Those twin little girls who hang out in the halls of Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining, have a lot in common with Stars’ new CD The Five Ghosts.
On the outside, they’re all cute ribbons and curls. But on the inside, they’re lost souls, crying out in agony from the depths of the netherworld.
“That’s a huge influence on my life, that movie, The Shining,” says Stars founder Torquil Campbell. “I think we’ve always had that in our music.”
Campbell is talking about the eerie pop-synth mix that comes about when Stars’ lead singer Amy Millan’s childlike voice meets the ghoulish nature of new songs like Dead Hearts, Winter Bones and I Died So I Could Haunt You.
“That’s always something we’ve tried to do in the songs,” Campbell explains, “To take subject matter that was sort of the opposite of the music you were hearing.
“So you receive the music in one way and then you receive the story within the music in another way. That creates the tension and unease between the two things. I think the best pop music is about that tension, achieving a kind of halfway point between joy and darkness.”
Campbell says the dark nature of the material also came honestly to the band’s five members, who wrote the 11 new tracks collectively.
“Definitely ghosts, the loss of people, death, all those things were a part of this year for all of us. We had a tough year that way. My dad passed away and people were born (Campbell and his wife have a baby daughter). And Chris (Seligman, keyboardist) had this bizarre episode in Vancouver of being haunted and literally having to leave his apartment in the middle of the night.
“So right from the get-go, there was this something pointing us toward talking about this stuff. It kind of came upon us. It wasn’t something that we decided to do.”
