New York – Towering over you at over six feet, Finlay “Starsmith” Dow-Smith is hard to miss. His parted hair, pale skin and gangly walk make him fun to look at, but it’s his demeanor that catches you off guard. The 25-year-old electro-pop DJ’s loquaciousness and candid attitude strikes you as someone who has spent more time in the industry than a mere four years. Though fame hasn’t marred this soft-spoken Englishman, the roller-coaster ride of working from his mother’s basement to signing with major labels has made a definitive impact on Starsmith‘s music. 

So first off, the name Starsmith, where’d it come from?

Starsmith: I’m really bad because I’m asked that all the time, but there really is no story to it. I was in Uni and I had done that Bootleg remix, and I was going to put it online but I had no name to put it under. So, smith is in my surname, and I tried finding loads of post-it notes with words that worked before it, and every week I’d take one down until the one left was “star” and that’s really it. I really should come up with a story, you know?

You could just make something up; you don’t have to be so candid.

Starsmith: I could! I definitely could!

Now you’re well-known for your collaborations and remixes, such as Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” that was featured on her remixes album, so when you branched off in 2011 to do your own thing, what was your motivation in doing that?

Starsmith: I suppose it was – the opportunity was there to try and do it. I was signed to Island Records, I got signed as an artist and I had never thought about doing that. I had never thought about signing to a major record label and doing my own thing. But I never pumped anything out, so people had no idea I was ever signed to them. And that’s actually the best-case scenario now because there’s no positive or negative to it. By around 2011, by that point I’d left Island. So I had made a lot of an album and had decided it just wasn’t for me, and the tracks that I had started to put out were the ones that I was into but they weren’t into. It was more like if I were to do something, this is where I wanted to go, as opposed to more commercial stuff, which on a major label they were expecting. And at the time I was willing to try it, but kinda realized that after a few sessions that doing that stuff I kinda said that this wasn’t for me.

Speaking of Island Records, you put up on your Tumblr article “boobs” that you were going to leave Island and let those tracks that you made sit for a while. Have you ever revisited those tracks to do anything with them?

Starsmith: No, no no. It’s odd because you hear about people doing an album and they leave it and say “I’m done with those tracks,” but I would stand there and say, “how can you be done with those tracks?” I now completely get it. Even though I could reproduce them, there are some songs in there that I think would work if I reproduced them, but there’s too much of a connection to the way they are now. I think the way they sound to me, is the way they were in 2009 and 2010, and to reproduce them I’d still know the original versions. I’m sure at some point a couple of them will be revisited, or resurfaced but it probably seems mental to write off so many songs.

Especially because that’s your blood, sweat and tears for so long.

Starsmith: And with so many people, as well. With what they put in, it’s potentially a lot of work to write off it was a time when I was doing that. When you’re writing songs it’s easy to move on to the newest song that you’re doing without even thinking about it. You’ve forgotten about the ones you’d written last week. For me there are songs from a month ago that I may not remember it till I hear it, but there are other songs that I wrote four months ago that I’m still loving now. It’s just a very natural thing.

You studied music professionally at the University of Surrey, so was it an accident that you fell into electronic music?

Starsmith: Completely. Ellie [Goulding] was the very first person I worked with. I had done this bootleg remix while coming up with my name, it was for Katy Perry, and I set up a MySpace page and put it up there and it got featured on the Hype machine. At the time I didn’t even know what the Hype machine was. My brother was like, send me songs because he knew he all about it. And I heard it was doing really well and Ellie contacted me on MySpace. At the time she was writing acoustic demos for guitar and vocals. She just emailed and said she had a couple of demos and wanted to see if I could do something with them. It was a couple of days before the end of December and said she was free the first week of January and I said I work on my iMac in my bedroom at my mom’s house but come on down. But I had never written with anyone else, I’d written with friends when I was a teenager but never an open collaboration with someone I’d never met before which was I do on a daily basis now. She came over showed me her demo, and the first track we worked on was “Starry Eyed,” which is now her biggest hit in the UK. So that kinda set the precedent for the rest of the record. Everything just worked out very well.

So because you studied classically, do you think you may have a one-up on some other producers?

Starsmith: No, no. Production is like a – musical knowledge definitely comes into production but it’s definitely a different beast to song writing. For the first couple years I had been writing songs based off of what I had been taught based on what you shouldn’t do and stuff like that. For a couple years I had to force myself to go against that instinct of what I had known for 15 years.

You gained notoriety when you were fairly young, while in college. Was it a complete shock, especially because it wasn’t your goal?

Starsmith: Yeah during my final semester at Uni, when I met Ellie and I had been taken on by another company very soon after meeting Ellie, it was all brand new to me and got some official remixes in. I was studying and trying to do all my finals and prepare for my final performance and there was many, many moments when I was ready to drop out. I had gotten three years but I could see the finish line but I was wondering how much work I would need to get done, mixed with my career prospects, mixed with everything with Ellie. I mean she wasn’t signed at the time. There was no money; I was working as a waiter. Ellie was living outside of London and coming down for weeks at a time. It was all going well. But, I was spending shit tons of money on this degree. I got through it and graduated, but it was a massive, massive shock. Still was until very recently.

Now, you’re versed in a number of instruments including your specialty, which is tenor sax. Is it still your favorite instrument?

Starsmith: It’s definitely my favorite but I never get to play it. I tried putting it on a track in Ellie’s first record but it got lowered in the mix. I think the label was like, “that’s not happening.” They kept it but if I told you what song it is and where it is you’d hear it, but other than that you’d think it was just some annoying background in the mix. After that, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and M83 had these massive saxophones within 12 months! And I had done it six months earlier, and I was just sitting there like, “I tried it, but…”

A lot of people try to continually evolve electronic music to keep pace with pop music. Are you trying to do that yourself?

Starsmith: I suppose at the time when me and Ellie were working together that we had made this new influential sound. It wasn’t just Ellie but she was a part of this wave of female electronic people and I was part of that but I never thought that I was trying to do something new, and I’ve always had that hang over me that since I did something new then I have to try to do something new. I don’t try to think about how to push it forward, I suppose you don’t even realize that you’re doing it.

What’s your next Venture?

Starsmith: Starting to do my own singles next year, rather than put one out every year or a free download here and there, I took off a few months of writing for other people and sorta just wanted to see what I could come up with myself. I’ve written five singles, and three more commercial singles. We’re getting ready to put out from January. 

Photos By Joseph Jaafari