Kasha Souter Willett and Grace Rolek on Nostalgia, Authenticity, and Starling’s Latest Album
Emerging from the twilight shimmer of L.A.’s restless underground, Starling lays it to you soft and heavy.
Founded by singer‑guitarist Kasha Souter Willett in 2023, the four‑piece alt‑rock band boldly defies every sense of genre, blending raw vulnerability, layered textures, and cinematic tension into stirring, emotionally charged music.
With the addition of Grace Rolek (bass), Erik Sathrum Johnson (drums, mixing), and Gitai Vinshtok (lead guitar, vocals,) Starling officially solidified in May 2024. Their debut EP, 2324, released in September of the same year, captured nostalgic, grunge‑tinged reflections infused with a modern sense of irony and timeless poetic longing.
Continuing their DIY ethos — tracking in sheds, bedrooms, and sweltering garages — Starling’s new EP, Forgive Me, drops on June 27th via Sunday Drive Records.
Our publisher, Kristin Prim, spoke with Kasha and Grace ahead of the record’s release to discuss nostalgia, authenticity, and everything Starling.
KP: There’s this brooding, dreamlike quality to much of, if not all, of your music that is so tangible. It somehow drips with this feeling of yearning or nostalgia, which your bandmate, Erik [Johnson], had an interesting quote about. He said, “Making any piece of music that has to do with anything at all conceptually is nostalgia. It only ever is nostalgic.”
I thought about it, and that’s so true, which makes me wonder why we call any music “nostalgic” in particular. But there still is this undeniable sense of memory that’s tied to your catalog. I have my own ideas as to why, but I think your sound is so interesting and incredibly authentic, which is really what drew me to you initially.
But I want to ask you, since your opinions are really the only ones that matter. What do you think makes your music sound so desirous or yearning, and do any of those feelings actually come into play when you write? What role does the concept of nostalgia play for you in your songwriting or recording?
KSW: Thank you for the kind words; I feel understood. I think the reason is because, yes, those are the very feelings that come into play when writing and performing. That is often just my experience of existing — writing songs helps me cope and direct the strong feelings into something productive that’s hopefully helpful for someone else to hear. I remember that interview where Erik said that, but I can’t remember exactly what my response was. I thought it was kind of a silly thing for him to say initially, but then it seeped in — it definitely does relate to all of what Starling does. The best songs encapsulate a feeling into a few minutes that can be felt again and again upon listening. It is a way to prolong something fleeting and from the past — nostalgia.
GR: It’s all cyclical. I think that every time you listen to a song, you’re tapping into the feelings that the writer was feeling when they wrote it. And then, when you listen to a song over and over in a specific part of your life, it later reminds you of all the times you listened to that song in that part of your life. I think, as performers, we know that if people love our songs, that will be true for them. Music has a way of tying the past to the present. I think that’s true of all art.
KP: I think that definitely is true, too. It’s what gives it life.
Kasha, you initially founded the group, and Grace, you joined soon thereafter. For those who aren’t familiar, what are your personal backgrounds, and what led to the initial forming of the band? If you could accomplish one thing with the project, what would you hope for it to be?
GR: Kasha and I met back in 2016 and were friends for years before we started playing music together. Kasha knew that I had played bass in the past, but I hadn’t picked it up in years when she initially asked me to play bass for her. Kasha and I had gone to the same arts high school, and growing up I was always passionate about performing, whether it was with music or acting — which I’ve also done a fair amount of. I loved writing songs as a teenager but had kind of let that outlet of creativity fall by the wayside as I got older.
I don’t know if I have one specific goal through being part of Starling, but I think the goal of any piece of personal art is to connect with people and make them feel something.
KSW: I always wanted to be in a band in high school but never got the chance. In seclusion, I began teaching myself guitar and eventually production. I released some music as a solo artist, including our first single, “Fuss,” and a few pieces before that. I began to really crave the live aspect of music as an avid showgoer since the heyday of The Smell in high school. So I asked Grace and a friend of ours to play for me. We did a few shows, and then Gitai and Erik joined, both long-time friends of Grace and me since high school. Soon after, we decided that we wanted to go in the direction of making this a true collaborative band, since that’s where it was heading anyway. My mom was a vocal teacher growing up, and my dad loved playing guitar in his spare time, so I was lucky to have music be such an important part of my life since the beginning.
The one thing I want to accomplish with Starling is timelessness. I write from true experiences, aches, pains, and joys, and I hope for it to continue to be felt and understood by others as time goes on.
KP: And speaking of your writing, your last single off your upcoming album, “No Frown,” exists as your “entry into the slowness... marking one of [your] most reflective and memorable releases yet.” What was it that inspired its writing?
KSW: “No Frown” is simply, lyrically, a straightforward love song, country boy, city girl. But to any relationship there is an aspect of melancholy — the flow, the push, and the pull, which is felt in the instrumental of this song. I wrote this in a tuning that I hadn’t used before and haven’t used since — I honestly forget half the time what it is still.
Honestly, I do not agree with that quote. “No Frown” is something that I needed to get out, but I do not feel attached to it now. Some songs are like this, flowing in and out of relevancy to me after — and sometimes during — the process. But I felt it deeply for a time, and I hope that others can find that in it too.
KP: Your forthcoming EP, Forgive Me, is out on June 27th. Congratulations! What can you tell us about it? Do you each have a favorite track?
GR: My favorite track on Forgive Me is probably “My Love.” It was the first song that I wrote bass for in Starling, and it’s definitely a track that I’m really proud of. On the whole, I feel like the record is kind of the first glimpse of what all four of our creative influences come together to build. I love how much sonic variety there is in it from start to finish.
KSW: I love each track for different reasons; I really think that there is something special in feeling each of them while still carrying out a unified message at the end of it all. I played around a lot with the metrics and structures of these songs without really setting out to do so. I know very minimal theory and tend to just feel out what I think sounds best, and the boys will usually tell me that I did “x y z” in theory language once I bring the piece to the band. I really enjoy the strings that we added to a few of the tracks. We were a little bit nervous about how to execute that, how to really make it sound good with such a low DIY budget. It was new to us, except Gitai, who scared us by saying that he had done it before and it went horribly! Still, we all got together in my bedroom in Koreatown with a cellist and violinist and recorded the strings with two mics within maybe four hours. I do have to give credit to one of the boys here — the strings were Erik’s idea, and he played the biggest role in writing their parts.
KP: They’re so beautiful — I’m so happy you decided to take that direction.
I hate the question of influences because I find it so incredibly boring, but I can’t help but ask when you seem to blur the lines of as many genres as you do. So, who or what inspires you? And who do you wish to collaborate with in the future?
GR: I think one thing that’s really fun about Kasha and I is that we try to never really get caught up in discussing genre or “who we sound like.” I think that feeling free to just come up with whatever we think sounds good, regardless of what it might remind us of, is part of what makes us sound like Starling.
But so as not to avoid the question… I got most of my music taste from googling “cool hipster bands” in, like, 2009, and it’d be impossible to shake that influence off at this point. I’m really inspired by what the PC Music movement did for pop music in the mid-to-late 2010s too. I also feel like right now “alternative rock” is undergoing some similar experimentation.
My brain goes totally blank when it comes to who I wish I could collaborate with, though. Right now I feel like we’re still just learning how to truly collaborate with each other.
KSW: The lines are blurred, I think, because Starling as an entity does not have any direct musical influences. As individuals, we bring all of ourselves into what we create, which of course inherently ends up bringing things into the mix that we may consciously or subconsciously pull from other places, people, or ideas. The boys actually do get caught up sometimes in how what we are creating in a given moment correlates — negatively or positively — to another musical act. This is usually in the writing process and can sometimes be a valuable tool in articulating what one person is advocating for within the song, but I generally do not enjoy it because it can take away from what is best for the song. I often do not care if something has or has not been done before — I just go with what fits in that moment and what feels right for the piece. I think that Grace and I both try to ground the conversation when it goes in that direction, so I am grateful to have an ally in that.
As far as personal influences go, they broadly range across multiple genres. My hot take is that The Beatles are underrated by people in my generation. One of my greatest weaknesses — or strengths — is that I always circle back to the music that I listened to the most in my teen years. It’s when music felt the most like a drug to me, in the healthiest way possible. It was spiritual. It helped me feel seen and connected and got me through the best and the worst times. So those artists are Harry Nilsson, Mitski, The Velvet Underground, Sparklehorse, Elliott Smith, Big Thief, Lil Peep, Joyce Manor, Badfinger... It goes on and on, but I will stop there.
I have also always been inspired by what’s going on in my local music scene ever since my mom dropped me off at my first DIY punk show at the age of 14. So a big goal that I have is to help the youth in the same way that music helped me as a teen.
Today, I think a lot of my inspiration comes from what I encounter in my day-to-day — in books that I read, the way that the sun shines on a tree, or a conversation that I might overhear. Music has just always been a way for me to articulate the feelings that I am going through. I am generally a happy person but can sometimes sink into a lonely sadness where writing can be a good friend to get me through it.
I second Grace in saying that we are enjoying just collaborating with each other for now, and the only thing that I would currently like to introduce is an awesome engineer who gets it and can help us in recording the vision.
KP: Kasha, of Starling’s work in general, you said that you “want every melody, rhythm, and raw feeling to be intentionally placed and unmistakably ours.” In that vein, I really loved the music video for “I Can Be Convinced.”
There’s this incredibly distinct authenticity to your work — from the images to the sound — which is so refreshing. It doesn’t feel like you’re trying to play into any “aesthetic” or niche that will play well on social media (yawn), and that’s what really draws me in. It feels undeniably real.
So two questions — how do you conceptualize your visuals, and what is your take on authenticity today in such a fabricated world driven by vapid algorithms?
KSW: Unfortunately, this is not something that I feel incredibly confident in how to articulate. I think it is a feeling for us — or at least for me — that I religiously follow in order to show me the next indicated action of a given piece. Whether it is visual or auditory or whatever, I hear or see a certain thing and go with it piece by piece until it feels finished.
There are people in the music world who play characters, and I do not think that is always a bad thing. I actually think it can be really cool. But I also think that you can tell when that character is not part of someone at all, and sometimes these fabrications are really a part of someone that they haven’t quite figured out how to express until they fit it into their art. It can be an exaggerated version of a deep part of oneself. I think it takes time for these people to poke through sometimes, but I would like to think that they always do eventually.
But yeah, I don’t think that’s who you’re talking about. There is an exhaustive quality to probably the majority of musical artists right now, and I just think it is easy to get lost in what your art is really trying to say with the pressure of virality. So, for that, I feel sad.
KP: That’s exactly what I’m referring to — this push from the external, parasocial world for people to create these characters that they pass off as reality. I think that you put that perfectly, though!
GR: I feel like Kasha takes the biggest lead when it comes to the visuals, and I really admire her intuitive approach. I think that we’re very governed by whether or not something “feels” right before we sign off on anything we put out, whether it’s cover art or an Instagram post. It’s vibes-based decision-making, if you will.
Authenticity is so hard in today’s day and age, and honestly, as someone who was already on Instagram at the age of 14, it’s hard for me to imagine there being a time where authenticity could be easy. Was authenticity ever easy? We live in a time of trying to fit into these niche micro-aesthetics. I think the only way that you can be authentic today is if you throw all of that out the window. It’s hard to not worry about how you’re being perceived, but I think it’s vital to try the best you can to push those thoughts out.
“Was authenticity ever easy? We live in a time of trying to fit into these niche micro-aesthetics. I think the only way that you can be authentic today is if you throw all of that out the window.”
KP: That’s exactly the creative world that I want to see — one that comes from within, not from outside.
I want to go back to “I Can Be Convinced” as a song because I really love the track so much. Can you walk us through a little bit on its inspiration and production?
KSW: I was feeling a little sad. I wanted to be taken care of until I evaporated, like scrubbing yourself so clean that there is nothing left. That is the feeling of “I Can Be Convinced.” I really thought this was going to be a slow song at first, which it obviously is not! [Laughs]. But the mournful quality stayed intact — it turned out how it was meant to.
As far as production goes, I knew from the start that I wanted Mellotron on this record. I absolutely love the Mellotron — it’s used on some of my all-time favorite albums — but we did not have a Mellotron budget. What we did have were Mellotron samples on Logic as well as an old vintage practice amp to run the recordings back through in order to get a unique sound. Erik ran a bunch of stuff on this record through a tape recorder, and I think he might have done that for the digital strings, too. I know he did that on my voice for at least part of this song.
The most diabolical part of this whole recording process is that we recorded everything before the drums. That was Erik’s idea — our drummer and mixer — and somehow he made it work, but we will not ever be doing that again. Another little secret to this song is that we sped it up suuuuper mildly after it was mixed, which we had never done, but it somehow exaggerated and completed the overall sound and feeling of the track. I think that Erik did this with a tape recorder for the final version, but we discovered it by accident when someone made a change to the Logic template during the recording process.
KP: That’s so amazing! You definitely feel all of those very personal little touches.
GR: We started playing this track live way before we started the recording process, and I definitely think that played a huge part in how the song evolved from the tender demo that Kasha originally brought to the band to the upbeat lead single that it eventually became. I think that we all tried to get out of the way of what the song wanted to be.
KP: It’s such a cool track.
Has making music healed or changed you in an unexpected way?
KSW: I have had a pretty strong sense of self since I was young, but I also have been very influenced by music and musical artists since I was young, so it’s hard to know who I might be without it.
GR: When I was younger, music helped me understand that I wasn’t the first person ever to experience the feelings that I was feeling as an angsty teenage girl. That was probably pretty healing, after I got over the fact that I wasn’t the deepest, most misunderstood person ever. Then I felt seen, and that’s definitely way healthier.
KP: [Laughs]. It definitely is.
What advice would you lend to women who want to write or perform?
KSW: Nobody is stopping you, and nobody will come to guide you on exactly how to do this. Use your best judgment and follow your feelings.
GR: Don’t wait to be perfect. Perfectionism is the enemy…
KP: What advice would you give your younger selves?
KSW: Probably just to trust myself and to know that I am my own best advocate. I had trouble for a while articulating my ideas, even if they were very clear in my brain, because I didn’t trust that they were “good.” Now I know that it is kind of none of my business if they are good, and none of my business what other people think about them.
GR: I’d probably say that nobody is thinking about you nearly as much as you think about yourself. And also, I’d probably say that comparing yourself to other people is a huge waste of time. Everyone moves through life at their own pace and figures out who they are on their own time.
KP: What do you feel makes a provocative woman?
KSW & GR: Existing.
Photography: Liam Jones
