Stars

For now, The Five Ghosts is my favorite album of 2010. The latest Stars release is simply that good. Perhaps that’s because producer Tom McFall, from 2004′s Set Yourself on Fire, kept kicking the band’s ass, as vocalist Amy Millan describes. Whatever it takes to create an album this precise.

Millan says The Five Ghosts is the band’s best album yet and she’s not simply giving a press statement as she says it. She’s prideful about Stars’ latest and the creative process behind it, and for good reason. Everything from the sequencing to the final cuts went through several hoops to make it work and the end result is something the band can live with for the next few years. Fortunately, even the work they thought they hated has come back around again in good graces — a sign that Stars’ work lives on longer than even they realize.

SSv: The album is arresting from beginning to end, in my opinion, but none more so than starting the album with “Dead Hearts.” It’s a disarming lead out that didn’t seem a likely opener and yet by the end, it seems perfect. Was it hard to put things in order?

Amy Millan: Yeah, sequencing is really tough. It’s one of the hardest parts of the album. You’ve written all of these songs and you’re so connected to them and then to get an outside perspective of how to group them together can be really daunting. In fact, we’ve kind of relied on Kevin Drew for all of our other albums. He sequenced Set Yourself on Fire and he helped sequence Bedroom [2007's In Our Bedroom After The War], but he was busy sequencing his own album so he couldn’t help us with this one. [Laughs]

So we try a bunch of different ingredients in this. Actually, I think it’s more like painting. You have to listen to it a whole bunch of different ways. The band’s voices, with Torq and I, are so strong that it was appropriate for us to come out of the gates with something that’s a duet. Right off the bat, it’s a way of saying, ‘Here’s Stars. There’s Torq and there’s Amy and the band. Here they are.’

Sometimes you can start with the first song or sometimes you start with the last song and work from there. Because “Winter Bones” is the last song we actually wrote for the album, it actually felt like the closer already. Then you just cross your fingers and hope for the best. But also, we knew we were aiming for vinyl, so you’re also thinking of Side A and Side B as well.

SSv: Did you try other songs in that lead spot?

Amy: Yeah, we were originally going to open with “He Dreams He’s Awake.” That was the original idea. But we agreed that because Sad Robots, our EP, started with a slower melodic jam that we just wanted to have something that was direct off of the top. So our keyboard player, Chris Seligman, was the one who finalized the sequence. I think he spent nights upon nights without any sleep listening and listening because he has a kind of tolerance I just don’t have.

It was a lot of e-mailing back and forth with different things and it finally agreed on that one. I love starting out with “Dead Hearts.” To me, it’s the quintessential Stars song and says that we’re finally back.

SSv: I love the intensity and energy variance all through the album and there are some tracks that just really seem fun, for lack of a better word. I’m not sure if that matches the process of making The Five Ghosts or not, but how fun is a project like this for you?

Amy: Fun? Well, there’s always some fun, but it’s also torture. I call it ‘the trenches.’ Sometimes you have to get to a really low place in order to start to create. Sometimes I feel like I’m never going to be able to write another song again, so just the fact that it happens flabbergasts me and when it’s over, then it’s fun. [Laughs] You think, ‘Oh, we actually made another album.’ You just don’t know what will happen and it can be very frustrating to be articulate musically and lyrically about what you’re trying to say. It takes a lot of work to come up with things that are fresh for yourself.

The fun part is watching the other guys. For me, that’s what is so great about being in a band is that all five of us can contribute equally. So when the guys are doing something that I think is amazing, they can be tortured by it, but I can stand by with my fist pumping in the air and that’s what fun and exciting for me. Then I can try to match them as they are creating.

Now, writing “He Dreams He’s Awake” was really fun. We were in the basement in this room in Vancouver and we felt like we’d been haunted by this ghost. It was this ghosty moment where we were all connected as a band. We have six episodes of the making of the album, these short five-minute videos and those are a lot of fun. But recording vocals just isn’t fun. It’s not like being live where you’re fresh off of the floor. You have to have such precision and our producer, Thomas McFall, was a hard ass, and he worked me to the ground. I could get very frustrated and then you feel as if you suck, so that’s not fun all of the time.

SSv: You’ve used words like torturous, so how does that compare to your own solo work? Is that a release or do you feel the same with any musical outlet?

Amy: [Pause] I guess the difference is that I don’t think anyone is listening to my own solo albums. [Laughs] Because they are my solo albums, I think at the end of the day that I can go easy on myself. With Stars, I really want the guys to love what I’m doing. They are the most important critics to me. It’s very important to me that they are behind what I am doing and saying. That pressure within the studio to make sure that they believe is so important, because they are the ones that have to live inside of the music for two years.

SSv: You have a track called “The Five Ghosts” and yet it doesn’t make the album that’s named after it. I know you released that on The Seance EP. The reasoning there?

Amy: Well, we were talking about it because we were going to call the album The Black House, The Blue Sky. That song is also on the EP. The lore of a band doesn’t really happen in contemporary life of people listening to music, because people don’t listen to full albums anymore. But we come from that school. Just as somebody — you’re a music journalist, so obviously you are into what music means — and we thought it might be an interesting thing to do that somebody might not notice unless they are paying attention. So, nice one. [Laughs]

SSv: So what does the cutting room floor look like after these sessions?

Amy: We still have more tracks, but a lot of them are out. We wanted a Side A and a Side B, so we wanted to make a very concise record. That forced us to have a cutting room floor. Before we’ve been indulgent and put on every single song on the album. We were very conscious of being more precise here. But we have the EP and we have other songs that will come out, so nothing gets completely buried. Because we had this producer, if we had ideas for songs that he didn’t believe in, we just would not record them.

What’s interesting about The Seance EP is that we had these songs we didn’t think fit well on The Five Ghosts, but we didn’t want to do a regular EP. One of the reasons they didn’t fit on The Five Ghosts is that they just didn’t seem good enough. So we just gave all of the tracks to people to mix them, so what you’re hearing is a completely different song than what we wrote.

For instance, The Album Leaf took “Opinions Versus The Sun.” Of Montreal took another song. So it was another interesting way to flip what might end up on the cutting room floor and give it to another artist to see if they can manipulate it into something new and beautiful.

SSv: How do you choose what to let go of?

Amy: Every single thing that we do is a collaborative argument. It’s really a democracy that we’re in and because we had a producer to help with the inner dynamics of the band, at the end of the day, Thomas has the gauntlet and the guillotine, I guess you could say. Speaking of putting things on the floor and cutting them off. [Laughs] He gave us a list of songs he believed should be on the album and shouldn’t.

SSv: So you bring up a song and say “in our out?”

Amy: Yeah, we had 15 songs. We look at the body of 15 songs and say to ourselves, ‘Well, what has to be on the album?’ “Fixed” and “We Don’t Want Your Body” and “Daylight” and “Dead Hearts” and “I Died So I Could Haunt You” had to be there. That’s five right there. Those songs are staying. Then there’s another 10 that some people feel really attached to, so you hash it out. You do a sequence and see what things fit within that sequence.

There were some sequences that didn’t have certain songs on them from each of us. “How Much More” was in one person’s sequence. “The Last Song Ever Written” was going to be switched off with “The Black House, The Blue Sky.” So you just have to compromise. At the end of the day, you want everyone to be as happy as they can possibly be with making an album with five people.

SSv: What made those five obvious favorites for you?

Amy: I like them. I don’t know what else to say about it. [Laughs] When I listen to “I Died So I Could Haunt You,” I just think that’s one of Stars’ great songs. I love playing that live. Torq wrote the lyrics for that song and I love singing them. A song like “Fixed” has an immediate openness that invites you in. When we first wrote that song, I think everyone felt it was one of the best songs on the roster. It’s about instinct and taste and we’re lucky to have everyone going for the same things there. That’s why we’ve been in this band for 10 years. Some of those things just aren’t difficult.

SSv: The songs that you thought the same thing about from previous albums, do they remain the ‘it’ songs over time?

Amy: It’s interesting you ask that question, because we just did a tour where we played our whole album from start to finish, The Five Ghosts, and then in the second half of the evening, we played songs voted for by the public. There were a few songs on there that I don’t think we would have ever played again. That’s what is so fascinating about this culture of being so close to your audience. You have these interactions and their opinion starts to come into it.

We have this song called “Romantic Comedy” from Heart [2003] and we hadn’t played it in six years. One of the members of the band wasn’t crazy about it and by the end of touring Heart, they never wanted to play it again. But I said, ‘Well, they voted for it, so we have to play it.’ [Laughs] So we learned it and then he said, ‘Hey, this is fun. I love this song.’ It’s different when you play something for two years in a row.

Songs are like sex. How bad can it really be? Bad sex is really bad, but we all were a part of writing it. There’s no song that I look back on our roster and think, ‘Oh, that’s a terrible song.’ I don’t think I’ve changed all that much. I used to eat Twinkies and now I think they are synthetic garbage, but I don’t feel that way about our body of work.

SSv: How much can you submit yourself to the support of this?

Amy: Stars is my whole life. Stars is at the center of all of us. It’s the most important body of work. Sorry, I just said that phrase again. [Laughs] But Stars is the wife and mother of our children. She takes priority over anything else. We all started with Stars and the beginning of our musical career for all of us is Stars and it’s the center of our life. We aren’t going anywhere.