Garrison Starr was calling from Clayton, New York, on the St. Lawrence River, where she had performed at a benefit concert over the weekend and entered what she called “full relaxation mode.”
The pause would be brief. Starr’s itinerary includes a sold-out concert at Stissing Center in Pine Plains on July 17 followed by gigs that will take her to Oregon, Vermont, Maine, New York City, Nashville, and Memphis.
At Stissing Center, Starr will draw from nearly three decades of music, with an emphasis on her forthcoming album, “Garrison Starr and The Gospel Truth.” The concert will be held in The Grace Note, the center’s downstairs performance space.
“Audiences can expect to have a really fun and connected time,” Starr said in an interview with the Herald. “You might cry a little bit. You might laugh a little bit. You’re probably going to think twice about some things. I know you’ll enjoy it.”
Born in 1975 and raised in Hernando, Mississippi, near Memphis, Starr, 51, began playing guitar at 13. She describes her music through the artists who helped shape it: a little Melissa Etheridge, a little Indigo Girls, a little Tom Petty, and a rootsy country current beneath it all.
The words usually come first. Melodies, Starr said, “can kind of be anything,” but lyrics give a song its purpose.
“Lyrics, to me, that’s the integral part of the whole process,” she said. “Like, what are we talking about?”
Starr’s entry into the national music industry happened with improbable speed. She had attended the University of Mississippi for about a year and a half when she recorded a cassette containing an early version of “Superhero.” The manager of a local record store sent it to Ray Farrell, a Geffen Records representative, who shared it with others at the label.
“And the next thing you know, I was signed,” Starr said. “I mean, it was really that crazy.”
Starr was 21 when she signed with Geffen in 1996. The development deal included a $96,000 advance, she said, and she wrote most of the songs for her major-label debut during the following year. Geffen released “Eighteen Over Me” in 1997, introducing “Superhero” to a wider audience.
The opportunity arrived as Starr was struggling to understand who she was and how much of herself the people around her would allow her to become.
She grew up, she said, in “a very aggressive evangelical Christian community” and attended a private Christian school. In college, members of her sorority outed her, then told her they would give her “tough love” until she repented of what they called her “gay sin.”
Almost immediately afterward, she entered a major-label system with another set of expectations about how a young female artist should look, dress, and present herself.
“I think being with a major label and having them talk to you about your appearance and what needs to change, I think that just — I didn’t have the tools to deal with that,” Starr said.
She did not need someone to tell her to tell her how to look, she said.
“I was in such an identity crisis,” Starr said. “I often think about that time, and I think, man, I would really have loved to have had someone in my life who was evolved enough, who could have said, ‘Hey, Garrison, come on. Let’s talk over here for a second.’”
The question she wishes someone had asked was a simple one: “Who do you want to be?”
“If anyone had said that to me, it would have completely changed my whole trajectory,” she said.
Starr now describes herself as a “masculine-presenting lesbian” and “the definition of a tomboy.” In the 1990s, presenting herself authentically did not always feel safe, particularly after the response from the religious community in which she had grown up.
She resisted the expectation that she owed audiences, record executives, or anyone else an explanation of her sexuality before she had fully understood it herself.
“Why should anybody have to say anything?” she said. “Why do you all have to critique me at all? Why can’t I just be Garrison who happens to be gay? Why do you have to make it into a thing? Why do you have to make me say anything?”
Her career continued as the industry around her changed. Starr and her team expected “Superhero” to become a larger hit, but Geffen’s absorption into Interscope disrupted the label and its relationship with her work.
Starr survived the first round of roster cuts, in part because an Interscope executive was a fan, but spent about two years at the company without a sustained relationship with an artists-and-repertoire representative. She eventually wrote a letter asking to be released.
After Geffen and Interscope, Starr recorded through a Virgin subsidiary and later signed with Vanguard Records. She has since chosen to work independently.
That independence is not, in Starr’s telling, a romantic escape from the business of music. It requires her to understand the business more fully, decide what she can afford to invest, and determine how to give a record a chance of reaching listeners.
“I’ve been in this business long enough,” she said. “I know what needs to be done.”
When potential partners did not understand the new album, or decided the timing was not right, Starr stopped trying to persuade them.
“I’m not going to try to force anybody to get it,” she said.
Starr’s career has also expanded beyond her own recordings. Her songs have appeared in television series including “Grey’s Anatomy,” “All American,” “Queen Sugar,” “Pretty Little Liars,” and “The Hills.”
She has produced and co-written music with comedian and musician Margaret Cho, including material for Cho’s 2016 album, “American Myth,” which was nominated for best comedy album at the 2017 Grammy Awards.
As a producer, Starr said, she prefers to guide a project’s larger creative vision rather than become consumed by the technical minutiae of engineering a recording.
“I enjoy being more of a Rick Rubin,” she said. “I like the global view.”
“Garrison Starr and The Gospel Truth,” due Sept. 25, developed in Los Angeles over roughly six years. Some songs began as singles or were placed in television programs before Starr and her collaborators began treating them as parts of a full album. It will be her first full-length release since “Girl I Used to Be” in 2021.
The new record arrives as Starr reconsiders the experiences that shaped her, including her religious upbringing, her sexuality, her years in the major-label system, and her instinct to seek reconciliation before permitting herself to move forward.
“It’s been a long process of forgiveness,” she said. “And mostly I think it’s been a long process of forgiving myself for what I just didn’t know to do.”
For years, Starr believed she needed her parents and others within their religious community to understand her before she could turn the page. She no longer believes that understanding is a prerequisite for freedom.
“I’ve realized that I can turn the page on anything I want to,” she said. “And it’s also OK if I don’t go back there and they don’t follow me.”
Learning “how to cut loose what needs to be cut loose,” she said, has brought a new lightness to her performances without making her less willing to speak plainly.
Starr grew up admiring Indigo Girls, Tori Amos, Steve Earle, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, and Ani DiFranco, artists who treated songwriting as a place to make their convictions audible.
“I feel a responsibility to speak up on things that are on my heart,” Starr said. “That’s part of why I’m a singer-songwriter.”
She is particularly troubled, she said, when LGBTQ+ people, people of color, and other marginalized groups are targeted for political attention, media engagement, or profit. Her challenge is to speak with conviction without treating every disagreement as a reason to abandon the person on the other side.
Starr does not pretend that balance is simple, either in music or in life. She continues to struggle with self-criticism when writing alone and sometimes walks away from an idea when fear overtakes the work. The longer creativity is neglected, she said, the harder returning to it becomes.
Still, Starr is trying to trust that neither a song nor a life must be forced into existence according to someone else’s timetable.
“What is meant for me will find me,” she said. “I trust the timing of my life.”
Garrison Starr performs from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. Friday, July 17, in The Grace Note at Stissing Center in Pine Plains. The concert is sold out.