Daytona Starsky is that kind of guitar player who has a physical relationship with his instrument. He frowns and bites his lips whenever he is in action with a curvy six-string body in his hands. At the age of eight, while still living in the Netherlands, where he was born, his father taught him to pluck the fingerboard and strum harmonies. 

“My dad was a musician. There were always guitars around the house,” Starsky, now 26, told me last Friday night after sound check before a show at Purgatory, a queer bar in Bushwick. 

“And my father was like, you know, if you’re gonna pick these things up, I’d just have to teach you how to play them because they’re not toys,” he added.