Bedrooms are often a place of reflection---the location that bookends the day. Stars’ Polaris Prize-nominated album, In Our Bedroom After the War, has kept the band on tour for the past year and a half, sleeping whenever and wherever they can. Since their show on Citadel Hill this past summer they’ve released Sad Robots EP and opened for Coldplay.
“This tour is something we’ve been looking forward to for a long, long time,” says singer Torquil Campbell, calling from the Niagara region. “In Toronto, the powers that be seem to think there is no money out east, no one is interested. For years we’ve been saying that’s a bunch of bullshit.”
Noted for their salacious, temporal lyrical themes, Campbell often wonders why the band is labelled romantic. Stars borders on extreme nihilism, bleakness, sexual deviance, prostitution, drug dealers and murder all wrapped into the theatrics of exceptionally orchestrated pop songs.
“It’s sort of a misnomer. I think the music is so pretty that they miss that side,” he says. “Morrissey said it best: I love the romance of crime. From my standpoint that’s beauty being found in a very dark and sad place, love showing up in those places. People who are bankrupt in every way, emotionally, financially, morally can still find love inside themselves. We are all motivated by love. Killers are motivated by love. Hitler was motivated by love.”
Campbell believes Stars is really more of a kitchen-sink band than anything else. “It becomes an appliance in your life that you apply to your situations that you need. The band as a group of people disappears. You and the songs have a direct relationship. It seems very clear to me that people are celebrating the romance and sadness of their own lives at our shows.”