Jen Starsinic

Vents Magazine Interviews Jen Starsinic

Jen Starsinic is known as a prodigy fiddle player – yet she just made a badass indie rock album entitled Bad Actor, out February 7th. Her first single from the album, “Picture in a Frame,” has already garnered over 10k streams on Spotify and she played a sold-out Single Release show at The 5 Spot in Nashville. People are really excited about this release! Her backing band is Nashville pedal steel legend, Paul Niehaus (lead electric guitar, pedal steel) formerly of Calexico, Iron & Wine, currently plays with Justin Townes Earle and Iris Dement, Ben Alleman (synths, piano, organ) – currently in Jenny Lewis’s band. formerly played with Grace Potter and Dr. John, and Parker McAnnally (producer, bassist, mix engineer) of The Prescriptions who are recently signed to Single Lock Records.

The Berklee School of Music graduate has earned her stripes as a road warrior by joining the touring lineups of several bands, including the David Mayfield Parade. Starsinic wrote the majority of Bad Actor in Nashville after moving there in 2014. Nashville is also the place where she created her critically-acclaimed The Flood and Fire which featured Molly Tuttle (Compass Records, first woman to win IBMA Guitarist of the Year), Charlie Rose of Elephant Revival, Gabe Hirshfeld of Lonely Heartstring Band (Rounder Records), and Alison DeGroot (one of Canada’s finest folk musicians).

Glide Magazine Premieres Jen Starsinic’s Graceful and Sublime New Single, ‘Foreign Thing’

From the dreamy, confessional indie-rock that fills her newest release, Bad Actor, to the bluegrass and old-time roots music that soundtracked her upbringing in small-town Pennsylvania, Jen Starsinic has spent much of her 20s in a whirl of evolution. She’s been a frontwoman, a side musician, a songwriter, and a top-tier instrumentalist. As her music has deepened and diversified, so has her understanding of her own emotional makeup — an understanding that’s been shaped not only by the onset of adulthood, but also by her time taking care of a sick parent, navigating the twists and turns of modern-day romance, making a new home in Nashville, and taking a hard look at her anxieties. Bad Actor shines a light on that period of personal and musical growth, reintroducing Starsinic as a songwriter whose folk roots have blossomed into something bigger, bolder, and far more amplified.

“I grew up playing fiddle in bluegrass bands,” she says. “In my heart, I’ll always be a folk writer, because what that means to me is a musician who writes truthfully about her own experience. But I also love weird pop music, indie-rock, and dream-pop. I’ve always wanted to be in rock bands. The opportunity had just never been presented before…so I made my own.”

American Songwriter Features Jen Starsinic’s New Video, “Picture in a Frame,” Just Ahead of Her New Album

Photographs can be “electro-magnetic,” as multi-instrumentalist Jen Starsinic observes with her new song and video “Picture in a Frame,” premiering today on American Songwriter. The track serves as the first offering to an indie-rock record called Bad Actor, expected February 7, 2020.

“Visible wavelengths from back when we were fun / Printed out on paper to have you when you’re gone,” she sings. She waxes nostalgic for a time gone by, and together with fuzzy guitar work and a steady rhythm, she also tries to heal along the way. “I wrote ‘Picture in a Frame’ when my dad was first starting to get really sick,” she explained, “and I was also pretty fresh out of a relationship that I would later learn to recognize as having been emotionally abusive, a relationship dynamic that I was already quite familiar with.”