Preview
STARS with Broken Social Scene
Wednesday, March 26
Liberty Lounge (MRC)
Life has always been unforgiving of incurable romantics. Especially those who also happen to also be songwriters. If it weren’t, Brian Wilson’s early-’70s bedroom would have been for sleeping rather than living, Cole Porter’s sprawling catalogue wouldn’t be a thinly veiled eulogy to unfulfilled desire, and Kurt Cobain, suggests the title track of Stars’ sublime album Heart, might have stood a chance.
Stars frontman Torquil Campbell – slight, soft-spoken and sad-eyed – sings about love more or less exclusively, detailing the emotional wreckage it leaves in its wake as well as its happy endings. "Why do you always fucking sing about love?" his friend and tour-mate Kevin Drew, of Broken Social Scene, asked him recently. "Because love is God," he replied. The man pulls no punches.
Happily, Campbell is in love, pausing our conversation to giddily remark, "My girl just came in the door." But he then moves on to explain that the songs he writes with his fellow Stars – Evan Cranley (bass), Amy Millan (guitar, vocals) and Chris Seligman (keyboards) – are largely the spawn of a lifetime of disappointment, exclusion and displacement, laid bare in the lyric booklet of Heart (and its debut predecessor, Nightsongs) for all to see. But if the press and punters alike overlook the darker shades that lurk beneath the album’s joyful electro-pop veneer (which many seem to be doing), he won’t begrudge them.
"I think that we’re at the beginning again of a cycle where art has to be something that makes people feel the beauty of being alive," he says from his Toronto home. "It’s so relentlessly grim in the world right now – there’s so much fear and paranoia and hatred and consumption. There has to be some room for people to want to hear something that makes them feel like lovers again."
But Campbell is also realistic enough to know that being an incurably romantic songwriter in the early 21st century – particularly one who doesn’t pander to Top 40 clichés – remains a lonely occupation.
"It’s strange to me when you think about our grandparents knowing George Gershwin songs, but nobody knows [Prefab Sprout’s] Paddy McAloon – I don’t understand that," he says.
"Great songwriting is a cinematic form, about taking tiny little snippets, editing scenes into a look or a sigh or a single sentence or the description of a doorway or the light at evening time – taking all those little things and dropping it into a digestible three-minute format for people."
And this is exactly what Heart does, using the decidedly European esthetic of clean, hermetically produced melodies that barely contain the turmoil being sung about. In a tradition fine-tuned in ’80s Britain by New Order and Microdisney, and arguably perfected in the ’90s by Saint Etienne and Trembling Blue Stars, Heart’s 11 songs offer 11 vivid scenarios of arrival and departure, leaving and being left. As such, Heart is a deeply affecting but deeply unfashionable record in 2003, which is partly the point.
"I think that the peculiar uniqueness of Stars is that it is actually totally fashion-less," says Campbell. "It doesn’t have an alignment with anything fashionable right now, and that’s because it’s a sincere attempt to completely open up our vulnerability and make people feel things in a totally unabashed way.
"It doesn’t bother us, but when you’re an artist and you feel that you’re part of something that people don’t see as being legitimate at a given time, it can be very lonely, and I think that a lot of what we do comes out of that sense of beautiful loneliness and being alone together. The purpose is emotional: In terms of what we’re trying to do as a band, I would fucking love it if we made even one person start a band that was writing beautiful pop songs."
But make no mistake: Stars are hardly a withering bouquet of neo-hippies. In sharp contrast to the current musical and social climate, Heart is an infinitely more rebellious gesture than the stylized disaffection of nü-metal and shopping-mall punk that sells by the millions to suburban youth. This is the true sound of the terminal outsider.
"Listen, if everybody had been fucking screaming and blowing up their amps in 1977, then I’m sure Johnny Rotten would have bought himself a fucking tie and sang lovers’ rock – anything to annoy people," Campbell insists. "I think we are a punk band, but you have to be careful who you say that around, otherwise you’ll get a stomping.
"But I also love punk bands and I love hip-hop bands and Brazilian music and classical music. We just want to contribute to the form that is music, which is the most crucial art form, I think. The heartbeat is the first music you hear, and it doesn’t stop until the day you die." |
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