TAS In Session: Stars
Montréal's heartbreak kids, Stars, are marking their tenth anniversary and in June they released their fifth album, The Five Ghosts, on Vagrant Records . The quintet (yes, they're a bit fixed on the number 5 at the moment) have also become the proud owners of their very own label, Soft Revolution Records.
All band members - Torquil Campbell, Amy Millan, Evan Cranley, Chris Seligman and Pat McGee - are part of the extended Broken Social Scene family and will be on the road all summer and into late autumn. Tour stops include Lollapalooza and Montréal's Osheaga Music Festival. plus they'll be back in the New York area on September 24, playing Terminal 5 (appropriate, given their numerical obsession).
Stars dropped by Studio A not long ago to chat with WFUV's Rita Houston and they performed three songs from their new album, including "I Died So I Could Haunt You" and "Dead Hearts," plus one old favorite, "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead." Notice a theme?
Rita Houston: The new batch of songs on The Five Ghosts is a wonderful collection of some melody-rich tunes. The song “Fixed” is a great example of the gift for language that you guys bring to the table. “Fisticuffs” in a lyric! I think that’s a first. Where did that song come from?
Amy Millan: Well, we have gone through a big change with this latest album, a large change in our lives and we started our own label. It was the idea of ambition and what is success and our careers. We’ve been together for ten years and no matter what, you get a little nervous when you’re putting out an album. I think it’s mostly a question of ambition and success. Now, “fisticuffs” ... actually Leslie Feist, who is my friend, that’s my nickname for her. I call her “Fisticuffs.”
Rita: The twist there is that [in the lyric], you go from “fisticuffs” to “fixed to cut.”
Amy: That’s the idea; that you’re always setting yourself up to fail. Whether it be in your relationships or your work. I find for me, when I’m the underdog, I do much better when things are going well, but I feel nervous and I want to burn it all down, which isn’t a good thing.
Rita: What was the inspiration for titling the album The Five Ghosts?
Torquil Campbell: Well, we were haunted all year. I think we had ghosts on our mind a lot. I don’t know why there’s five of them, but I think five is a disturbing number, I guess, to me. There’s something unsettling about the number five. I always have an answer for these things, but in the case of The Five Ghosts, I don’t know why. It just seemed to be the only thing that made sense to everyone. The year was one of being aware of things you left behind, people you’ve left behind and things that are haunting you. The whole process of making the record started with these weird incident of Chris being haunted in the place he was staying in when we got together to write in Vancouver. Chris stayed in this place that was haunted and he’d be visited in the night by this entity. It was crazy! The whole album began with us being really freaked out by this experience. The ghost just stuck around.
Rita: Plus, it’s your fifth record.
Torquil: There you go.
Amy: And there’s five of us in the band.
Torquil: Five is a strange number.
Rita: Now you've started your own label [Soft Revolution Records]. What’s the story with that?
Amy: Well, we were pretty smart with our finances, we saved our pennies and we recorded the whole thing ourselves. It’s the new black (laughs). We put out [the EP] Sad Robots first; that was us getting our feet wet and it was pretty exciting. It’s an interesting way of making an album when you’re just doing it, the five of us in a room, discussing the music. You don’t have to play it for anyone until it’s finished. The idea is once we end up with all of the rights to our music, within the next 25 years, that it will have a home and we’ll be able to re-release things on vinyl and our fans who stick with us for that whole time will always know where to come find our music.
Torquil: The next 25 years. Wow. That’s like six albums worth of pan flute music somewhere in 2030. Everybody get there Zamfirs out, it’s time to play the new mix of “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead.” Cranley, do you want to lead the Zamfir orchestra?
Evan Cranley: I actually have a pocket Zamfir on me right now.
Torquil: I thought you were just happy to see me. (all laugh).
Rita: I don’t think that most music fans realize that a lot of bands are in situations where [they] don’t “own” their material.
Amy: Well, you always own a part of it. But, for instance, we couldn’t make any compilation we wanted, we’d have to have long discussions and figure out percentages. It’s kind of boring. And it’s all legal which is really expensive too.
Torquil: We’re probably getting charged just to talk about this right now.
Amy: But it’s important to know that stuff, to be aware of ownership. Like we own Heart in Canada now so we’re going to try to get that re-released on vinyl in Canada. It’s just good to have a home, have a future and know where the music’s going to be found. I heard about this kid who bought this Dead Child Star EP that we had, this rare little thing that we had on tour about three years ago, and he spent $80 on eBay buying it, which is insane. It’s that kind of thing, where I want to get everything we’ve ever done and have a home for it so people don’t have to get ripped off.
Torquil: If that kid goes into investment banking, do not hire him to be your advisor. He is a dreamer.
Amy: True fans love to get that kind of stuff, that’s hard to get your hands on, and we love them for that. But I want to have a home where they can find the music from us. It does take a village. We have Vagrant which is our team here in the United States and we have Universal which is our team in Canada and there’s a lot of people working behind [the record]; it’s not just the five of us working out of our basement. We have a great team of publicists and tons of people who are on our side and we appreciate their hard work. So it’s not like we started it and it’s just us.
Torquil: But I think the psychological difference of knowing that ultimately the decisions are yours, and the relationship you build with your listeners is yours, is just a nice feeling after having done this for a certain period of time. You’re capable of taking more on, so anything that can bring you closer to the customer. It's like running a shop. The more we can be in the shop and the more we can be behind the counter at the shop, the more we’ll know our customers and they’ll know us and we’ll run a nice, little neighborhood store until we drop dead. (laughs).
Rita: I didn’t think it was going to end that way!
Torquil: Well, everything ends that way. Which brings us back to our music.
Rita: And the whole Twitter thing?
Torquil: I don’t even know what that means. To me that’s the whole essence of everything that is wrong with modern media. There’s the bill, SB 1070 in Arizona, where it is now incumbent upon the police to make sure that anyone that they suspect of not being legally in the country is not so and it’s discriminatory and racist. We used Twitter to join the boycott that thousands of other people had already started to organize. Twitter, as a brand name, somehow got some publicity from it. But that’s the sort of sad world we live in.
Rita: But when it comes to having a direct connection with your fans, it’s a good tool.
Torquil: An incredible tool. But I found that in the bringing up of the subject of boycotting Arizona, people have begun with the word “Twitter” and I find it so weird because it’s so completely besides the point. The medium has become the message. The message is that SB 1070 is wrong. Not that Twitter is a powerful medium. Why are we focusing on the medium? We should focus on the result.
Amy(to Torquil): I think Rita is just talking about whether we use Twitter. She wasn’t even talking about Arizona.
Rita: I wasn’t ....
Amy: She was just asking if we used Twitter.
Torquil: Oh! Okay! So there you go. So often I’ve been asked about the Arizona thing and they start off with the word “Twitter,” that I assumed ....
Amy: Poor Rita. She was just wondering if we were on Twitter.
Torquil: Yeah, we’re on Twitter (laughs).
Rita: Yeah, all right, next question!
Amy: I love Twitter. I think it’s amazing to be able to interact with your fans. I do! You can thank [your fans] right away when you get offstage, you can talk about the beautiful drive that we had through New Hampshire. It’s incredible to be that close, having Facebook and Twitter. Being able to communicate with your fans that way is phenomenal.
Rita: Any downside to it? You’re making art and sometimes there’s a reason to be a little protected, have a wall.
Amy: I don’t think we’re famous enough. I think if you’re someone like John Mayer, you’re going to get dissed repeatedly on something like that. The people who are paying attention to us are paying attention to us because they like us. They love us and we love them and that kind of communication isn’t unhealthy.
Torquil: But you’re talking about mystery around musicians, right? That kind of distance between the musician and the listener shrinking?
Rita: I think that there is something in maintaining that distance.
Torquil: Well, blame it on Johnny Rotten. That’s what punk was about, right? Reducing that distance between us and you. We’re so close that I can spit on you and you can spit on me. Let’s spit on each other. I think for better or worse, there’s things that left pop music when punk came along that I think is too bad, but there were so many good things when punk music came along that it makes up for it. But you can never be Marvin Gaye again. Or Michael Jackson. There will never be those people again because punk music kicked over those statutes and said that anyone who was real will come right up to your face and deal with you. Even in fey pop music, like we make, that ethos has gotten such a firm foothold in rock ‘n’ roll that you can’t go back to being Bono (laughs). Only Bono can go back to being Bono if he should choose.
Amy: I’m sure Bono has meet and greets.
Torquil: Yeah, but they’re meet and greets with the Pope (all laugh).
