During this past weekend’s Outside Lands Music Festival, our own Allison Franks was briefly able to catch up with Stars’ singer/songwriter Torquil Campbell. Though between the band’s performance that day and numerous other interview obligations Campbell was certainly swamped, Allison managed to grab a few minutes of his time to briefly discuss Stars’ current direction, focus and future plans.

CoS: There was a lot of creative focus going into your last record, In Our Bedroom after the War, with contributions from author Daniel Handler to even a DVD documentary. What makes this particular album so special compared to your other releases?

Torquil Campbell: It’s not that it’s more special, I think that we just had more resources. We had a little more money and I think in order to convince people to buy a hard copy of a CD now, you have to make it something that’s worth possessing physically. We were very conscious of that and we tried to make the hard copy of the record something that you’d want to have for some other reason than just the music on it. That’s just not enough now, because you can get the music in other ways. That was really why we put a lot of effort into making it attractive because we felt that it was harder and harder to get people to buy records. You just have to go that extra length to make people do it.

CoS: And how did the album materialize? What were some of your major influences?

TC: We were very into the idea of, production wise, of records by Fleetwood Mac, Hall & Oates and Phoenix. We focused on getting a very clean, kind of 8/70’s studio sound in the drums, so sonically that was kind of where we were coming from. We were trying to make records that sounded like those records; very dry and very clean sounding music that was often about very dirty and messy things. I think that combination was what we were aiming for and what we tend to aim for in our music. The songs are a very pleasant and almost innocuous kind of pop music under which we put a lot of darkness, sorrow, drug use and transvestitism. That tension is something that we have always gone for and we will probably always focus on. I don’t think you’ll ever hear a difficult noise record from us. The hook for us is everything because it’s what keeps the listener coming back. For us that’s the important thing; to develop a lifetime relationship with the people that listen to the music.

CoS: The album’s cohesion is unreal. Do you feel an album is stronger as a concept or as a collection of separate ideas?

TC: God, it’s so subjective. I think when you are an artist and you try to make something of course you want people to like every minute of it and you want them to see it as a grand statement. You want people to be influenced by that whole thing. The great thing about pop music is that it is very throw away and it is very piecemeal. You might like a hook in a certain tune, you know like when I was a kid I used to just put the needle back onto one hook, over and over and over again within a song so that I could hear that one transition from chord to chord. I think that there are art forms that are better at grand statements. Pop music ultimately doesn’t really operate in the best way, that way. I think it’s about, well, the best pop music for me anyway is about how temporary things are and how temporary your youth is. A single moment can make you feel very beautiful and you can try and hang on to that through a pop song for a very long time. There are great albums, but even on great albums there are probably songs that people don’t like. I mean that fucking Indian tune on Revolver drives me nuts, you know what I mean! It’s a great record, but I don’t know why they put that Indian tune on there, but for somebody else they might say that Indian tune makes the whole thing. So, pop music is about three minutes for me and always will be, ultimately.

CoS: So, what’s next? Are there any particular influences you might be reeling from this time around?

TC: We have an EP finished called Sad Robots and that’s going to come out digitally September 16^th. We are going to sell it at the shows and we might put it out in stores if we feel that anybody might bother to go and buy it. It’s six new tunes that we’ve recorded very recently and wrote recently. So, we are doing that and we are touring this fall. And then we’ll start the next record, pretty quickly I think. We are on a good writing roll right now and I think we have a new way of working that’s quite exciting and immediate. It’s not as anal retentive as we tend to be, so we are trying to take advantage of it and exploit it while it’s there.

Could you elaborate a bit more on the band’s new work ethic for me?

TC: Well Chris, Evan and Pat are extremely detail oriented people and extremely self critical. They don’t let go of things easily, they work very, very hard and they will not allow themselves to go the easy route in things a lot of the time. I think this has been a huge advantage for the band, but I think that it also costs them a lot and sometimes it makes things let fun for them. So, I think they are trying very hard to let go of things more easily and trust the hook and trust the song, so that they can try to not overstate the idea of the song by instrumentation or arrangement. I mean those guys are totally capable of writing a pop song that has five sections in it and most people have only two sections in their pop songs.

We are trying to pull in our instinct to always go in the opposite direction of where the song seems to be going and allow ourselves to be simpler and more direct in the way we approach the music. That’s been a really fun thing, I think, for those guys. They’ve been able to just let it go a little bit more. I have always done that. I’m a completely self-loathing human being and the one thing that I always feel really pleased with myself about is pop songs. Like I write stuff in 20 minutes and walk around feeling like a genius. I don’t know why because a lot of them aren’t very good. I like them though and I’ve never had a problem letting go of them. The result for me is a big part. I want to have an effect on people. I don’t really care if they hate me or love me or hate the song or love the song. I just want to have that effect, that connection is what I care about. However, the other guys in the band aren’t interested in the effect. They are interested in the process of getting there, so it’s a good tension, I think. Me and Amy are people who need to communicate very badly in order to feel normal and the other three are people who really don’t put much stock in that. Somewhere in the middle we get the songs, you know.

CoS: Well it’s sort of an interesting and convoluted concept you are going for anyways, right?

TC: It’s been done before, lots of times. There have been lots of bands that have done that; they poof out and sprout in the beautiful South. Death Cab for Cutie do it and they write very accessible pop songs that tend to be extremely depressing if you really listen to what Ben’s writing about. It’s not a new idea, but the stuff that’s always meant the most to me as a listener, is music that captures that sort of simultaneous feeling of sadness and happiness. I guess Motown is the greatest example of it. You can put on a Motown record and you can cry to it or you can dance to it. To me, the best pop is in that territory; where depending on how you feel the song can be a happy thing or a sad thing. It’s about you. The song is just a vessel for your experience and that’s what we are trying to do. To create songs where the listener and the song have a direct relationship and we step out of it and sort of disappear. That’s our ideal.

CoS: Not only are you an accomplished musician, but an increasingly popular actor. Could you tell me about some of your experiences as an actor?

TC: I used to be. I haven’t acted in years, yeah, but I used to be an actor.

CoS: Do you ever plan to pick up acting again as a part of your career?

TC: Well, I don’t plan to, but I’ll probably have to when I get really old. I’ll probably have to go a play COPS or something. I come from a theatre family and my wife is an actress. Everybody in my family is involved in the theatre in one way or another, so it’ll always be a big part of my life. I’ve directed quite recently, that’s more of what I think I would go back to in the theatre. I’m not interested in film and television as an art form particularly. It’s not an actor’s art form, it’s a technician’s art form and it doesn’t interest me. Theatre is something I think I would get involved with again, but it’s a scary world the theatre. You have to know all those lines and be sober and show up at the same time every night, so you can put on a costume. The fifth wall is up, you know and you can’t let that fifth wall drop. Now that I’ve experienced what it’s like to let that fifth wall drop down and have a direct relationship with the audience, I’m not sure I could go back to pretending again. It would be very challenging for me, for sure. It’s a spooky job and you can’t talk about whether it’s a spooky job to actors either because they are spooked. They know it’s spooky and they are trying to not think about how hard it is. My wife is playing two huge parts and she’s doing 8 shows a week and sometimes she does two shows a day, you know. There’s a lot of obligations that an actor has to detect in the story, but as a rock and roll musician you can just let go. If I want to stop in the middle of my song, it’s my song, so who’s going to tell me if I want to change the words or the melody line that it’s wrong, nobody. As an actor though, you are working within a framework that someone else has set up.

CoS: Does your involvement in Broken Social Scene ever interfere with you work for Stars?

TC: I mean I don’t work with Broken Social Scene, I play with Broken Social Scene. I have nothing to do with all of the brilliant music that’s been made by Broken Social Scene. I’m just their annoying friend and I get up there and I play the horn lines I’m told to play and I sing the backing vocals I’m told to sing. I’m just happy to be there. Amy and Evan are much more involved musically in the band and especially Evan has written a lot of great stuff for that band. I’m very much a hanger-on, I’m a groupie in that band. I love the band, I love the energy they project on stage and I feel incredibly lucky. I mean, the only experience I can still have as a real sort of unabashed fan is when I’m on stage with Broken because it just seems so ridiculous that I get the chance to be a part of that much energy. If I wasn’t there nobody would notice, so it’s really just self-indulgence on my part that I play with Broken Social Scene and they tolerate it. People say I’m in Broken Social Scene, but it’s a lie. I’m just their buddy.

CoS: On a more personal note, what’s your opinion about today’s music scene and where do you see yourself fitting into it?

TC: Oh God, I couldn’t even begin to answer that. It seems like music is as beautiful and as important in people’s lives as it ever has been and it always will be. Music is as elemental and as crucial as anything in the world in my opinion and it’ll always be that way. I don’t really see any big differences between its place in people’s lives now and its place in people’s lives 20 years ago.

In terms of our place in the scene, I think we just feel very lucky in the sense that we’ve never really been the ‘it’ band. We’ve never had our moment and we’ve never had any features in major magazines or hype really around us. We very slowly over the years built up an audience of people who enjoy the music. For a group of pretty homely people in their 30’s, we’ve managed to kind of connect in a very direct way to a lot of people. So, I think our place in the scene is non-existent. We haven’t really worked very hard on that and instead focused on the idea, as I said, of writing kitchen sink music that personally connects to people and in a way which we disappear from. I can go out into my own crowd of 5,000 people and stand there and no one knows who I am. In a way, that was like the dream of being in a band for me. There is no real cult of personality in our band, there’s just a bunch of sort of pudgy people making really beautiful music. So, I guess that’s where we, by our own choice, ended up. We are the Rodney Dangerfield of Indie-rock. That’s what we are.

CoS: One last thing before you go, do you have anything special planned for your performance later today?

TC: Well, this is a festival set. It’s only 45 minutes you know, and we are playing with Broken later on so nothing particularly in terms of the set or anything new that way, no. It’s incredibly special to us that we are playing in Golden Gate Park though. I feel like this is one of the most sort of spiritual places in the world, not to sound like a hippie. Hey, but we are in a hippie festival man, I just watched Ben Harper so fuck it. We just try very, very hard to reveal to people that we care as much about the moment as they do. It’s twice as important to us that we are playing for them, as it is that they are watching us. As long as they feel that, we feel like we’ve achieved what we want to. They make our lives possible. The people who listen to the music make all these thrilling moments in our lives happen. It’s a very lucky thing, so we try and let people know that.

Categories: Features, Interview
Tags: Stars