some of Stargazer's devotees, fantastic as it was, and the band admits it was a move they struggled with.

"Since Arista owned the recordings for the first album, we couldn't do anything with it," says Rosetti. "We wanted to put out a CD that was ours, that we owned, that we could sell."

Flash forward to 2004, and a record that was written in stages from the release of Lift through two bitterly cold February stays in Hayes' aunt's North Carolina beach house, spanning crushes, breakups and nightclubbing. Aside from the tongue-in-cheek indie-pop title cut, Young Professionals isn't exactly reactionary to the Arista experience as much as it is a composite of the songwriters' lives and experiences over that time.

The loopy beatbox-driven "Crush" details pizza boys and waitresses Rosetti finds herself infatuated with. More of the album, however, follows the longing "Kiss Me," with slow acoustic strums and pedal steel.

"It reached the point where it was pretty depressing," Rosetti says, and Hayes explains that when the initial six-week session at Conshohocken's Studio 4 concluded, they went back to re-record additional material, like the anthem "Stay True"—a riff on "Ziggy Stardust"—to add some spark to the otherwise deep and sensitive song set.

And despite the daunting encounter with the corporate musical world, Stargazer agrees it still has aspirations of getting signed and continues to shop around its self-released records. But, as Hayes confides, the band's spastic stylistic gamut has been a tough sell.

"It's one of our curse-and-blessing things," she says. "It's really cool that we have so much we incorporate but sometimes it becomes difficult to make an interesting record that still sounds like one band is playing. We've always sort of had trouble doing that."

Still, that's part of what makes Stargazer Lily one of Philadelphia's most fun and fascinating acts.

"We're a multiple-personality band, Rosetti says. "Today, modern rock. Tomorrow, folk."

Stargazer Lily plays Fri., Oct. 29, 8 p.m., $14, World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St., 215-222-1400.