A musical slugfest with an unlikely lineup that includes grunge, spectral folk, some oh-so-English poets, punk, classic rock, Greg Kinnear, and the Carnatic-tinged blues? In Episode Three of Day Is Night Diaries, we, Doug Carraway and Akhila Ramnarayan of Starcracker, delve into the creative process for “Stuck Record,” the tenth and last track on our debut album, Day Is Night, which dropped on March 1, 2024. What’s in the name, you ask? Listen, and all shall be revealed.
If you’d like to experience the full song before or after you check out the episode, here’s a peek:
The musicians referenced in Episode Three are Pearl Jam, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones, Chris Cornell, The Beatles, The Decemberists, The Crane Wives, and Queen. Four that were left out somehow (how could we?!) are the Arctic Monkeys, Le Tigre, Fleet Foxes, and the Sex Pistols. The writers we mention are Coleridge, Tennyson, and Shakespeare, though the pre-Raphaelites (Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and John Everett Millais, whose 1851-52 painting Ophelia is part of the visual palimpsest below) also have their rightful place in the mix.
Glass-ceiling smashers Ada Lovelace (incidentally the daughter of swashbuckling Romantic poet Byron) and Clara Bow get a shoutout towards the end. And last, there’d have been no pep-talk-riddled middle verse in “Stuck Record” without Greg Kinnear’s sidesplitting, heartbreaking portrayal of motivational speaker Richard Hoover in the 2006 motion picture Little Miss Sunshine, and no song whatsoever sans postcolonial studies.
Curious about what came before Episode Three? In Episode Two, we discuss “Hello Lenore,” a track haunted by Edgar Allan Poe and other named and unnamed nineteenth-century ghouls at an English tea party. Our inspiration and creative process for "Question," the first track on the record, is the subject of Episode One.
Day Is Night Diaries is Starcracker’s attempt to document how we work as an indie rock duo across continents, as much for ourselves as anyone else. If you're a fellow creativity/process geek, performer/writer, or long-suffering friend/family member related to either of us, do subscribe, if willing, for free.
Happy listening!
Share this post