New music is out now from local progressive metal band StarChaser.
WFYI's Adam Gross sat down with lead singer, guitarist and songwriter Kara Tucker to talk about her new music and being a female in a traditionally male-dominated genre.
This interview has been edited for style and clarity.
Adam Gross: You just released the final installment of your new album, "Tsars of the Universe." It's an epic album released in three parts, each with an accompanying CD and book. I have the book for the third installment, so I was missing parts one and two.
Kara Tucker: What is going on? [laughs]
Gross: But I really enjoyed it. I mean, it's written like a novel or a short story, it was impressive.
Tucker: Thank you. I don't really think of myself as being a writer, I guess. So, when I started Star Chaser, I needed to rebuild myself, coming from another band, and I knew that I wanted to shift, not just visually, but also sonically.
I knew that I was gonna start trying to do something more in the metal vein of things, and I had no content. I was like, what am I gonna, what am I gonna do?
And I started designing stage costumes for myself, and coming up with the inspiration for that. I was like, I should just write for myself a character. So I started writing a story.
As I started writing that character, I was like, I think we're just gonna do a graphic novel, so that's how that happened.
Gross: So that other band you referenced, that was Elliot Bigger, you did a small studio session with that band here, and that band was metal adjacent, but it was still kind of rooted in pop, I guess, structure.
Tucker: Indie rock, especially the first album, which had good stuff about it, but it was very indie rock, it had some odd time signatures, but you could hear the Rush in it, and Foals in it.
You could hear more rock, and then the second album, "Space Ocean," that definitely had more progressive metal, right, and that's where I started shifting.
Gross: So back to the books for a minute, the images in the books you drew those also. What comes first, the music, the story, the art?
Tucker: I would write a song, and then the lyrics would happen, and be like, ‘Well, that doesn't fit the story’. Go back and, like rewrite the story or rewrite lyrics, which happened for a couple songs.
Gross: So the music on the album, I think it's really beautiful. It's certainly metal, there's no doubt about that. It's shreddy, it's chuggy at times, but it's also really complex stuff. There's breaks where it gets really pretty and kind of ambient, dreamy, and then it comes back to the metal at times. How much time do you take learning these parts?
Tucker: Usually, what it is like, I have this one idea, and it could be anything from like this is the part or this is what I want the solo to sound like, and I'll write a song around that, but what ends up happening by the time I'm done recording all of the parts, I'll have to go back and relearn it, basically.
Gross: So you're a woman playing lead guitar and singing in a metal band, typically you think of metal as a genre that's primarily dominated by men.
Tucker: It's changing, historically, I suppose, but yeah, it's changing.
Gross: How do you navigate it, and has it brought up challenges?
Tucker: Yes, this is so cheesy to say, but it does matter to see people that look like you doing something that you want to do.
Actually, I can tell you the very first band I played in in high school, I think I was like 15, probably when I started playing in that band, and I played keyboards, flute, and guitar in that band, and it had not occurred to me that that would be a thing that people would notice.
We played this all ages show, and we get done, and this dude says to me, ‘you sure play pretty good for a girl’, and I'll never forget that. That was like being branded, but as you get older, you do start seeing people, because there are a lot of ladies out there in the metal world that are tearing it up.
Then you just hit a point where, this is my music, this is my band, you know.
Yeah, I can't change you, you can't change me, and maybe that's just partially age, but what also helps is the youth are changing. It's a lot different now than it was when we were coming up, which is like a really good thing.
