Keegan Tawa's "Startide" Epic Showcases Love and Loss While Painted With a Backdrop of Celestial Imagery
Keegan Tawa & Sophie Coran, photo by Max Grudzinski
By Emily Herbein
Keegan Tawa, a diverse multi-instrumentalist and composer, is releasing his debut epic LP Startide this Friday. This concept album, meant to be listened to from front to back, sits at around 45 minutes and tells a deeply personal story about love and loss set to a backdrop of thematic celestial imagery. The players involved in this project are some of my favorite musicians, so listening to this was so enjoyable for me. The featured vocalist is Sophie Coran, who we all know I’m obsessed with. Other notable faces include Trap Rabbit’s Logan Roth, Elizabeth Steiner of the Baltimore Symphony, Chris Castellanos of Boston Brass, Dan Kassel of the Philadelphia String Quartet, and Qin Qian of the Guangxi Symphony Orchestra.
This album is one of the most complex and intricate listens that I’ve sat down with in a while. I love concept albums more than anything else, and Startide, though wildly specific in imagery, follows a narrative that we can all relate to. Time passes and we leave people that we love, or we get left behind, or things just blatantly don’t work out. Whatever way you spin it, it’s a story of growth and change and learning how to be alone even when it feels impossible. I admire the way Keegan and his team were able to transform such a wide-spread theme into something so specific, like a trek into outer space. Every part of this album feels intentional and the music is stunning. It expertly blends modern, classical, and jazz music with the most unexpected instruments. It was a long time in the making, but so worth the wait. Keegan and his team should be proud of the world they’ve built.
I connected with Keegan at the start of this year to talk about his album cycle and how to put Startide in front of people, and I’m glad that I can be the first to give you a glimpse of what went into the making of this album. You can read our conversation below, and pre-save the album under the cut.
Em: This album seems to be a combination of all of your various passions. Did you always intend to write a concept album that ties together all these different facets of your life? It's such an expansive topic too — how did you determine a direction?
Keegan: The scope and subject material of the album were all generated pretty organically, without much of a plan at first. In the early writing process, I was working on a handful of songs that I didn’t know were going to be an album at all. When I started digging into the lyrics with one of my collaborators, Myles, a loose and tenuous story arc began to form, with no plan or ending to speak of — just a natural, experimental creative writing process.
Around halfway through the album’s creation, once it was clear that this was an album, gears definitely began to shift as we started trying to puzzle out how to end the album, both musically and narratively, and this is when we really began to come up with our first semblance of a hard plan. As a writer (I love to write fiction as well as music) I think it’s always easier to work out the arc and vector of a story after spending a lot of time simply world-building, sometimes with no plan or intention in mind. World-building doesn’t require a big idea, arc, or a motive; it’s just the generation of setting, characters, and environment. And musical world-building is much more than simply a narrative exercise; it can be the definition and exploration of sound-spaces, of aesthetic sound sets, of synthesis and textures and techniques — these are a few of the threads of a musical setting. Once you have an interesting world built, working out the arc of a story (whether it's lyrical, sonic or both) can be much easier, and that’s the approach Myles and I took.
The album is certainly a blend of many different topics I’m passionate about — music, outer space, science fiction, and storytelling. There was no preliminary intention to rope all of these things into the album, but I think that their injection is just a natural result of the lifelong passion that both Myles and I have for these subjects.
Em: I love the collaborative aspect of this project. Why did you choose these specific artists? What did the collaboration process look like? Did everyone write their own parts? Did the arrangements mostly come from you? Did COVID affect any of this?
Keegan: Most of the musicians on the record are all people who I have admired and/or worked with for many years. I am a huge fan of Sophie’s voice and writing, and have performed with her in the past; Zach, I’ve known since high school. Logan and Jack are two of my favorite jazz players in Philly, and I’ve played with Jack for many years. I connected with Lizzie, the album’s harpist, by performing together at numerous Daybreaker events around the city.
However, I had to seek out a few new musicians for some of the more specific parts of the album. Chris, the french horn player, and Qian, the erhu player, are new friends I’ve made through the album’s development, who I didn’t know before and sought out for their unique skills. I look forward to working with them more in the future.
Pretty much all of the parts on Startide were arranged by myself, but Sophie had a heavy hand in the composition of her vocal parts and made them completely her own. Lizzie also taught me a lot about the arrangement for Harp, which as it turns out is not as straightforward as one might expect. In addition to this, there are a few moments of improvisation on the album: namely, Logan’s piano solo (and my saxophone solo) in “Fantasy Sidereal” and Qian’s erhu solo in “The Stars Watched.” Aside from these moments, the rest of the album was composed and arranged by myself.
COVID definitely changed a lot about the album’s writing process. I was lucky enough to have gotten most of the instrumental recordings out of the way by the time the first lockdown arrived, but Sophie and I had to write and record her vocal parts almost entirely by remote, which was a challenging and new experience. I definitely would not prefer to do it again, but it was an interesting experiment, and we proved that we were capable of it.
Em: What does the story this album tells mean to you? What do you want it to mean to listeners?
Keegan: Myles and I went to lengths to make Startide at least a little bit abstract, in that we wanted anybody to be able to relate to it and apply it to their lives. From a distance, Startide is about leaving somebody you love, or being left by somebody you love, and what can follow. It’s about the excitement (and dread) of flight and the pain and burden of memory. It’s about the passage of time, and how we — and our memories — age. These things, I think anybody can relate to. I think there is a little bit of Startide that can be transposed onto anybody’s life.
This all being said, Startide does have a very specific and personal application to my own life. Startide is a true story. Obviously, nobody went to outer space and flung themselves into a black hole — but in the allegorical sense, Startide is a narration of true events, something that really happened to me. Despite keeping the lyrics symbolic and abstract, the album has been my way of processing and reflecting on the events of my own life, which I won’t regale you with here.
Em: Had COVID not been a factor in the release, would the project have looked any different? How did you initially plan on celebrating the project coming to a close? What will you be doing instead?
Keegan: Logistically, I think COVID may have sped up the album’s finish. Ordinarily, getting a musician’s time and attention can be hard, and there are 12 musicians on Startide. Once COVID hit, a lot of these musicians — myself included — suddenly had a lot more time on their hands. I was able to double down and really accelerate my own work, and also to get my collaborators on the line much more easily.
Musically, I don’t think Startide would have sounded much different in the absence of COVID. Startide doesn’t have many moments of synchronous play - that is, multiple musicians in the same room playing at once. Each part was recorded individually and added procedurally to the record. I think this would have been how we built the album, COVID or not. Additionally, there wasn’t much co-writing on Startide — most of the parts were down on paper long before the pandemic struck.
Celebratorily, the release looks a lot different. We had big plans for an extremely cool release show — a revolving door of the 12 musicians, a few excursions into jazz and jam territory, a few departures into techno, an amazing team of openers, and an amazing venue nailed down. Sadly, this is all impossible now.
In the absence of being able to throw a release party, I’ve been diverting a lot of that effort into the development of a vinyl pressing of Startide. I think it’s a cool way to commemorate the release and give people something to take away with them, in the absence of a cool performance experience. A lot of work has gone into an awesome sleeve design, which has an illustrated tracklist and lyrics panel to act as supplements to the music.
As the weather warms up and the vaccine proliferates, I’m kicking around ideas for an outdoor listening party, using radio headphones, like a silent disco, so that everyone can have a good sonic experience at a distance from one another! Stay tuned for more on that.
Em: What are you the proudest of about this album? What's something you felt you wouldn't be able to overcome in creating it, and then ultimately did? What have you learned?
Keegan: There was a moment about 60% through the album’s development where finishing it seemed pretty much impossible. We had created the upward-slope of our story arc, but not worked out how to bring it in for a landing. We had spent so much time and money recording and had so much left to do. A vocalist I spent about 100 hours recording, processing, and mixing dropped off the team. Logistically, coordinating the efforts of 12 musicians was an executive nightmare. It felt a little bit like I had dug myself into a really deep hole without making a plan about how to get out.
Moreover, writing songs that comprise a serial story is harder (at least for me) than writing isolated, self-contained pieces. It felt like every piece we added to the album was twice as hard to work out as the last. Really, Startide is basically a 42-minute long song. By songs 8, 9, and 10, trying to write with the weight of the entire album behind me was pretty tough.
For a long time, it was impossible to zoom out and think about the project-at-large, as a whole, because I’d lose my mind. The thousands of hours, dollars and decisions between me and the finish line seemed pretty much unbeatable. I guess if I’m proud of myself for anything, it’s keeping my head down and picking off one task at a time until, eventually, I could wrap my head around exactly how to get over the finish line.
I’m also really proud of the diverse cast of this album. There are a lot of people from different musical backgrounds, disciplines, and cultures on this piece. There are ancient instruments, modern instruments, chamber musicians, jazz musicians. Some of them only appear for a special moment, some of them are with us for the whole trip. Even though there are only two main characters on Startide, to me it feels like there are a dozen, old friends and new friends, friends who show up just for a short time and make a great impact, friends who are quietly by your side for years. In the end, I think it creates a sound that’s both electronic and organic, reminiscent and modern, and, most importantly, tells a great story.
Pre-save Startide here. It’s one of the most elaborate listening experiences I’ve had this year, and I feel so privileged to have sat with it a little early to fully dig in to how complex and nuanced Keegan’s writing and musicality is. I’m gutted that we can’t attend a real release show for this, but that’s something to look forward to in the future.