Stream: Lavender Diamond, ‘This Is How We Rise’

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Lavender Diamond (Photo by Shervin Lainez)

Becky Stark sings in the key of hope. So Lavender Diamond’s first album in eight years, “Now Is Time” (out Dec. 4), comes like a patch of blue sky on a smoke-filled landscape.

The follow-up to 2012’s “Incorruptible Heart” and 2007’s “Imagine Our Love” (the debut released on Matador Records), “Now Is the Time” finds Lavender Diamond resolutely sanguine. Here, Stark reunites with ace collaborators Steve Gregoropoulos and Ron Regé, Jr., and, backed by strings and horns, she soars over ornate orchestral arrangements.

“Right before our current storm of catastrophe, these songs came pouring in to us,” Stark says. “These songs of healing for a world in crisis. Crisis holds profound opportunity for healing and transformation. Now is the most powerful time we have ever known to transform our world and to build justice, peace and prosperity for all by living in harmony and with love for the earth, embodying the wisdom of equality and respect for all.”

She adds: “I came to this realization that there’s medicine in the music itself,” says Stark. “It can lift people up and heal them and point them toward transformation, and that led me to this tremendously powerful need to start writing and recording again.”

“You and I” is the recurring theme on the album’s lead track, “This Is How We Rise” — together, she submits, is not only how we fall but we turn the tide.

Guests on the album include guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, horn players Nate Walcott (Bright Eyes), Probyn Gregory and Sasami Ashworth, clarinetist Brian Walsh, bassists Ryan Feves and Gordon Bash and the string quartet of Kaitlin Wolfberg, Eric KM Clark, Tess Scott-Suhrstedt and Aniela Perry.

||| Stream: “This is How We Rise”

||| Previously: “Look Through The Window,” “Everybody’s Heart’s Breaking Now,” “Light My Way,” “Oh My Beautiful World”