Castaway

“'Castaway' was a record born out of frustration”. Tashaki Miyaki’s Paige Stark says matter of factly. “I felt stuck in every single aspect of life, and writing was my way of venting”. The record opens with the title track, an unhurried melodic pop song about the challenges of depression and long term relationships. “Give me a reason to cry, it’s been so long since I had feeling, I don’t remember why I do anything, what am I doing here?”, Stark asks as she coos along to an infectious melody. The track is backed by lush, yet spare instrumentation managing to simultaneously recall Prince, Bryan Ferry and the Byrds as it tumbles into the chorus distilling the melancholic feeling, “I don’t want to be the one to love you, I’m no good at it, oh well, I guess that we are stuck together, like two castaways out at sea, you and me.”

In a recent interview, Stark told Nylon Magazine, “'Castaway' is about the challenges of romantic love and how we are all bad at it in one way or another. No matter how hard we try, at some point we are going to fail and hurt ourselves or our partners. For any relationship of any kind to work, there is a type of surrender to this notion. The idea of a castaway in all this is that no one understands the relationship except the people in it, so you really are stuck on an island alone together there, and maybe you make it back to the mainland, and maybe you stay on the island”. This theme reigns throughout the record. Stark laments the foibles of relationships and being alive. She sings with unapologetic directness in her voice of love, heartbreak, memory, time, and depression. Never falling into despair despite the heavy subject matter, she manages to find a sort of optimism the complexity of relationships.

On the gorgeous slow burner "Gone" she confidently tells her lover, “She won’t know the way to turn you on, you’re gonna miss me”. On the ballad “U” she tells us, “People are awful, good is hard to find, but I’m learning”. On the up tempo “Wasting Time” she sings “Wasting my time but I never give up”.
The tender “Baby Don’t” almost seems like a lullaby to herself as she whispers, “Don’t give up on me, I’m doing things you can’t see, it’s gonna get better, believe in me”. On “I Feel Fine” Stark sings, “I love you, but I can’t stand you”, bringing to mind the Replacement’s classic, “Unsatisfied”.

During the last stages of recording as the global pandemic descended, the band felt they needed one final track to really tie the project together. “I wrote 'I Feel Fine' at the beginning of Covid 19 unfolding and it felt like it belonged to the record. I said lot of the things my friends were saying to me about their lives, so it felt right to add it”. The trio got together at Joel Jerome’s East Los Angeles studio in the midst of a blistering mid summer heatwave and hammered out the track one sweltering August afternoon. “We knew this was the finishing touch”, says guitarist Luke Paquin. The remainder of the record was recorded pre covid at the North Hollywood studio of Grammy wining engineer Cassidy Turbin (Beck, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Bat for Lashes).

The sonics on "Castaway" explore the band’s broad musical tastes sailing beyond shoe gaze and dream pop, as they travel through their inspirations including the American Songbook, Sun Records, doo whoop, vocal groups from the 40's and 50's, “the 60’s and 70’s things everyone loves”, their hero 'Uncle Neil', punk, “everything in the 90’s”, and past and current hip hop. Stark channeled these multi genre influences into arrangements supported by the elegant string orchestrations of Paul Cartwright.

The record also features guest appearances by The Heartbreaker’s Benmont Tench, famed multi instrumentalist Jon Brion, who also aided in mixing the record, and local LA legend, and frequent Tashaki collaborator, Joel Jerome. The record is produced by Stark who guided the band to push themselves into new spaces. They did a deep dive into classic film scores and the music that originally inspired the trio of native Californians to create as kids, ranging from Portishead to Bob Dylan, Snoop Dogg to Brian Eno, Sam Cooke to Nick Cave. “We listened to everything we ever loved”, says bassist Sandi Denton. They tried to deconstruct their own sound and reboot from that place, while letting some beloved influences echo throughout. “We decided no wah wah pedal for most of the record”, Stark recently told Brooklyn Vegan, “We tried to incorporate new soundscapes. Like, what if there isn’t as much reverb on everything? What would be the less obvious sonic choice here? What if everything isn’t as fuzzy and smeary? What sounds have we not tried? What if we let stuff be a little naked? What does that sound like?”.

Stark also pushed her boundaries lyrically, going deeper and more personal, never shying away from uncomfortable emotions. “The title of the record comes from this thing a friend would say. He said called himself a ‘castaway from decent society’. I feel like a castaway from everything a lot of the time. When I wrote the title track, I was thinking about love and how it changes over time if you stay in something long enough. It gets hard. And sometimes you feel stuck, and that’s kind of the mood of the record. Being stuck with yourself or with your partner or with your habits or thoughts. Being stuck in your reality, in your life. It’s a pretty melancholy record, I guess. I always try to be direct, but I didn’t have as much life lived on the first record. I saw things very black and white, and perhaps simpler. Now I see a lot more grey and a lot more complexity. And I think this record goes into that grey area”.