Star grew up with a love hate relationship with music. They slept through piano lessons in their youth. However, writing poetry and eventually lyrics became a creative outlet for Star. That musical journey led them to release a solo album, move to Boston, and form their band The Sunset Kings.
Today, Star is the lyricist and main singer for the group. They also play guitar and keyboard for the band.
In this episode of the BOSFilipinos Podcast, Star shares the origin story of The Sunset Kings, their creative process, and how music has shaped who they are — as well as their relationship with culture.
The Sunset Kings next single, “Metronomin’,” comes out on July 17. This podcast includes clips from that track, “Symphony Blues,” and “Come By” in that order. For more music from The Sunset Kings, visit the band’s YouTube Channel, Spotify page, and website.
Transcript
[THEME MUSIC]
Kaitlin Milliken: Hello, and welcome to the BOSFilipinos Podcast. I'm your host, Kaitlin Milliken, and this show is obviously made by BOSFilipinos.
This podcast is all about telling Filipino and Fim-Am stories in the Greater Boston community.
And one way people share their stories is through music. From lyrics to melodies and harmonies, songs can take us on a journey. Artists generously share their experiences and how they feel through their work.
I wanted to know how Filipino Americans express themselves through music. So, I hopped on a Zoom call with Star. Originally born in a Texas border town, Star began expressing themselves creatively as a poet. Then, they transitioned that love of writing to lyrics. After exploring the music scene in Orange County, California, Star moved to Boston in 2012. They created a solo album, which they toured around the US.
Today, Star is the lyricist and main singer for the Boston-Based band the Sunset Kings. They also play guitar and keyboard for the group.
[METRONOMIN’ BY THE SUNSET KINGS]
Kaitlin Milliken: The Sunset Kings have a musical style that feels all their own. The group blends genres including hip hop, jazz, rock, and indie music. Their first album, The Ballad of Bella Fury came out in 2018. The band has continued to evolve, as seen in their songs released since then.
Star shared with me how the band settled on a sound, the creative process, and how music has shaped who they are — as well as their relationship with culture. But first, we talked about how the band got its start.
So to kick us off, can you tell us a little bit about The Sunset Kings And what the group's origin story is?
Star: We all met in university. We were all in like this jazz ensemble. We were in different jazz ensembles, but they have like those end of the year performances, and we all saw each other play then and my guitarist and violinists came up to me and they said, they really liked what I was doing.
I wasn't studying music. And they were. So I just finished a solo record. And I left Boston to tour that. My brother and I actually drove around the United States and toured that album solo, and then I came back, and I started linking up with my guitarist. He had a drummer, and pretty soon our saxophone player joined. Our bass player joined, and our violinist got into it.
Originally I had started the group with the intention of like I was, I was working in a studio at the same time that I was in the university. So I wanted to cut demos of songs that I was writing for these artists. And I was like we should rehearse these, record them. And I can shop these to artists. And so we started doing that. But it eventually turned into us playing our own songs, and playing shows, and making money that way. And so that's The Sunset Kings.
Kaitlin Milliken: It's really interesting because the music blurs so many genres. Can you explain how you guys pick to go that route and have that sound?
Star: I don't think that it was like a conscious decision to be like, “We should play this genre music.” We all had so many conversations about what a rock band could be. Because we all grew up in different scenes, and we were like, “I don't want to play — sorry but we call it — butt rock.” It's just music that's like super basic. We didn't want to be like Nickelback or something like that.
I mean, me and Neumi, my saxophone player. We grew up on hip hop. Matt and Mike grew up doing prog [rock] and stuff like that, and like I mean, we all grew up listening to emo music like that was pop music back then you know what I'm saying? So like, it wasn't conscious it was that I was writing certain songs, and having the instrumentation, and just hours and hours and hours of us just jamming together, like pulling all nighters and jamming together, that became the sound. And so when I listen to that first album, I love it because it's so... I know it's going to be established for me 10 years later. When I remember how we even came up with it, it was all just chemistry.
Kaitlin Milliken: Totally. I love how you mentioned bringing all of the musical backgrounds together. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about your personal musical journey and what role music has played in your life?
Star: I have always kind of had a love hate relationship with music. My parents, when they finally decided to settle down in the states, like together. They were building their own business, and they didn't really have time to take care of us all the time. And I totally understand that a lot of immigrant families have that story.
But instead of going to play sports, they put me in piano lessons. And I really hated it. I hated it. I would fall asleep in that room with my teacher there and other students playing piano. I grew up listening to classical music. And I would never practice. It wasn't until I was in middle school, and I was going through a lot of hard stuff in my life that I started to discover writing. And I started to write poems, and one of my English teachers who actually passed away that year started taking me under his wing, and he said, “I think that you could be a really great writer.” And it kind of started with this book, Bridge to Terabithia. I don't know if you've ever read that
Kaitlin Milliken: Cry every time. It's such a good book.
Star: Yeah, that book is amazing like, and my, my teacher put me on to that book and started giving me a bunch of books to read. And at the same time, my mother's oldest sister came to visit us in Texas, and she had cancer. And she came to see us because we had better treatment in the States than they did in the Philippines.
And at the same time, I was very interested in this person, and she got really sick as well. And so like that was happening parallel, and I didn't know how to process all this stuff. So I started writing. And my music journey kind of starts with me learning how to write. Playing guitar. I started setting up my own shows recording my own music.
When I was 17, I released a record that I will never ever talk about again, but I raised enough money with those shows to move to California. And so I moved out in high school and tried to make it out there. And it was one of the hardest times of my life. I don't think that things are as forgiving for people of color around that time. I had a super tough time trying to break into that industry, and I almost gave up music.
I kept on working at it. I moved to Boston, and I was working out of a studio. I learned how to engineer and produce, and I got my first break in 2014. Some people heard the song that I wrote called “Stand Up, Stand Tall” and it was featured at the UN Youth Summit in New York City. And after that, I released a solo record, which led me to meeting my band. And, you know, I still I still play some of those songs with my band. I re-recorded a lot of those songs with the band.
Kaitlin Milliken: I think it's really interesting that you found yourself in Boston too. I think that especially like SoCal, La kind of has this whole myth around it. I'm from the Bay Area, so like, kind of grew up adjacent to all of that. Being in these different areas you've also toward what has been your experience in the Boston music scene specifically?
Star: I think that's something that I gotta acknowledge is that I think that in the, in the beginning of the band of my band being a thing we did very well, because Boston was hostile to hip hop. And they saw us as a rock band. And I mean...it's not necessarily that they can see who's fronting a band, you know what I mean? They just hear our music. And they weren't listening to every single song, so they didn't hear the poetry and the content of it. I don't think people are really listening to it for that.
But we did very well in the beginning because we were doing rock music or being defined as rock music, and not doing like hip hop. And so my experience in the Boston music scene is having that initial push, and getting to see that shift to like Boston becoming more of a hip hop city. I really love that. It's interesting to me because now like, I try and collaborate with more hip hop artists. I try and be in shows with more of those artists because those are the people that I really line up with. But like outside of our most of our our listeners are outside of Boston now. We have listeners in Greece, Albania, Turkey, India, and then like other places in the States. But Boston, we have like our circle, and I love them, and then a lot of it is like hip hop. And it's really cool to be in that sphere of music. I feel like it's really informative and super inspiring.
Kaitlin Milliken: Yeah, that's really interesting because...I did like the college radio thing I went to school here. And I always think of Boston kind of having these almost two music scenes going on at the same time. We're one is very like Allston basement. white kids. And the other is a little bit more...like more genre bonding, jazz influenced, a little bit more diverse. But they all kind of exist in the same city.
Star: I love that observation of it because it really is like that. I think that's so specific to Boston's too because we're like a college town. And so like, you still get a little bit of that, like everyone wants to do how it shows but like, you got to use what you got. And then there's a bunch of other people who are like here for like...there's such a heavy undercurrent of intellectualism and academia that is like.
And then also that counterculture of like, how do we survive in this heavily curated sphere of academia? A lot of this stuff that we think about doesn't necessarily exist yet, in academia. Like Bell Hooks, the way that she writes it's very accurate. But like if you brought that to a class like 20, 30 years ago, it's nothing like the writing of her contemporaries.
Kaitlin Milliken: I do want to talk about the sort of writing process. I think you've mentioned how things that you've experienced inspired you very early on. What is the songwriting process and the lyric writing process look like for you now?
Star: I can really trace it back to this moment. We had just finished recording our album. And I wanted to celebrate so my brother and I... I got tickets for my brother and I to go to this new age music festival in the woods outside of Portland, Oregon. And it was called Beloved. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. It's pretty odd, but it was pretty cool. But I remember on one of the days a bunch of us were doing this soul gazing exercise
Kaitlin Milliken: Is that just kind of like when you stare at each other and like, kind of sit in silence?
Star: Just like you're in a tent and you just walk around a circle. And you stop and you look into this person's eyes without saying a thing. And you're supposed to think about things that you're trying to, like heal and get through some traumas and things that you need to forgive. Really new agey stuff, right? But and you go to the next person, the next person, but there was this person who I kept walking by. And we kept smiling at each other. Because, I mean, it seemed like we were like the only brown people in the tent.
And after a while, it seemed like we couldn't keep our eyes off each other. So we finally ended up doing the soul gazing exercise. And they were like, “This feels like home.” And we had that connection of like, “Okay, this is super comfortable.” So we kept on talking after that. Her name was Cassidy — and I remember that she told me she was a Pisces because that's how I had her in my phone before like we lost contact.
But I remember playing her the album, and we had just finished getting all the tracks together. We hadn't mixed it yet. She said this thing that blew my mind, and I still think about it to this day. And she said, “Do you ever feel like writing about your pain is just perpetuating it?” You know, like, and that's something that I've heard come up a lot in the poetry community and writer communities now because everyone loves a sad song. But how much of our music, how much of that vibration are we perpetuating?
And I've thought about that ever since. And after performing our first record, for the past couple years, I decided I wanted to try something new. And I thought, “What if I write about my joy? What if I try and perpetuate and memorialize my joy? And where will that take me if I'm singing those songs every single night?” I'm talking like that real juicy happiness that comes from knowing what the other side really feels like.
It's trying to find those moments in my life. Whether that's hanging out with my friends, or, or taking time at night instead of scrolling through Instagram — 30 minutes putting myself to sleep I just by thinking about how much gratitude I have for every single year of my life in those low moments like where did they get me?
Kaitlin Milliken: That's awesome. I definitely want to talk about some of the songs that you've created. If there's like one song that you feel really proud of that you kind of want to dive into and share the writing of it and all of that other good stuff.
Star: I really, a song that I like will always be really proud of is this like it? It's my song “Symphony Blues.”
[SYMPHONY BLUES BY THE SUNSET KINGS]
It's done. So well with people and really helps me connect to the person that I was becoming when I was not that person. I thought about that and just kind of this process of like, “How can I write about really deep things that I'm talking about, without alienating people?” There's a book called God's Debris that's written by the guy who wrote Dilbert, the comic. And basically, this theory that he has is that the way that you communicate with a ton of people is you talk about a common experience that everyone has. That everyone has their own individual, unique experience of it, and that's love.
And so “Symphony Blues” is really important to me because I tried to talk about a lot of things that I was struggling with, in terms of like, my cultural upbringing, growing up in the States, and being in a totally different generation than my parents and trying to reconcile that. Also dealing with relationships. And how totally different cultures come together in those vulnerable states, and you don't really understand it all the time. But those things are, they cause very heavy stress points. And I wanted to write about that, but not necessarily isolated to like, “Oh, this is an experience that can only be felt by me.” This is a human experience. And it's art before it is like a personal story that I'm relating.
Kaitlin Milliken: I think it's really interesting, sort of what you just touched on when it comes to feeling separated. And I think a lot of kids with immigrant parents have that. So can you talk a little bit about that?
Star: Even though I feel like I had a unique experience growing up, a lot of people can relate to it. And both my parents were doctors in the Philippines, and they met in med school, but only my mother practices medicine here. She moved into a tiny spare room in her older sister's house in Chicago, immediately after getting married. And she left my father behind in the Philippines so that she could focus on studying and passing the board.
And I didn't find this until I started writing poetry because my parents had actually come up to Austin...and they saw me perform. And they started getting really open about their experiences of racism and stuff. But she wrestled with depression, self isolation, just like not really connecting to anybody. And struggling with that racism in the hospital's, like, “Oh, it's a petite little Asian girl.” Everyone wanted to try and take advantage of that. And when finally she passed, the board got her first job in Maine where I was born. But when they finally decided to settle and really give it a go at building a family, we ended up in this small border town at the very southern tip of Texas.
It's a place called the Rio Grande Valley. And honestly, a lot of people don't really know that much about it. But we end up in the news a lot. And it's wild because it feels like this closed off little town, like we have to go through a border checkpoint to get to like the next city. The next city is like six hours away. And the demographic here is mostly Hispanic. At the time that my parents moved there were not that many Filipinos. And there was a minority of like white people who all seem to make up the higher socioeconomic classes. And for the beginning of my mother's career like these were the people like she would rub shoulders with, elbows with. I remember like, being super young, really weird memory taking etiquette classes at like the Country Club. Like where the forks is supposed to go, like, why there's two forks.
Kaitlin Milliken: There's like the tiny ones up top, which like, “Who are they? I don't know them.”
Star: Like the napkins and all that stuff. But none of it lasted. And that's what's wild to me. So to me becoming more mature, I look back at it. And I think that it's because something didn't intrinsically click between my parents and those people. And there's this book called Limbo by this guy named Alfred Lubrano, I think. He talks about people who experience social mobility, especially going from lower classes to like higher ones. And what those people experience when they gain traction in building their status and wealth is that they don't have the same mannerisms, the same fundamental knowledge that people in upper society have. Some people figure that stuff out, and others never find their place.
That's kind of what informs my writing. And I feel like that's a heavy part of my culture because I feel like that strive, that ambition, like the American dream in my eyes kept my parents so busy building their family and chasing the next thing that they felt they needed to have, that they were never able to see the subtleties of existing here. And that's the role that I've kind of taken as I've matured, navigating those things. First for myself, and then like coming back and being like, “Hey, this is why I feel like we had these conversations when I was younger. We're hitting walls because we don't understand that word from two different cultures.”
Being Filipino American heavily influences my work, because I think about that all the time. And it's something that I meditate on like every single time I try and write something, like that's my unique experience. Like it's something that I don't feel a lot of artists are writing about, especially now that we have an oversaturation of music. People want to do the trendiest thing and yeah, I want to do that too, and make people move and vibe and feel things like that, but I also don't want to lose this very integral part of me that understands that my experience is a political one.
Kaitlin Milliken: I thought it was really awesome how you talked about when you were able to share your music with your family. That was something that brought you closer together and offered a point of connection. I did want to talk about one of the songs that you released last year “Come By.” Can you talk about how that song came to be and working with other artists?
Star: The idea for come by was one that I had where I wanted to kind of frustrate the idea of like a lead singer.
[COME BY, BY THE SUNSET KINGS]
Star:In my brain, it's not a band. It's a movement. We just finished our record. Put it out on Spotify. And we were getting these shows, and we had a tour set up. I'm not going too deeply into it. Our bass player passed away in a freak accident in August 2018 right before we got to release that record. I felt like we had such a strong musical connection that we had to keep on going like in order to like he recorded all the bass parts on our first record, and it's a trip to listen to just every single time I listened to it. I can see him playing every single part and just like him really struggling with some of those ideas and being like, “Oh, let me get this again.”
Losing him at such a crucial moment. And our manager being like, “This is what you got to do. You got to tour that album. This is just how music works. This is how the industry works.” We had to switch our entire lineup. So I started playing keys. My guitar player, Matt shifted to the bass. And then you know, we went touring.
“Come By,” to me, is kind of like a photograph. It's like a snapshot of the way that our tour ended up being. To me on the keys, Matt on the bass, me and Miu are sharing vocals because like, to me, that's how the band survived.
Kaitlin Milliken: I think a lot of people are asking themselves, “What can I do to support local musicians, local music?” A lot of times it's you go to a show you buy merch. Um...don't know when that's gonna happen again. So like, what are some ways that people can pull through and support that type of creative work?
Star: It's great for people to buy merch and support us in that way. I love that. I wish that it would happen more but I mean, I'm not really complaining. I really feel like the best way to support local musicians is to engage with us. Ask us those questions because, I mean, this is the kind of stuff that I love. The fact that there's someone who wants to get deeper into my process, hopefully, because it'll help them with something that they're going through and possibly inspire them to start their own creative processes. Check out this stuff. Propose things that we could create. How can we better serve those communities? I think that those direct conversations are the most helpful thing.
Kaitlin Milliken: What would you say to people who are looking at these creative outlets and want to get started or want to pursue it and like... there is that anxiety. There is a little bit of being afraid to get into it. How do you get past that?
Star: I learned from like, going to a ton of protests and a ton of poetry readings, and trying to hold space for those people and for me and my friends. The best thing that you can do when you're starting out is to, to show up and just listen. Showing up to everything and listening as hard as I could, and then finding ways that I could contribute. And for me that started off, like, “I'll shoot photos. I'll shoot videos. Let me do that for you. Can I edit your poems?”
And also, in the beginning, don't worry too much about making mistakes. You know, like who's really listening? and the people that are like, they're gonna push you to get better.
Kaitlin Milliken: And this is my final question that I have on the list. What's coming up next for you and what's coming up next for The Sunset Kings?
Star: July 17, we are going to release a single that is a precursor to our next EP, and the song's called “Metronomin’” and I'm really excited about it. It's the first song that I have lyrically collaborated on with my sax player Neumi. And so we're really excited to put this kind of music out. And it really talks about the stuff that we were talking about earlier in the interview about really injecting your experience with that joy and trying to find that joy, and express it and live it. So that this is one of the first songs that I really feel that with, and I'm excited to see where it takes us.
And as far as like, what I'm doing on the other side is like I'm working with my brother. We're trying to write a script, dealing with issues of anti-colonialism. Something that we talk a lot about is like we grew up with this, you know, like we had relatives who brought this stuff from the Philippines [papaya soap] and they're like, you should use this you're getting kind of dark. And we wanted to write a couple of pieces kind of centered on like, “What is that? What is that a symbol of? What is that a clue or indicator of in our communities?” And so like I'm working on some very specific writing towards that and trying to find other people, the other artists who are willing to collaborate on that.
Kaitlin Milliken: Well, we look forward to seeing all of that awesome stuff. Thank you so much, Star, for taking the time to chat.
Star: I appreciate you making time for me and holding space for me.
[THEME MUSIC]
Kaitlin Milliken: This has been the BOSFilipinos Podcast. I'm your host, Kaitlin Milliken. Music for our episode was made by Matt Garamella. Other music featured on this show was created by The Sunset Kings. Special thanks to Star for sharing their art with us. If you haven't already, check out the sunset kings on Spotify, YouTube, and SoundCloud. You can learn more about the band at their website thesunsetkings.com.
Now I'm going to plug some BOSFilipinos content. If you haven't already, you can subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also follow us on Instagram, @bosfilipinos, to stay connected. What do you want us to cover? Let us know at bosfilipinos.com. Thanks for listening and see you soon.