“What a long strange trip it’s been,” sang the Grateful Dead in their most popular anthem, “Truckin’.” The same could be said for the saga that brought Joel Siegel, Sherry Fox and Laura Allan together to make Starcrossed. In a way, this album was more than 30 years in the making. It’s a culmination and a vindication. It’s the fulfillment of a dream and of destiny. It’s a journey and a destination. It’s yesterday, today and tomorrow. Most of all, it’s real music, sung and played with passion — heart songs and brain food — voices rising in sweet harmony, carried on rivers of rhythm and rhyme.

The friendship between Joel Siegel and Sherry Fox stretches back to the late 1960s, when both were students and aspiring musicians at Henry Ford High School in a working class part of Detroit. “Everyone in the group that became R.J. Fox went to the same high school,” Joel remembers. “We all started singing in choirs when we were kids. We sang in the same honors glee clubs, though we weren’t all in the same grade.”

Both had music in their backgrounds from a very early age. Joel’s parents played in Detroit’s symphony orchestra — mom was first violin, dad first cello — on top of successful careers as a psychologist and professor, respectively. Sherry’s parents were both huge fans of music, so the sounds of Ella, Sinatra, Mel Torme, Peggy Lee and other great singers filled the house, and were augmented by her older brother’s folk music records. And then, of course there was that inescapable music that had branded Detroit as one of the music capitals of America: Motown.