David Starr on his new album “Must Be Blue,” collaborating with music legends, and finding his home in “good music.”
by Danny Colman originally published on Rock On! This Week’s Sound Bites…6/19/2025
“Reese Wynans, I came to know him when he joined Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble and then after Stevie Ray Vaughn was killed, he played with a lot of people but for the last few years he’s primarily toured with Joe Bonamassa. He’s an amazing keyboard player and a super guy. I didn’t know him prior to working on this record but my friend Mark Prentice who produced it with me suggested we bring him in and it was a perfect call.”
Wynan’s isn’t the only “A” lister David Starr works with now or in the past but he, along with John Oates, Jeff King and others have come together once again to release Starr’s latest effort titled, “Must Be Blue” on Quarto Valley Records.
Recently, Starr too the time to talk about the new record, his past and about why he chose to record in Nashville.
“I was born and raised in Fayetteville, Arkansas up there in the northwest corner of the state,” he began.“My older brother was taking guitar lessons when he was about 10 so I had to take some kind of lessons and so I became a drummer at a very early age. I was a singing drummer for a long time but over the years, being around good guitar players; I picked that up. Over time I decided that I wanted to pursue more of a singer-songwriter kind of a thing and played in lots of bands through the years.I still enjoy that but it’s more practical to tour, travel and book yourself as a solo most of the time or a duo with my friend EriK Stucky. So, over the years, I’ve done that, I live here in Western Colorado in a town called Cedaredge and I have a guitar store; a really nice guitar store in a fairly unlikely place but as I’ve told people numerous times, it’s where I want to be and you figure out a way to make it work. I’ve got somebody who manages the store when I’m not here or out touring so it works out pretty well, I’m very fortunate.”
“Must Be Blue,” is an interesting title and one derived from a song lyric. According to Starr however, this record and the process have made him anything but “Blue.”
“Must Be Blue” is the title of the album and we have a number of singles we’ve released off of it and that title comes from one of the songs called, “My Favorite Color” and the rest of that line is, “My favorite color must be blue.” The idea behind this album; I grew up playing blues based stuff. Allman Brothers, early Fleetwood Mac before they became the Fleetwood Mac that everyone thinks of and early ZZ Top, a lot of early good blues stuff and I thought, man, I’ve always wanted to focus my energy on a record that just addressed that side of things. So, while it’s a bluesy record, it also has my friend Erik Stucky playing mandolin on it, I’m playing acoustic guitars so it has kind of got a little Americana, a little Blues so one of the folks on the team came up with the term “Bluesicana” and it kind of a stuck. You’re in radio, you know people are always trying to pigeonhole and find a genre for stuff. I’ve been lucky enough to have had John Oates produce a couple of my records in years past and I told him, I’m talking to these people on radio and in the press about the record and they want to know what genre to call it and he said, “Just tell them it’s good music” and I said, “Well, I like that” because that covers a lot of territory. I think, as an artist, you want to grow and as someone who has had success at the level I’m at which is not a high level but I’m happy doing what I’m doing, I’ve played with a lot of folks in a year; it gives me the opportunity to pivot and change and follow the muse wherever it goes and I’ve been real lucky that way. This was a fun record to make, we got to cut loose and do some covers and originals, we didn’t really put any parameters on it, we just played songs we liked.”
Quarto Valley is a label which relies heavily on blues artists and people whose past achievements have brought them prominence but they are also very friendly to artists such as Starr who up until now had never been signed to a label.
“Yeah, that was a big thing for me, ” he said enthusiastically, “Everything I’ve ever done up to this point was self-released, I’ve never chased a label deal or anything but my PR team in Nashville said, “You know what? Let’s run this by the guys at Quarto Valley” and they seemed to have liked what they heard and they’ve been nice enough to have partnered with us and they’ve been really great partners. They have done a lot to help get the word out and I’m really grateful to them. I think that helps a project get a little more visibility when you’ve got a label involved. They did a record on Paul Rodgers, some of the Savoy Brown people, Edgar Winter; it seemed to me early on, the little I knew and I’ve come to know this as a fact, they’re about the music and that’s what I’m all about so I appreciated that approach and I’m real thankful to them”
Musicians all cut their teeth in various ways and styles and Starr is no different. He, like others, got an education at a young age and furthering his studies has led him to where he has been and continues to go today.
“I grew up playing in clubs from the age of 14 or 15 on. I was playing in clubs at night and going to school during the day so my grades suffered but I picked up a lot of good music. I think there is something, in one way, getting together with your buddies to play music was an easy thing to do because you could take a three chord blues tune, a 12-bar thing and just go with it and one thing led to another and we got better as players but then a group like Led Zeppelin came along or like I said, early Fleetwood Mac stuff and adapted the early blues. A good example off of this record is the Greg Allman tune “Whipping Post” which oddly enough, we didn’t listen to the original version of that at all before we went in to record but everybody in the band heard it enough that we just came up with our own arrangement which included elements of the “Live at the Fillmore” version but the essence was there in the vocal and the feel. So, I think it’s all about the message, the feel and the groove and all that, as a drummer you know that if you can lay it down and everybody can go with you; that’s what it’s about.”
In today’s sports bar themed environment, music often takes a backseat to televisions, sporting events and more and this is something he tries to avoid, especially given that his time on the road is limited most times. So, when he books a run of shows, he does so carefully.
“This year, I’ve not toured as much oddly enough as I have in the past, I usually go out 60 or 70 times a year and for a guy who has a full-time job running a store, that’s a lot. I go to Scotland, England and Wales every year, I go to Texas most years, I’m going to Montana for a songwriter festival up there. I didn’t schedule quite as much the first quarter of this year because my wife had a little bit of a health issue we had to attend to, she’s fine and I was also remodeling an old building here in town and I knew that was going to take up a lot of attention and time and I wanted to be around for that; that’s all but finished now so that frees me up to get going again. I get out and travel, I’ll be gone for five or six days at a time, I don’t want to be gone for a month or anything like that. I enjoy getting out and playing and playing mostly listening rooms. I really don’t want to play at a bar where there are a bunch of TVs and soccer games going; I kind of like people paying attention if I’m gonna play if I’m lucky enough to get to do that. I’ve done my time there, I’ve done all that; you know what I mean?”
Years ago, New York City, Los Angeles and Philadelphia were the recording meccas of the U.S and many artists knew that to “Make it” they had to move or flock to these locales but today, it’;s Nashville, TN. So, what was or is the allure for Starr about Nashville?
“Over the last 12 years or so, I’ve been going there to record, mainly because John Oates and I worked on an album. I asked him to produce a record because we had been writing together and we’d done some duo gigs together and he said, “Yeah, I’ll do that but let’s do it in Nashville and I get to pick the band” and I said, “Fair enough.” So, he introduced me to a studio and some people who I’d might not have met any other way and there is just a certain level of comfort where when you go in the studio, you know what to expect, everybody knows how you sound, they know what mic works, what signal chain, what drummer to use on what song and all of that. In this case, my friend Mark Prentice who has worked with me on this and two or three other records; he and I collaborate, he lives there and he’s a session guy so it just makes sense. Some years ago, my wife and I bought a little condo there when it was still affordable so even though we aren’t there much, we have a tiny place to be and as we said, there is no shortage of great people to play on stuff so, I’ve got a comfort level there that I like. When I go there, there is a real energy and focus on making music with the group of people that I work with so I get in focus on what I need to do and kind of get out. A good example of why I like to go there is, John Oates and I worked on a project where my grandfather had written a book back in the ’70s and he passed away suddenly, the book never got a wide distribution. When I finally got around to reading it a few years ago, I realized there were good stories and characters in there. So, I said to John, “Let’s read this book, let’s give it to a number of songwriters and everyone contributes something and we’ll do an album based on the book ” and we did that. Part of that was to get the album done, get the swag done, get the artwork done, get the book reprinted, videos and all of that within that little network of people. So, to the extent that you can get a lot of things done right there; I fell in with folks who are creative and helpful.”
To discover more about David Starr, please visit https://www.davidstarrmusic.com/