Francis Farewell Starlite  Francis Farewell Starlite is an American musician, record producer, singer, songwriter, dancer, and the founder and lead singer of the pop project Francis and the Lights. He is primarily a vocalist and pianist, and is often credited by the Francis and the Lights name for his solo work. He is a frequent collaborator of multiple artists and producers, including Kanye West, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Benny Blanco, Cashmere Cat, Chance the Rapper, Nico Segal, Frank Ocean and Banks. Starlite was born Abe Morre Katz-Milder on 14 June 1981 in Oakland, California. He was raised in Berkeley, California, and attended Berkeley High School, where he befriended future collaborators and Francis and the Lights members Rene Solomon and Jake Schreier. In 1999, Starlite enrolled at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Starlite befriended future Francis and the Lights collaborator Jake Rabinbach while a student at Wesleyan. Starlite attended Wesleyan from 1999 before ultimately dropping out in 2002. While there, Starlite and Rabinach were schoolmates of MGMT's members Andrew VanWyngarden and Benjamin Goldwasser, whom they have since toured with. Starlite began traveling across the United States by train in an effort to find what direction he was going to take his life. While on a train traveling from Elkhart, Indiana to New Orleans, Starlite came to the decision that he was going to pursue his passion for music as a career path. In an interview with "Entertainment Weekly" in 2010, he said, "I had played music and loved it my entire life, but hadn’t fully committed to it. And there was a moment when I wrote down the different things I could do. And then I wrote down, 'I think I’ll give the band a go.'" Shortly afterwards, Starlite returned to his birthplace of Oakland, California, where he lived and worked in a rehearsal space at Soundwave Studios and wrote songs for close to a year. He subsequently drove across the U.S. in a decommissioned postal truck to New York City, where he then formed Francis and the Lights. The band rehearsed for an entire year before starting to perform through a series of invitation-only shows at a white fabric-draped warehouse space. On 3 November 2008, Starlite incorporated Francis and the Lights, LLC, as a limited liability company, as an alternative to signing a record deal.