Stars Place Their Bets On Humanity

12/22/08 11:43am

by Scott Bryson (CHARTattack)

Montreal's pop romantics herald the end of their war

As far as wars go, this one was a particularly bloody affair. Murders were committed. Fascist soccer hooligans fell in love while beating people. Drug addicts rioted and spent the night in jail. Though it seemed for a while like humanity might be irredeemable, the battle eventually ended peacefully in a bedroom.

Stars' fourth full-length, In Our Bedroom After The War, may seem like a political statement on the surface, but it's more a declaration of the way the altruistic five-piece feel about humanity. Sure, we're violent, vindictive and generally apathetic towards others' feelings, but Stars are betting we'll all wake up one day and find we've become better people.

"After a very personal war you've had with someone else or even with yourself," bassist Evan Cranley says, "you're left alone in a room with four white walls to kind of look at yourself again and to be born again. That was the idea of the record."

Like the disc's title, the music on In Our Bedroom carries a double-edged sword. Stars make just about the prettiest songs you'll find in pop today, but the lyrics they weave throughout the album's 13 tracks are mostly sad, scary or downright perverse.

"I would say there's definitely some intense darkness," Cranley elaborates, "but also some intense joy and light to the record… I think we're getting better at being dark and then letting go and being joyful and then letting go."

Though their lyrics would suggest Stars are an especially literary bunch, it turns out it's the music that's their paramount concern. Over the course of their last two releases, Heart and Set Yourself On Fire, the pop-romantique warriors have been honing a sound that's growing increasingly grandiose and becoming the focus of their efforts. In Our Bedroom was mapped out musically before words were even a consideration.

"It starts with the music and builds from the music and then the lyrics are added," Cranley explains. "Myself and Chris Seligman and Pat McGee pretty much scored the record and demoed the record in its musical form. Torq [Campbell] and Amy [Millan] write lyrics on their own time and come in, and I think are sometimes inspired by the music that we make, and sing over top of those musical ideas.

"Everyone in the band really has a very specific function as to what they bring to the band. It's never just one person — it's really an artistic democracy."

When they had In Our Bedroom mixed and mastered, the Stars' democracy decided to immediately put it up for sale on the internet, handing it to iTunes and other online vendors a scant four days after completion. While deterring theft and leaks was partly behind the decision to go with an early digital release, Cranley likes to look at it from another perspective.

"We wanted to do something unconventional and maybe shake things up and shake up the industry a bit," he says. "It got the people that like us excited about the new record in a way that seeing a commercial on television or seeing a poster on the street could never do… It made it special for people…

"I think in this day and age that the power of making music has actually gone into the hands of the artist in a way that hasn't happened in a long time. You can make a record and just throw it out on the internet and see if it sticks, and I think that's a really powerful place to be as a musician right now."

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War Stories

Stars had kooky author Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) pen a short story for In Our Bedroom After The War's liner notes. While writing fiction is Handler's primary occupation, this isn't his first foray into the world of music. He played accordion for The Gothic Archies and also lent a hand to the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs.

The following feature is taken from the December 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. To purchase the issue, head on over to the Chart Shop.