Week of March 31, 2005, Issue #493
MUSIC
Stars epidemic
By LEAH COLLINS
Stars multi-instrumentalist Evan Cranley sighs heavily before breaking into
a peal of wry laughter; like so many readers of the music press, the musician
(who usually divides his time between bass and trombone for the band) is tired
of hearing that “Montreal is the new New York.”
Like so many other rising bands—the Arcade Fire, the Dears and just about
everyone on Montreal’s Arts and Crafts label—Stars makes its home
in the frosty Quebec metropolis. And Cranley can’t help but be dismissive
of the trend-mongering buzz the American press has started about the city—an
attitude he figures most Montrealers share. “I don’t think the people
there are taking it all that seriously, I really don’t,” Cranley
says, taking a pause to hand bandmate Torquil Campbell change for the hotel
laundromat. “I think the people are kind of under-their-breath laughing
about the whole thing. I think Montreal is a really proud place; it doesn’t
take an American publication to tell them that they’re hip or that something’s
happening because it’s always been there.”
Cranley is thankful for the attention, though. With every mainstream publication
from Spin to the New York Times turning their eyes to Montreal, Cranley sees
the trend—however short-lived it might be—as a window of opportunity
for many Canadian bands, including his own.
Stars’ latest album, Set Yourself on Fire, has just been successfully
released in the States, and as Cranley speaks, he’s about to begin two
sold-out nights at L.A.’s legendary the Troubadour, and he couldn’t
be happier (even though he’s been stuck on laundry duty for most of the
day: “You need clean underwear in this battle,” he jokes). But while
the band is benefiting from the buzz, Cranley says Montreal remains the same
cold, stylishly aloof city it always was. He’s met a few musicians traveling
through the city in search of a scene, but he figures the wannabe rock-star
tourists won’t ever really invade. There just isn’t any Montreal
rock zeitgeist to be found there, no matter what the magazines say.
“It’s funny, but there isn’t a lot of camaraderie there, I
find,” he says. “I’m good friends with the Dears and a couple
of bands there, but I don’t feel like I’m part of a movement. I
really don’t. I’ve lived there for five years and across North America,
and Montreal is the place we don’t draw well, ironically enough. And between
you and me, the ticket sales for the tour in Montreal have not been selling
as well as in other cities. So I mean, although they say Montreal’s the
new hip place to be, there’s not a lot of support within the musical community
as much as, say, Toronto, which is kind of funny—no one would really know
about that unless they were a band there.”
Cranley can’t explain the lack of attention Stars gets in Montreal, but
he’s thankful for it, in a way, as it was Montreal’s nonplussed
attitude towards its artists that moved the band from its previous home, now-passé
hip centre, New York. Cranley (who’s also a prominent member of Toronto
collective Broken Social Scene) came down to join Stars a few years back when
they were living in Williamsburg, New York. There to help finish the group’s
Night Songs EP, Cranley et al. soon found themselves a little weirded-out by
the supposed radness of the place. “I really feel uncomfortable where
everyone and their grandmother is in a band,” he explains. “I find
the idea of being in a band is quite passé, and when we were in New York
I just felt like I was one in 5,000 people in a particular neighbourhood who
were competing against each other and kind of walking around as a band. And
I hate that kind of posturing. And that’s what I didn’t like about
New York, because I felt like I was in competition with the people I was living
around.”
Tired of the posturing, running out of money and missing their Canadian homeland,
the band migrated to Montreal intent on eking out intelligent love songs in
self-imposed isolation. And that’s where the band will stay, says Cranley.
The group has always found inspiration from putting themselves in different
places while creating each of their records—Night Songs was made in a
West Village Manhattan apartment, Heart was made on the plateau of Montreal
and Set Yourself on Fire was made in Quebec’s eastern townships—and
there’s even been some talk about recording an album in Sweden with producer
Tore Johansson (the Cardigans, Saint Etienne, Franz Ferdinand). A new album
is still a long ways off, says Cranley (though he does have dreams of writing
conceptual albums about robots, trips to the moon and “the life and times
of being a firefighter in nine songs”), but when that time comes, the
record will be made in pretension-free Montreal. Mainstream buzz hasn’t
turned the city into a new New York, after all; instead, it’s inadvertently
given Stars another reason to stick out the winters.
“All the industry is based out of Montreal in the last five years,”
he says, “and unlike being around the industry in New York, it doesn’t
make me want to change cities. No, now I’m kind of comfortable with it.
Now that people are buying the record and people are paying attention to us
I’m a little bit more comfortable. I can finally enjoy the music business.”
V
Stars
With Apostle of Hustle and Montag • Dinwoodie Lounge • Thu,
Apr 7