You may recognise some of its band members from various Canadian indie outfits (most notably Broken Social Scene), but Montreal's Stars are a musical force of their own. Having won over indie-pop harmony lovers with their signature melodic sound since 2000, the quartet return to Australia in January to promote their new EP, Sad Robots.
yourGigs (yG): Why did you decide to release an EP rather than a full-length album?
Torquil Campbell (TC): We had started to talk about a certain approach to music that we wanted to take with the new stuff in the new record that we were going to make, and everybody got very excited by it because we all seem to be pretty much in agreement about that direction. So the EP was kind of a way of affirming these instincts we had about the possibilities of that approach to music. We paid for it ourselves and we did it ourselves and it was very much a family project that we did to kind of check in and see where we were and what we wanted to do.
yG: What influenced your decision to release Sad Robots independently?
TC: We just wanted to very spontaneously and simply get these ideas out, not take too much time with it, not spend too much money on it and really have complete control over the instantaneousness of it. This band tends to work in a very detailed, very painstaking way on things and ... we knew we didn't have the time to do that, but we still wanted to go in and make this music. The EP kind of came up because we had these tracks and we had ideas for a couple of other tracks and we thought we'd put some live stuff on it, you know, something that the fans could buy at shows who already owned the records and stuff and something we can sell online. And it kind of grew into this fully shaped idea.
yG: With the Internet allowing so many people to release music, do you feel more pressure as a band to step things up?
TC: The only pressure we ever feel is between each other - the only pressure you ever should feel if you want to succeed. It doesn't matter, ultimately; you're in this experience with these people trying to make music and you're accountable to them for good ideas and for positivity and hard work and those sorts of things, and other than that you can't control it. Really, they're the people you're around so it doesn't matter if somebody else hates what you're doing; it matters if Evan [Cranley, the band's bassist] is looking at you like you're an idiot. The worst thing that could possibly happen is that Evan sings you a vocal line that you're doing in a mocking Aretha Franklin voice [laughs], and you know it's ... way worse than a bad review or what people think on the Internet.
yG: Do you ever write about personal experiences in your songs?
TC: I live a life that most people would consider a very happy and light life ... [and] I think that as a narrator, as a person who wants to tell stories, I find other people whose lives are desperate and on the edge of something to be much more rich in meaning and symbolism and in everything. That's where my taste leads me as an artist; it always has. Like Patricia Highsmith and Marc Chagall, and sex and death and murder.
yG: You and bandmate Amy Millan share vocal duties - how do you decide who sings?
TC: Sometimes you just hear that it makes sense that things are doubled - it's very instinctual; I tend to write more for Amy than she does for me, because ultimately I think I'd like to write exclusively for Amy and I'd rather not be singing. But it kind of takes away an option in terms of your ability to tell a story if you only have one voice. I agree with most people in saying that if Amy sang all the time the band would be better, but I'm not sure if it would be "the band".
yG: When can we expect another full-length album from Stars?
TC: Probably not until early 2010 would be our guess. Hopefully there will be other records involving all of us coming out next year and we'll continue to try and develop this idea of having direct contact with the listeners and putting out things that people can buy on the spur of the moment. We might make a single and decide to sell it for 50 cents on the Internet - I mean, that's what's great about this technology. You never know, maybe there'll be a record next week! [Laughs]; it's so instantly "completable" and so instantly accessible.
Michelle Ho
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