Stars released their gorgeous album The North recently.? The Canadian indie pop group is quite eclectic, having started as mostly electronic and gradually going more rock as they added more instrumentalists to the band.? The new album is like a mixtape with a bit of EDM, shoegaze, ambient, and rock flowing together like a soundtrack. ? On tour with Diamond Rings, I spoke with band member Chris Seligman before their show in Nashville.
DJ Ron Slomowicz: Everyone contributed to the album, what was the song writing process like?
Chris Seligman: Well it depends; it usually starts with the music. We either hang out in our home studio or jam space and come up with different ideas and either send them off to people or, if we are all in the same city we just cram into a room. Generally Amy likes to have us give her music and then she writes at home and spends time on it. Torquil tends to write pretty quickly, so he usually does it in the room. Once we have the basic idea for a song, we then have to figure out how to produce it. Producing songs takes on a whole other world of thought. If it?s an electronic tune, it can take a lot of different steps. We did both electronic and more organic rock that we wanted to do live off the floor to capture a real moment in time; in that case, you do the production as you go. There are tunes that we spent a whole day in the recording studio working on and we gradually got more comfortable playing them. The guys engineering the track would engineer it and we would go back and listen to it, then from there pick out what direction we wanted it to go. That is it in a nutshell.
Continue reading INTERVIEW: Stars (2013)