With six studio albums and twelve years making music, Stars need no introduction. The Canadian indie five-piece released their sixth album, The North earlier this month and will soon set off on a world tour.
For frontman Torquil Campbell, music is something he truly believes in – it’s his life. With houses to pay for and children to feed, Campbell appreciates how lucky they’ve been to make a living from music, “How often do you have the opportunity to have a band?” he queries.
“Lots of people have played in great bands and maybe get three or four years of touring and having fun out of that,” Campbell continues. “We never really wanted to be that. We never had another plan, we wanted to make a life in music and it’s a huge part of every single one of our lives to keep it going.”
Campbell says being able to keep it together comes down to letting go of grudges, “you forgive each other and you hold on when you get love and let go when you give it. What’s the point of being selfish or protecting yourself? We’re going to die.”
There’s a positive upshot to this morbid view though, “you find people who love you, people who trust you and who are willing to let you sing or play guitar in a band. That’s hard to find in life so you invest in each other and love each other. We are five incredibly different people and the one thing we all have in common is that we don’t hold grudges. We just say ‘Fuck it, I love you, we’re fine’.”
As the group have grown and developed, so too have what influences them to write music.
“Life is different and circumstances are different. It takes us about a year and a half to make a record so over the course of a year and a half as you get older… every single year some fucking massive event happens. People start dying, children get born, you buy a house or you don’t buy a house – you know, like huge shit. A year and a half is a seismic shift in a person in their late thirties or early forties.”
Before deciding to make a new record, Campbell says the band get drunk, talk music, and discuss what kind of record they want to make.
“All that stuff is just planning because once you get there, it’s just what you can get done that matters and that’s life right? You can make a plan – go ahead it passes the time – but it won’t be that way in the end. This time [with The North] we just got lucky. Nothing too dramatic happened in anybody’s life so we were able to work in a happy, focused way. It’s really hard when something’s devastating you in your life to work, as everybody knows. Anybody who has suffered loss knows getting up to go to work when you’re in pain is a really hard thing to do.”“I think it’s like if a giant man came up to me in a public shower and gave me a huge hug. I wouldn’t resist him because I’d be frightened. That’s the analogy for me and the Internet…
Campbell’s direct approach to critics is famous, but the point is to reiterate who Stars make music for, that is – themselves and their fans. On criticisms of their previous album he says, “I think The Five Ghosts is a record that for some people – it’ll mean everything to them. To a lot of people, it won’t mean much but for some people, that’ll be their book they read for six months and be part of their life where they know what we’re on about. It’s valid to make those records.”
Stars delve into classic topics in writing such as love, sex, and politics. For Campbell, the latter is particularly interesting to him at a time in Canadian politics he describes as, “really, really grim.”
He goes on, “Canada’s a big fucking place – much like Australia. It’s a really regional place – much like Australia. What’s happened is this guy (PM Stephen Harper) has perfected the art of division. Alberta has so much oil and he’s from Alberta and a neo-con. It’s very dark times for this country…”
Something that informed Stars’ latest album, “Part of the reason we called this record The North is because this is not the Canada we grew up in. It’s not the place we knew. I hate patriotism, I mean who gives a shit about Canada? But it was a nice place where people would say ‘Wait a minute we don’t really do wars, we don’t just get into wars for no reason’. Those days are over.”
Campbell himself doesn’t feel the need to write too many political songs, “Anybody I want to talk to already knows these things, they don’t need to be preached at. Anybody who doesn’t know and they’re listening to Stars… they should get a therapist – they’re conflicted.”
The Canadian music industry is very healthy and Campbell puts this down to the support systems in place for young musicians.
“When I was a kid in Canada there were the ‘big people’ like Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. Beneath that there was just an industry based on people who could fill rooms in 40 tiny towns in Canada. There was no support for anything other than pretty straight ahead shit.”You get on your pony, you put your armour on, and you go out there and speak for beauty… In print that’s going to look fucking ridiculous.”
He continues, “we got a government funding program in place in the late eighties and a Canadian content law and they were big things. Everybody yelled about them at the time saying it was communism but it forced an industry to happen and it did. You have to have those things if you’re living next to the biggest cultural force in the world.”
Campbell says while the art of music is booming; the industry is falling apart because of the digitalisation of music, a change he feels is necessary to embrace, “I think it’s like if a giant man came up to me in a public shower and gave me a huge hug. I wouldn’t resist him because I’d be frightened. That’s the analogy for me and the Internet… I won’t embrace you nor am I going to push you away because I’m frightened if I do, you will murder me.”
The Stars’ upcoming world tour will be their longest since having, “I don’t know if we can keep it up. We’ll try but it’s not going to be easy. I was saying to my wife I think you have to think of yourself as Don Quixote or something. You get on your pony, you put your armour on, and you go out there and speak for beauty… In print that’s going to look fucking ridiculous,” he adds with a bellowing laugh.
“In some ways you have to say ‘I’m going abroad to represent beauty and my family’, it’s a ridiculous thing to be doing and I shouldn’t be doing it but if I’m going to do it I’m going to do it with my whole heart, really professionally, take care of myself and play amazing shows.”
Australian fans are yet to be hit with official dates but Campbell is confident they’ll head Down Under, “I am really hoping we’re coming late summer/early autumn for you, that’s the last I heard. You are a hell of a long way away, but tell people to call Triple J and request our record because the more they play it the higher the chances are we’ll get there.”
The North is out now through Shock Records/ATO, read the Tone Deaf review here.
