Francis and the Lights, Pop Star Interrupted

Two days later, I drove to a small cabin he was renting at the end of a long, rocky road in Sebastopol, a leafy, vineyard-choked town in Northern California 20 minutes from the coast. In more than a dozen years of releasing music under the name Francis and the Lights, Starlite, 38, had never sat for an in-depth interview. Basic facts of his life (Who were his parents? Was that really his name?) remained a mystery, even as his sound and aesthetic sensibility as a songwriter and producer for transformative acts like Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Drake and Bon Iver seeped into the fabric of modern pop.

When I arrived at the cabin, perched on a hill overlooking the Sonoma Valley, I half expected to find it empty. Instead, Starlite came to the front door with a shy smile. He was wearing a faded purple sweatshirt, black sunglasses and camel Yeezy boots, which made for a stark contrast with the home’s faux-frontier décor. He had arrived only the day before, but he was a gracious host and answered every question I could throw at him in 12 hours of interviews over three days.

In an earlier life, Starlite was a fixture of downtown New York and played the same stages from which the Strokes and Arcade Fire made their storied leaps toward the mainstream. Claiming a lineage of singer/showmen that included James Brown, Prince and David Byrne, his music — especially the first two Francis and the Lights EPs, “Striking” (2007) and “A Modern Promise” (2008) — distilled the precision and drama of ’80s arena pop into a sleek, serrated package.

When I first heard it, the voice is what got me. It was saturated with yearning yet fantastically suave, heedlessly skidding from ecstasy through agony and back, like a NASCAR racer who’d severed his own brakes. A series of single-take music videos, directed by Jake Schreier, enhanced the thrill.

In “The Top,” from “A Modern Promise,” Starlite appears alone in a half-lit room, looking like a 19th-century inventor — black suit, gaunt skin, precarious pompadour — and dancing like a young Elvis. Its masterful climax is a sudden torrent of prop lights, which shatter on the floor at the precise moment that Starlite, in a kind of full-body rebellion against gravity, departs from it.

As his legend spread, fueled by rapturous live shows and an enigmatic persona, other artists with grand visions came calling. Justin Vernon, of Bon Iver, who sings on the Starlite songs “Friends” and “Take Me to the Light,” compared Starlite’s all-around musical acumen to Prince and his mastery of the piano to Randy Newman. “I’ve never met anyone more destined to be a pop star,” he said.

West, for whom Starlite co-wrote and coproduced “I Thought About Killing You,” among other songs, called the artist “a true original with an unorthodox style” in an email.

Erykah Badu, another friend, introduced herself to Starlite backstage at one of his concerts in 2017. “I hadn’t felt that inspired or stimulated in a long time,” she told me of the show. “It’s his freedom — in his movements, his singing, his songwriting. Not everyone is in tune with that frequency, but he’s on it, and he’s sharing it with the rest of us.”

But Starlite himself never became a marquee name like the ones he channeled onstage or assisted in the studio. After his first album, “It’ll Be Better” (2010), and a tour opening for Drake, he went quiet for years at a time, with just two further albums released over the next decade.

At the cabin in Sebastopol, we were supposed to be discussing a triumphant return — a new project called “Same Night, Different Dream.” It had been planned as the culmination of a busy year in which Starlite, who has no record label or publicist, had contributed to new albums from West, Bon Iver and Chance the Rapper.

But after two canceled release dates — the last on Dec. 1, the day of his nonapology apology on Twitter — it was unclear when or if the music would come out.

Starlite made mint tea and sat down at the kitchen table. He had just a handful of half-finished songs where he’d hoped a complete thought would be. For months, he had been haunted by a dreadful feeling that a critical opportunity was escaping him, that they’d been escaping him his entire life. And yet he couldn’t figure out what he should do now.

When he thought about his career, he didn’t feel “unorthodox” or like an inspiration to anyone. He felt lost.

“It was harder to do it this way,” he said. “And I didn’t do the things that I wanted to.”

At the beginning , Francis Farewell Starlite, born Abe Morre Katz-Milder in Oakland, California — he legally changed his name in 2004 — was a dancer. As a 6-year-old at summer camp, he discovered his body had an automatic reaction to music, that this reaction was different from other people’s, and that seemingly everyone loved to watch.

Summer camp begat dance camp, where choreography set to pop hits of the day, like “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer, taught a young Starlite to temper his wild energy with formal rigor. Francis and the Lights music videos are always a balancing act between the two. But the immoderate 6-year-old remains his default setting.

In a recording studio, where artists and their cheerleaders often work in a fog of self-delusion, Starlite’s collaborators said he can act as a kind of human compass.

“When he likes something, he goes crazy; he’ll knock over your keyboards and mics because he’s so affected by it,” said Benny Blanco, a producer known for his work with Katy Perry and Ed Sheeran. “But as soon as he hears a sound that he doesn’t like, he completely shuts down; it’s impossible for him to listen to bad music.”

At 8, Starlite was put into guitar and then piano lessons by his mother. He excelled at piano, but he felt cursed, even as a child, by long periods of what he called writer’s block, usually accompanied by crippling self-doubt.

As an adolescent, Starlite was a classroom cutup who played Gollum in a student production of “The Lord of the Rings,” performed in a mentor’s soul cover band, and wore a tuxedo as the self-appointed host of a school talent show. But the highs that he felt onstage could be wiped out by debilitating lows elsewhere. Even small perceived failures could send him into spirals of despair and self-consciousness, sometimes lasting for months.

“I remember walking around literally cursing myself out loud, just yelling all of these crazy things,” Starlite said. “I was convinced I was a loser who couldn’t do anything right and that I had to change schools because everyone knew it.”

In middle school, a doctor gave Starlite a diagnosis of bipolar disorder (later, another doctor said he had depression) and prescribed psychiatric medication. At summer camp, he threw it out, unused. “I was afraid it was going to make me into something that I wasn’t,” he said.

When he’s not feeling depressed, Starlite has long stretches of happiness and relative stability, usually accompanied by surges in musical productivity. During these phases, his zealous pursuit of his creative vision can be intoxicating.

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Schreier, the music video director (he now works in film and television), grew up with Starlite and is a former keyboard player in Francis and the Lights. He recalls the euphoria of the band’s early performances in Brooklyn, after Starlite had spent all of his money to move there in a mail truck he’d filled with music equipment.

“He would have these Champagne chandeliers at the shows, and people would be drinking out of coconuts and eating strawberries and chocolate,” Schreier said. “It started out with just a few people in his loft, but eventually there were hundreds of kids losing their minds.”

Aaron Lammer, another childhood friend of Starlite’s and a keyboardist and songwriter in the band, calls Starlite’s philosophy of absolute devotion to his music “knees to the floor,” an expression that later became a song title and the name of Starlite’s company (KTTF Records).

“It refers to a video of James Brown he used to watch where Brown keeps dropping to the floor, full body weight,” Lammer said. “At the end of it, his pants are skinned, and he’s bleeding from both knees — that’s Francis in pretty much everything he does.”

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From the outside, the ups and downs of Starlite’s career — including the six years between his first album and his second, “Farewell, Starlite!” — had seemed to fit a familiar script: tortured artist, capricious muse. But learning of his struggles with mental illness suggested a more complicated one.

Starlite recalled meeting with a psychiatrist who cited the symptoms of a manic episode (“exaggerated self-esteem and grandiosity”) to imply that his conviction to emulate the achievements of Brown and Michael Jackson was a manifestation of his delusion. If it was, then the engine that had powered his career and sustained him through his darkest days was a kind of mirage, no more real than the nagging thoughts that had tormented him as an adolescent. Was it? If so, where did that leave him?

“In my worst moments, I feel like I don’t know who I am,” Starlite said. After years of going on and off medication, he’d recently decided to start again.

On my second day in Sebastopol, I took Starlite to see about renting a piano. It was too rainy not to turn on the windshield wipers but not rainy enough to really need them, turning the world into a smear of greens, browns and yellows.

His plan for the next few months, he said, was to practice piano. Also: to get in shape. Both of which seemed easier than writing — or acknowledging the necessity of writing — a batch of new songs.

But Starlite didn’t actually feel much like practicing. He was depressed and preoccupied with regret.

Since 2008, he’d declined several opportunities to sign with record labels — including XL Records, West’s GOOD Music label, Drake’s October’s Very Own imprint and others — that many other artists dream of, opting instead to self-release his music.

This has had definite upsides. Starlite controls his recordings and collects all revenue. But there are downsides, too. If he’d had the resources that a label could have provided, if his songs were on the radio and in soda ads, if his music video budgets were three or five times what they were, could he have been as big as his idols?

“How many shows have I played since 2011?” Starlite asked, ruefully. “How many videos have I made? A few, but not nearly as many as I would have wanted. What pains me is that people wanted to help me. They wanted to take me in. And as soon as it was at the door, I ran away — again and again and again.”

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His most enduring collaborations have been with other artists, including Bon Iver, Blanco and West, with whom Starlite has grown especially close in recent years. The two first met in 2007, while Starlite was working as a runner at the SoHo restaurant Blue Ribbon Brasserie (he used the office computer to burn a CD of his demo), but they didn’t become friendly until 2016, when both worked on the Chance the Rapper song “All We Got.”

They connected over a digital vocal production technique Starlite had discovered called the harmonizer (or “prismizer”), in which the notes on a keyboard are used to create a real-time, five-part harmony with the singer’s voice. (He later showed it to Bon Iver and Frank Ocean.) Soon after, an invitation to West’s ranch in Wyoming arrived. Starlite lived there on and off in 2018 and 2019, helping West, whose every interview he can quote on command, to craft the albums “Ye” and “Jesus Is King.”

“We just started working immediately,” Starlite said. “I couldn’t believe it. He was validating everything I’d ever thought about myself.”

It’s easy to see why Starlite would see in West an answer to the questions that bedeviled him in Sebastopol. Not only has the rapper and provocateur managed stardom on his own terms, he has also said he is bipolar.

But while he was orbiting his hero, Starlite’s own mental health deteriorated, and his music, including the songs he had hoped would make up “Same Night, Different Dream,” languished.

BJ Burton, a producer and friend Starlite met through Justin Vernon, suggested that absorption into West’s universe had a corrosive effect. “He started to get paranoid and difficult to talk to,” Burton said. “I don’t think being around that level of fame was a good influence on him.”

Starlite rejected that theory. “That whole experience was amazing for me,” he said. “I had some of the best moments of my life.”

On the third day at the cabin, Starlite tested out his new piano, playing an ethereal melody for a song he was working on called “Witness.” He was sitting in front of a picture window, next to a wood-burning stove fireplace, which filled the room with the sharp, sweet smell of oak.

“Witness” is about a friend named Jim, who is suffering from memory loss, and to whom Starlite planned to dedicate “Same Night, Different Dream.”

In times when / You don’t know who’s listening / I’ll be your witness.

Jim helped raise Starlite after his parents’ divorce. Thinking of his friend gave the artist a sense of urgency to finish the project. But it also deepened his guilt over the time he felt he’d wasted.

“It’s easy for me to get into that state where I feel like I’m already too old, and the touch is gone,” he said.

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Every pivotal decision he’d made in his career replayed in his mind on a punishing loop. What was he thinking when he’d said no to all those record deals?

Caius Pawson, a friend and the founder of the record label Young Turks, who’d twice tried to sign Starlite as a scout for XL, suggested the musician’s fear of not making it had led him to avoid situations where he could fail. “The closer he got to a partner who could realize his vision, the more he wanted to disappear,” he said.

Blanco, who’d also tried and failed to forge a deal with Starlite, blamed his contrarian nature: “Francis is the kind of person where if there’s two hallways and you tell him to go down one of them, he’ll back flip down the other one, do a split at the end, and then look back at you and smile.”

But the artist himself was working toward a simpler theory: “hubris.” As a young man, he had thought that accepting help meant admitting weakness.

“I used to feel like if I did something on my own, and it went well, it would prove how valuable I was,” he said.

Now he was recalculating and considering what he might gain by relinquishing control — if not to a record company, then to the supporters around him who had been there all along.

“The most painful part is times like this because you’re in the dark,” he said. “You know there’s something on the other side, but you don’t know what it is.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .