Star 99 break down every track on their new album, 'Gaman'!

Today we are thrilled to bring you a track-by-track breakdown for San Jose-based indie punks Star 99’s sophomore album Gaman! The album is out today via Lauren Records and it is their first release as a quintet with multi-instrumentalist Aidan Delaney joining Saoirse Alesandro, Chris Gough, Jeremy Romero, and Thomas Calvo.
The album contains 10 extremely dynamic tracks that find the band expanding their sound and diving into a multitude of emotional complexities as they explore familial, platonic, and romantic relationships as well as what it truly means to persist through hardships.
We caught up with guitarists and vocalists Saoirse Alesandro and Thomas Calvo to hear the stories behind each of the tracks. Listen to Gaman and read the track-by-track below!

Gaman Track-by-Track Breakdown

Kill

I’m getting grey hair and it’s freaking me out. I wish I could feel the enlightened, earned confidence I thought I’d feel by my late 20’s, but found you can’t wait around for anything good or meaningful to find you- you have to actively seek it out. This is about what runs through my head when I keep myself from doing that. - Saoirse

Simulator

I moved to California from Guam in 2012, not too long after I graduated high school, and was lucky enough to spend the formative years of my young adulthood going to DIY shows in the Bay Area. I experienced some heavy culture shock in those first few years, the contrast between island life and living in the city is something I am still trying to reconcile. I’m prone to second guessing and hyper fixation, especially because I’ll always feel a little bit like an outsider, not totally feeling comfortable in America or in Guam.  This song is about anxiously navigating conversations and code switching. - Thomas

Brother

The older sister role is really intense - it’s partially a peer relationship, partially (hopefully) a protector role, but ideally you’re also trying not to project too much of your own singular experiences/feelings. I wrote this for my brothers, but probably I inevitably projected a little. Everyone in this band is the oldest sibling and it makes for a very specific and direct dynamic when we talk about our feelings and write songs. It’s also about dropping my own experiences for them to learn from. - Saoirse

IWLYG (I Wanna Let You Go)

The songs I write for Star 99 are heavily  informed by 90’s power pop and grunge-adjacent indie rock, stuff like Matthew Sweet & J Mascis. I love how they write lyrics that could be interpreted as romantic or blissful, but utilize aching chord progressions and bittersweet vocal performances that can suggest a level of irony and resentment. I wanted to write “I Wanna Let You Go” like a breakup song, but it started as a song about realizing a family member was toxic, and wondering if I need to cut them off. - Thomas

Emails

San Jose is a major character in the life of anyone that’s from here. It breathes and evolves and devolves. This is about feeling stuck, comparing yourself to the alternate reality version of yourself where you moved to New York, getting mad at yourself for thinking like that because the Bay Area rules, spinning out completely into imposter syndrome, bouncing back into a totally unearned ego trip, and generally needing to call my therapist and increase my meds. - Saoirse

Grey Wall

”Grey Wall” was written when we locked ourselves in our practice room with a beat playing on a loop. We wrote this 100% together, which is rare, and it might have happened as quickly as it did because we wanted to leave the room and the looped track. It’s about sitting on porches, smoking cigarettes with your friends in the summer in downtown San Jose, and how something that feels so ordinary in the moment becomes mythologized by nostalgia over time.' - Saoirse

Pacemaker

My fear of death is totally constant and debilitating. “Pacemaker” is about that. You can try to distract yourself from your existential crisis but the only way out is through! I was high on mushrooms at a park thinking about the patterns I saw in how my family interacts with each other with all their worst tendencies on display while my grandad was on his deathbed. - Saoirse

Pushing Daisies

This song is an attempt to not overthink lyrics or chord progressions, and write a straightforward C chord/G chord indie rock jangle banger. I got in a long-distance argument with some family back home, and I jotted down my immediate feelings after that went down, which became the basis of this track. It was really great to write a guitar song with our old friend and new member, Aidan, especially because they can take over the solos and melodic parts with keys, while I can relax on some jangly arpeggiated major chords.  - Thomas

Esta

I’m in my early 30s, and my family is hitting the point where we have to prepare for the older generation to pass away. I catch myself imagining the headspace my parents/grandparents were in when they were my age. Guam has been colonized by various countries for over 500 years, and the traumas inflicted by the Japanese occupation of the island during the Second World War, along with our current  status as a heavily militarized US territory with no meaningful sociopolitical agency have negatively permeated most aspects of island life. Every family on Guam has dealt with drug addictions, physical abuse and emotional dysfunction.
I had a difficult relationship with my grandmother, who passed recently: she was a fundamentally devout Catholic, and growing up I often felt like her relationship with God came before her ability to practically deal with family dysfunction, or to understand me better as a person. You can’t pray away all of your problems. This song is about trying to empathize with my grandmother, recognizing the struggles she experienced as a mother and survivor of the War, and realizing that her religiosity might be her own way of responding to trauma. - Thomas

Gaman

I’m mixed/Japanese, and I was raised by my grandma. She comes from the generation of Japanese-Americans that were sent to internment camps during WW2, and a lot of that generation embody this concept called “gaman”. “Gaman” is about sustaining a state of emotional strength and pushing through your circumstances despite adversity. It’s also - for better or worse - about keeping your head down, minding your business, and not making too many waves.
My grandma is a warm, cheerful, positive person, but she’s been through some pretty gnarly, harrowing stuff. I wrote this while thinking about her, but from my perspective as someone that is a few generations out and almost opposite in temperament. I struggle with many aspects of Japanese-American culture that exist in my family and in myself, but recently I’ve seen how powerful a “gaman” mentality can be when you need to be strong. - Saoirse