Canadian Indie-Popsters Start Own Label for Fifth Album
By Andrew Clayman
Published in The Cleveland Scene, June 2010
On June 22, Toronto synth-pop dramatists Stars will release their fifth album, The Five Ghosts, on their own newly established imprint Soft Revolution. For singer/guitarist Amy Millan, the album will mark her third major release in a matter of months, following her sophomore solo effort (Masters of the Burial) and Broken Social Scene’s Forgiveness Rock Record. At 36, Millan still admits to getting the new album jitters, but at her current pace, it’s become a lot easier to put things in perspective.
“It’s sort of like the first day of school when you’re a kid,” she says. “You feel like a whole new life is going to begin on that day. And then there’s kind of this let down of it being, ‘oh, now I’m just back at school.’ [laughs] When a new record comes out, there’s so much buildup and work that gets done, and then it’s like, ‘Wow, it’s over! Now I have to start working on another record.’ But, you know, that’s the best way to channel anxiety—throw yourself back into the work.”
In the case of The Five Ghosts, “the work” meant not only writing and recording a new album, but paying for nearly every aspect of it, as well. It was all a part of Stars’ aforementioned business enterprise, Soft Revolution Records—a self-run label they hope will one day own the rights to the entire Stars catalog, enabling their fans greater access to the band’s output.
“We’re basically basing a company just around the music that Stars makes,” Millan says, “and that will mean being able to re-release albums or put out more oddities and rarities... It’s really the best possible arrangement for our fans and for our future.”
Clearly, Stars is a band that understands its industry, but as The Five Ghosts shows, they aren’t letting it compromise their art.
“I think the success we had with [the acclaimed 2004 album] Set Yourself on Fire created a lot of expectations for the follow-up, In Our Bedroom After the War [2007],” Millan says. “That was something we’d never experienced before when making a record. So when Bedroom came out, and some people liked it and some people didn’t, it was like the pressure then was off. We realized, ‘Okay, we can have that pressure album and survive it.’ So The Five Ghosts kind of felt like going back to the beginning, where we have nothing to lose. We’ve got our fans and this quiet part of the world, so let’s just go in there with the five of us and not make music for any other reason than for each other.”
The result is an album that’s more pointed, immediate, and fulfilling than In Our Bedroom without really migrating too far from Stars’ trademark sound— epic, synthy orchestral pop buoyed by the heart-wrenching vocal interplay of Millan and Torquil Campbell.
Much in the way that her voice splits the difference between Feist’s silky fragility and Emily Haines’s streetwise intensity in Broken Social Scene, Millan is the master of versatility in Stars, as well— her sweet soprano sounding equally at home on a wistful ballad (“Changes”) as it does on a spunky dancefloor duet with Campbell (“We Don’t Want Your Body”).
“I think it’s my love of the theater— trying to channel different moods and voices of different characters,” Millan says. “A lot of the times when I’m singing, I think I sound like Tom Waits, and then I hear myself back, and I realize I don’t sound like Tom Waits at all. I sound like a 13 year-old girl [laughs]. But I’m definitely striving to have a range of emotions that you can draw from on something beyond just a two dimensional level.”
As evidenced by her solo work, Millan’s musical roots actually lie in country, folk, and jazz. “I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t really listen to pop music before I joined Stars,” she admits. Rather than seeing that as an obstacle, however, Millan identifies it as one of Stars’ secret weapons: it’s not what they all have in common that makes them good—it’s what they don’t.
“We all come from very different influences,” she says. “Chris Seligman (keys) and Evan Cranley (bass) grew up playing classical music in a brass quartet. And Evan is also a huge follower of jazz, which you can hear in his bass parts. Patty McGee (drums) listens to Converge and a lot of hardcore music. I could just lie in a bath and listen to Billie Holiday all day. And then you have Torquil’s kind of obsession with ‘80s pop music. So you bring all of us together in a room, and what happens is Stars! Instead of having something that’s pastiche, you get something that’s unique on its own.”
For 2008 Stars feature in Cleveland Scene, go here
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