the making of set yourself on fire by stars - featuring torquil campbell, amy millan, evan cranley and chris seligman 

Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim. 

Stars formed in 1999 by Torquil Campbell and Chris Seligman. The two of them had grown up together in Toronto and began Stars while they were living in New York City. Their first album, Nightsongs, was released in 2001 on the label Le Grand Magistery. They had recorded with several guest singers on that record, including Amy Millan. Deciding to relocate to Montreal, they added Amy Millan and Evan Cranley as full time members. Their second album, Heart, was released in 2003 on Paper Bag Records and the new label Arts & Crafts. For their third record, they brought in drummer Pat McGee and producer Tom McFall. Set Yourself on Fire was eventually released in 2004. 

In this episode, for the 20th anniversary, Torquil Campbell, Amy Millan, Evan Cranley and Chris Seligman reflect on how the album came together. This is the making of Set Yourself on Fire. 

Torquil Campbell:  Hey, this is Torquil Campbell, and we're talking about the album Set Yourself on Fire by Stars. We found a way to exist in Montreal, it was cheap. It was 300 bucks a month rent. You know, you didn't really have to have a job, and we could work. And so Set Yourself on Fire was the first time where we actually had some money, somebody gave us money to make a record. They gave us like fifty thousand dollars. And so we were like, “Okay, this is it.” It was very much a a moment of, “If we fuck this up, we're done, and if we do well, this could be a job.”  And it was the last record where everybody was still working at coffee shops, or working in restaurants, or doing, or in my case, playing sleazy lawyers in episodic television programs (laughs), or whatever people were doing at the time to make ends meet. So we were very driven, very, very driven. Very ambitious and very drunk. Very, very drunk. 

Stars had started as me and Chris in one room in the Village. He came up and lived with me. I had an apartment there cause I was working as an actor. And so it was just me and Seligman trying to figure out how to make music together. And neither of us really knew what we were doing. 

Chris Seligman: Hey, I'm Christopher Seligman from Stars. We made Nightsongs in New York.  I keep going back to the bedroom side of things. And we initially, we just had like a sampler and we’d just run beats and we’d play to that. So I think being influenced by our friends to a degree, I think we kind of wanted to open things up a bit and be more of a band, be more of a unit.

Torquil Campbell:  Then we moved to Williamsburg, we moved to Brooklyn because we needed space. And this was not when Williamsburg was a Sonoma showroom, it was like a shithole. And we got a lot of space and we lived in this big loft and Jimmy and Emily lived there from Metric and Nick Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs lived there. And at various times, members of Liars lived there and guys from The Bell Cafe Band, but amazing musicians were all in there. Which in New York at the time, like we were playing, you know, Pet Shop Boys music and everything sounded like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I love the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but we were not rock people. We were playing pop music. And so we felt like in no way part of the whole “Meet Me in the Bathroom” world. Metric was much more akin to that than we were. And so Jimmy helped us make Nightsongs and that sort of started to happen. And Jimmy and Emily were playing with us at the gigs we would get at the Time Cafe downtown, but they were busy. So then we were like, “Okay, this is really happening. We have a little record deal with Le Grand Magistery.” We're putting out a record, we need a proper band.” And we had known Evan from the neighborhood, so we got him and then he knew Amy and Emily knew Amy, so we got Amy. 

Chris Seligman: Like when Torq and I started the band, there was like this female sensibility that we always wanted and we're always attracted to. So I think when we met Amy, it was just like, she fits that idea so perfectly. Being around it for 20 years, it's like, it's incredibly powerful. It really resonates with people. 

Torquil Campbell:  We had three or four different female singers on Nightsongs, because the whole, I never imagined writing under any other circumstances. I'm a massive fan of Paul Heaton and The Beautiful South. And, Stars is just a Beautiful South rip off. That's all it is. It's just, I stole everything, all my ideas (laughs), from his band. Which is, you know, make political music that is personal. Have a woman in the band so that two different perspectives can be represented and it doesn't just turn into a bunch of boys with haircuts. Bands that last have a diversity of people, kinds of people, different genders, for me that's the way a band should be. I don't want to be in a band with a bunch of swinging dicks. It'll last like five years. That was the way my thinking was, you know, we needed female energy and we needed to be able to tell stories from two sides.

Amy Millan: Hi, this is Amy Millan and I am the co-lead singer and writer in Stars. Night songs had come out, but I wasn't really in the band. Evan wasn't really in the band at that point. That was really made by Chris Seligman and Tom McCampbell, they made night songs together and brought in guests and Emily Haynes was a guest and Jimmy Shaw was a guest and Kendall was like, there's lots of different female singers on that. And then I had joined the band to tour that record Nightsongs live and (laughs), I'm laughing because I was living in Toronto and they were moving to Montreal and I had just lived in Montreal. I had gone to university here and I didn't really have a very good time here and I just didn't want to come to Montreal. And so I basically got berated by Torquil, and he said, you know, “You're either in or you're out, and you're either coming or you're not in the band. It's interesting, because I was in therapy. I know, so smart for a young woman to be in therapy at such a young age. And my therapist said, “I think you don't like conflict and I think you're afraid to join this band because there's so much conflict.” And so he kind of convinced me (laughs), uh, Dr. Tudors, to come and take the risk, you know, take the risk and come to Montreal and join the band. 

Torquil Campbell:  And then we got to Montreal because we couldn't all live in New York. They weren't legal. We had to move to Montreal. So we all moved to Montreal and that's where Heart happened. That record was like the cementing of like, “Okay, this is a band. This is a real band. We're really going to try and do this.” And Heart was the first record where the four of us kind of fell in love with each other. And in some ways, literally, um, with some people (clears throat). 

Amy Millan: Ummm, you know, there was a lot of relationship drama. One of the things that makes this fan what it is, is the relationships. And that's why I don't want to talk about who I was with or when I was with and like the fact that I'm now been with Evan for 20 years. It's such a separate thing because within the alchemy of Stars, we are each other's soulmates. Each one of us with each other. We are bound to one another in a way that is so profound and is outside of any kind of soap opera drama, it's a much deeper, it feels like, you know, there's a history that goes long beyond even this lifetime between the group of us. And, you know, the way that people speak about a soulmate, I don't believe that there's only one for us in our lifetimes, if we're lucky. And I've been extremely lucky. And I feel like I'm just so linked to all of them in this way that is beyond any kind of relationship outside of that. 

Evan Cranley: Hi, it's Evan Cranley from Stars. The band in 2003/2004 was very much Torquil, Christopher, Amy, and myself. And we were coming off of making our second full-length called Heart. And we were writing as a four piece. 

Chris Seligman: I think Heart, we made the record in my apartment in Montreal. So it's still like a bedroom record, you know, Nightsongs and Heart were bedroom records. We've kind of recorded everything ourselves.

Amy Millan: So we made Heart and I remember feeling like we really thought this was going to break us in a big way. And it's so interesting because we were talking about the album and we were actually asked to go to Europe and Torq as like, “This isn't the time to go. It's not a good idea.” And I think there were alternative reasons why he didn't want to go. But he said, “This isn't the record.” It wasn't even out yet. And he said, “This isn't the record.” He said, “The next record’s, the record that's going to break us.” And he was right. 

Torquil Campbell: Then Arts & Crafts started. Broken Social Scene had started Arts & Crafts. Kevin had started the label Arts and Crafts, and there were all these bands. There was us, there was Broken, there was Feist, there was Metric, there was the Dears, there was the Constantines. There were hundreds of bands back then in Toronto and Montreal, literally hundreds, who were good enough to go. And everybody was like, “Okay, this is gonna take off. This is happening.” So Arts & Crafts started signing people, and we were one of the people that they signed. We had found our people, we had found our label that understood what we were going to do because it was being run partly by our friend, Kevin, we had found the scene we were going to be a part of.

Evan Cranley: There was arts funding, there was a lot of places to play, there was a lots of raw space to make art in, music, visual art. And a really like supporting community of musicians, you know, at the same time, that felt the same kind of energy. I can't really speak for, you know, cities, but New York had that at the time for me when we first started down there and Montreal definitely had it, it had that energy, but like I said, I think most of it was because you could just make noise and be messy anywhere you wanted in the city. It was just an interesting time to be making music. Creatively we thrive in the winter and if you live in Montreal or anywhere in Quebec, you're going to have a long winter. So we decided to kind of leave the city and go out to a region called the Eastern Townships where Torquil has a house. 

Amy Millan: Torq is really good at like just making things happen. Like he just does the thing and it's very helpful (laughs) because a lot of us kind of vacillate and like, you know, between what we should do and he just goes, “This is what we're going to do. We're going to, what we need to do is go to North Hatley,” because his parents had a place there that he'd grown up with, but it was a summer house.

Torquil Campbell: And so the band wrote a lot, always wrote a lot in North Hatley, because it was this big old house. We could go up there and, and nobody would bother us and it was quiet and we could set up a recording studio in the dining room. And one day we were up there recording and we went for a drink, of course, at the local pub. And there was a guy sitting down the bar who was wearing like a Boston Red Sox hat. And there was just something about him, there was just this like dissolute (laughs) aspect to this guy that made me say to Amy, “I'll bet you 50 dollars that guy is in the music industry or in the entertainment industry.” And she's like, “Why?” “I just like, I don't know. I just know he is.” So she went over and asked him and he was sure enough, he was like, “How did you know I'm a musician? I'm an actor.” And he was this lovely man called Alan Nichols. He had been in the original cast of Hair. 

Amy Millan: And so we went over inside the bar with him. We were watching the baseball game and started chatting. His name is Alan Nichols and he was actually an artist. And he's a wonderful guy, we're still in touch. 

Torquil Campbell: And we all got super drunk in this bar together and he was like, “I live right up the hill. You got to come see my house.” Because we told him we were looking for somewhere to record a record. So we went up the hill to his house, and he had a recording studio in his basement. Like, the entire basement was finished like a recording studio. It had five bedrooms or whatever, it was this big old house, and he was leaving, and I think he gave it to us for like, 750 bucks or something for the month, or two months. It was one of those moments where everything seemed to be landing how you needed it to land, and fate was stepping in to help you finish something.

Evan Cranley: So we took him up on it on a whim and we just worked every day in the basement, fleshing out tunes that Chris and I were, kind of sketches of tunes that we were working on and turning them into pop songs. 

Chris Seligman: So it was our way of basically fleshing out the songs arrangement wise with drums. And it definitely helps me to like have an idea of where things are sitting and then you can start to arrange around different sections. So that was like a key for us to really start to figure out how to put the record together. 

Evan Cranley: Yeah we spent five weeks there kind of losing our minds and writing this record in minus 25, minus 20. It was a really creative time, it was really amazing.

Torquil Campbell: And it was pretty much a song a day for like 40 days or something. I mean, we were just like, we were on fire. We were absolutely filled with ideas. So it was the perfect place for us to completely engage with each other and kind of fight it out. 

Amy Millan: It was a really special, fruitful time and there was a lot of fighting. There was a lot of drinking and a lot of songs were made. 

Torquil Campbell: I think we were probably hoping that we could make the record up there and then quickly realized we had no idea what the fuck we were doing and we needed an engineer and a producer to help us make it sound good, you know? When it came time to make Set Yourself on Fire, my memory, I could be wrong, but my memory is that Evan was like, “Why don't we get Tom McFall, that guy from London, let's see if he'll do it?” 

Amy Millan: We went to Europe with Heart and we did a radio session. And the person who was engineering the radio session was named Tom McFall. And we had a wonderful night with this guy, Tom McFall. He was just so lovely. And he took us out that night after he said, “Oh,” he's like, “Oh, you're Canadians, you're visiting.” He took us out on the town. We just had an excellent night with him. And he was really good at what he did. Torquil remembered him and got his contact and said, “That's who should make our record. We should bring him over to make the album.” And so, I remember Tom McFall coming over. We had a really terrible jam space. It was so small, it was the size of a closet, it was in the middle of nowhere. I hated going there. It had Zero vibes. But we went there because it was the only place we had and we took Tom there and we went and played all the songs for him live and he had his notepad and he was ruthless in his opinions about what should happen and even lyrically, which was so interesting because Torq is a hard person to challenge lyrically because he's very confident in his way of how he writes. But he respected Tom so much that watching them kind of go at it was really fun. And then I remember we were listening to the demos. We were going through each song and then “Ageless Beauty” came on and he looked at me and he went, “Well, this one is just perfect,” in his little English accent. I was like, “Yes, it is!” So that was fun.

Torquil Campbell: And at that point Tom was making records with big bands. I mean, he was engineering U2 records, he was engineering Snow Patrol records and they made a big R.E.M. record, I can't remember which R.E.M. record it was but he'd been working on R.E.M. and so he was, you know, learning a ton. He was a very young man at the time. He was probably only 25, 26 years old, but he had been picking up shed loads of ideas from Jacknife Lee, that's who he worked for, Jacknife Lee. And so it was sort of his moment to prove himself as well. No one had ever really hired him to be a producer before, I don't think. So he had a lot to prove. We had this really good team of people. We had a good idea and we had three weeks. Tom was going to go home. At the end of three weeks, he was going to go back to England. So we just, you know, had to do it, and decisions had to be made quickly. And I'm a big fan of that. 

“Your Ex-Lover Is Dead”

Chris Seligman: I would say the string arrangements actually came when we went into the studio to actually record the record. Cause I remember probably I had left it to the last second. So I remember being pretty rushed with them. We were in the middle of recording the record and I would be at home writing string arrangements, and then the string players were in the session, and I was like, really a mad dash to get all this parts written for the string players to play.

Evan Cranley: The third record was definitely our most ornate when it came to arrangements and orchestration. We try to sketch songs that are instrumentally interesting to us. Chris has a classical background, and I grew up playing a lot of trombone, and dipped my toe into that. And so I think we try to make kind of simple, almost classical style music in the art of traditional pop arrangement. So I think if something has enough space and we think it's beautiful and we sketch it out as a song structure. If we think it's good, then we think Torq and Amy are going to think it's good. So yeah, if it's interesting enough without lyrics and singing, but you can kind of hear space for that, then I think it's a successful sketch.

Chris Seligman: I think for me, like beginning with Nightsongs, I could just kind of express ideas through strings. I could be emotional in creating like a climax in songs with strings. So I think I always just thought of that. And I think like people in the band were always connected to that sensibility. 

Evan Cranley: Chris did most of the strings for that and then we both played horns along with an alto sax player named Eric Hove. Those were fleshed out kind of after the demos were formed and we would arrange, we would do those kind of orchestral things after the song was solidified. And those were done quite quickly in the studio with the string quartet or a three piece horn section. So, they were always in our mind to do that when we were writing the songs. For instance, “Ex-Lover Is Dead” was going to be an instrumental song. And me and Chris and I sketched it out that there would be a really big kind of string thing to go along with it. But we didn't really think there'd be lyrics at all or singing at all with it, to be honest, when it started. It's funny how things evolve.

Torquil Campbell: So “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead,” what I remember about it is, they had this piece of music that didn't have any chorus. It just had three sections to it. But I really liked it. It was very different from anything we'd done before. And like so many songs I've written, to me songwriting or lyric writing is a lot like Sudoku. You have one thing you know, and you put that on the page, and then you kind of build around it, a world of logic. So in that case, in the case of “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead.” I had “God, that was strange to see you again.” I don't know why that seemed to be preoccupying me (laughs). I think if I'm honest, it was very much an imagining. I had left a partner that I was with a long seven years, seven long, painful years in New York. And I had fallen in love with somebody else, with the woman who's now my wife, with Moya. And I had broken up with this woman that I had been with. And she was from Montreal. And then I had moved back to Montreal and was living in a little bit of fear or trepidation that I would run into her at some point, you know, because it was very unresolved. It was very like, it wasn't a nice, peaceful, you know, “We'll be friends” breakup. It was like, “That's it. We're never speaking again. Goodbye.” And so I imagined the scenario of what it would be like to meet her at a party and have someone not know that we knew each other introduced by a friend of a friend. And then you're off. 

Amy Millan: We have always been a big fan of the Pogues. And I think that definitely there was an aspect of “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” where I wanted to channel Kirsty MacColl in that way where she's so raw. And it was such a beautiful melody and the lyrics. It's so interesting because I still think about, you know, my first relationship where I was really heartbroken. 

And when I sing it, when I sang it in the studio and when I sing it on stage, I mostly hearken back to that feeling of being so devastated by someone and so heartbroken by someone that you thought was your forever person. I remember saying to Torq, you know, “If they were so in love, like how could he possibly say, I was trying to remember your name?” And he said, “Because it's the cruelest thing you could say to somebody who once loved you.” Ouch (laughs). 

Torquil Campbell: The balance that Amy and I try to achieve is I'll go very dark and she'll try to lift me out of that darkness. And so the conversation between the two of us is a naturally optimistic person and a naturally pessimistic person who love each other and are trying to do something together, you know, and that happens a lot in Stars. 

Amy Millan: I remember the very first time that Torq and I ever sang together, I was kind of auditioning for the band. When we came in together, it was just a undeniable kind of chemistry with one another. And you know, sometimes that chemistry, chemistry is an interesting thing because it's not always positive, you know, if people can have, and him and I can go at it, man, oh my God. But still, if you're that kind of worked up about somebody, even if it's in the negative way, it still creates a chemistry that is alive in the room, right? I was so excited as a person who writes songs to be able to use that tool to have a conversation. And so in Heart, you know, I felt like the biggest contribution that I was able to make, for the first time, to Stars was “Elevator Love Letter.” Seligman and I wrote that song late one night in Montreal, and I felt like, “Here I can make this relationship with these people, I can be a part of that relationship, and I can have these two people talk to each other, and break each other's hearts over and over again.” And then “Ex-Lover” just felt like it was like the next stage to that, these two people, these two same people who keep coming back and breaking each other's hearts. 

Torquil Campbell: And I think the reason “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” maybe is such a sort of keystone song for us is that after that, I realized you could write songs where what happens is never said because that's the way life is. You just can describe the details of something, the absolute diaristic details of something, and everyone will be like, “Oh, I know what that was about.” 

Amy Millan: But “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead,” I can't remember where the music was written, but I remember I was out and I came back to 939, the apartment, we called it 939, an apartment that had gone through friends for years and years and years, and Chris Seligman and I were both living there, and Torq was there, and him and Seligman and Cranley had written the song and I remember him sitting in the windowsill and singing it to me and then he goes, “This is your part.” And then he's like, “The scar is a fleck on my porcelain skin,” and it's so funny because we're like family, right? So sometimes we're not very like nice to each other, we get irritated and you know, we're just we're very critical of one another and I remember hearing the song being like, “Okay sounds good.” But I had no idea the monumental life that that song would have in that moment of listening to it. No idea that it would go on for 20 years to connect with people and have such a life. It's remarkable. 

Chris Seligman: I think what it meant to us, like “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead,” when the record came out and we started touring it, I think that song, we were all going through that together. The idea of your ex-lover being dead. So I think it was emotional for us, you know, it was emotional for us to play it and to kind of like face those emotions within, cause we were feeling those things all together. That definitely resounded with us as well. 

Amy Millan: Well, let's talk about the sequencing of the album because it's interesting that “Your Ex-Lover's Dead” begins the album because for sure, if it had been left in the hands of us. We never would have started the record with “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead.” It felt like such a bold move because we thought, you know, “We should start with a banger, you know, like, let's start with ‘Reunion,’ or let's start with ‘Ageless,’ or let's start,” and it was Kevin Drew from Broken Social Scene. He's a doula on many people's records, and he was definitely a doula on Set Yourself on Fire. And we gave him all the songs, and he said, “You start it with ‘Your Ex- Lover Is Dead.’” And it was his call to make that happen. And he sequenced the whole thing. He gave us the songs that we should have in order. And that's a crucial part to the album, you know, and that's, again, I come back to the soulmates. But Kevin Drew has been a massive part of the life of this band as well, just on the outside and us as well inside Broken Social Scene and then the peripheral of Broken Social Scene, like this group of like friendships have like made the albums what they were and like the players you didn't always know, you know, that's what's so interesting.It's like Kevin Drew made it start with “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead.” 

Chris Seligman: Those things, kind of the end bits of the record can be the most torturous sometimes figuring out how the song should go together and I think Kevin just represents, like this great father figure or great, he looks after his friends and he's been there when you've needed them over the years.

Torquil Campbell: Kevin's unbelievably good at understanding the energy that a project has and how to make that energy holistic and complete.  And he follows his instincts without any fear. So you want somebody like that sequencing a record because you can just sit there. I mean, it's like trying to, you know, break the code of a safe or something. Any combination could potentially be the right one. Who the hell knows? And you've already been working on this album for a year, and you've lost all perspective and objectivity about what's good and what's bad, and what's your favorite and which one you hate. And I think it's at that point that someone like Kevin can really make a huge difference in making the record complete, because he can stand back from it and kind of go, “No, no, no, no, no.” Like, we would never have put “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead” first. I think we were putting that last. And he was like, “No, what are you talking about? That's the first song.” When Kevy gives you his confidence, amazing things occur. 

“Set Yourself on Fire” 

Torquil Campbell: Previous to that, Stars was very much in a template of like, everything was in the box. We didn't really write with live drums. That's the other big factor is that that's when Patty (Pat McGee)  joined full time. So Patty was there to make that record. Heart was made without him. Heart was made with like synthetic beats and then we hired George Donoso from the Dears to play a lot of the drums on Heart. So it was the first time we had a drummer in the room and of course that changes the temperature. Everything goes up 10 degrees and every, the tempos go up, the guitars get louder, everything gets more dramatic. 

Evan Cranley: Having Patty flushing out the music and making it more human and it was a treat for me because I was playing bass and guitar on the record and I got to really kind of play with a person. I remember Patty being a big, we had a big impact on that song through the intro verse dynamics and pre chorus dynamics. I remember him being a big part of his drum arrangement really helping the song. And I just remember doing take after take, me and Patty in the actual studio in Montreal, we did a drum and bass version off the floor. I remember we did like 18 or 22 takes to try to get that feeling good. 

Torquil Campbell: The second song is “Set Yourself on Fire” and the first lyrics of that are, “In a village in the hills, house buried to the windowsills in snow,” that's where we were. And that concentration, that focus, the coldness of the weather, our inability to go anywhere, we didn't have a car, you know, we were just like in this little village in the middle of winter. It was one of those moments where you were allowed to completely be free of everything else except the work. So we took advantage of it. 

Evan Cranley: The song is really interesting, it has this tender quality, but there's moments in it that are a little frantic and bombastic, but those two dynamics work, they bounce off each other and it kind of, it makes the tune work in a unique way. When we play it live, it almost goes off the rails in sections because of the drum and bass dynamics. It's kind of a tune that has, it's like a small little symphony style arrangement, the beginning, the middle, and then this kind of arcing outro. It has, for like a four and a half minute pop song or whatever it is, it has a kind of a really interesting classical arc to it. 

Torquil Campbell: We've been playing “Set Yourself on Fire” obviously on tour recently. And, you know, that's one of those songs we don't play that often if we're not playing the album. So listening to the lyrics of “Set Yourself on Fire” again as I sing them, I'm struck by my attempt to encompass literally everything in the world (laughs). It's like, so grandiose and ridiculous. But I remember fiercely believing in this idea that no matter what you are, no matter who you are, no matter how fallen, or broken, or fucked up you are, or how risen and high and mighty you are, love, this one thing that motivates our entire lives, is an amoral force. Hitler loved Eva Braun. You can't take that away from him. But he loved that woman, in the same way that good people love people. Love is not the domain of the good. It randomly is gifted upon people. In fact, lots and lots and lots of really, really good people don't get to be loved or don't find love, whether it's platonic, or romantic, or sexual, or whatever. People who are deeply good are cheated of love, and people who are total pieces of shit are surrounded by it. That was, to me, the point of that song, was that one thing, which I don't say, motivates and brings down and saves every single one of us. 

The cost of love is that you have to give up everything and everyone you ever loved and die, or they die. You have to say goodbye to everybody and everything. And you have 20 years of this dream, you know, 20 years sleeping. And then that's it. I think there was a lot going on in my mind while we made this record about, “How do you talk about love without using the word love all the time?” It's not used in “Your Ex-Lover Is Dead.” It's not used in “Set Yourself on Fire.” It's not used in a lot of the songs. And there's even a song that's like, “I'm trying to say what I want to say without having to say I love you,” because it felt so pointless to say that. But it was also, you know, love is the lingua franca of pop songs. What are you gonna talk about? I mean, I guess if you're in Pavement, you can talk about I don't know, freezies or whatever it is those guys are talking about (laughs). But if you're in like another band, you have to write songs that people understand what you're talking about.  

Evan Cranley: It's really funny, we talk about this a lot about, yeah, how it's all going to end eventually, even in our early to mid twenties. We could kind of like be realistic about, “You're not here forever.” And that's what makes a good pop song is if you can encapsulate something that’s a timeless feeling of something ending or a new beginning. 

“Ageless Beauty”

Amy Millan: What I find so remarkable in this experience in this past year of playing this album, being the age that I am now, and this was 20 years ago, I'm 51. And so, you know, 20 years ago, I was relatively young, but we didn't feel young and we've, I think have always felt the chase of death and the fear of death. And my father was killed in a car accident when I was very young and so I had sort of a traumatic experience in childhood that definitely is the reason for me of why I had, you know, death always felt close to where I was. It's so funny to sing these songs now because I'm like, “Girl?” (laughs) “‘Ageless Beauty,’ like, what are you even talking about? You're 26 years old.” I think part of, you know, the muse and being a person who lives in art is that you have to know that it's going to end. 

Chris Seligman: I was always excited by that song because it was like kind of anthemic. I think we were kind of like, had My Bloody Valentine in the back of our head with it a little bit, in terms of the production. 

Torquil Campbell: I would say the only thing I had to do with “Ageless Beauty” is I played people My Bloody Valentine, you know? Like, a lot of what I've done in my life as a musician is, because I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I mean, I played trumpet as a kid, and I sang in a choir, but I don't know chords. These guys are virtuosic musicians, and I'm just a guy who listens to a lot of music. And so, my job to a large degree was playing them music.

Evan Cranley: I remember Chris had this idea for the verse on piano that was super, super slow, that descending kind of E flat thing that goes down, which I thought was really, really great, but he played it really, really slow. And I suggested that we speed up that verse section and then I added the chorus on guitar and it turned what was going to be this kind of languid ballad turned into this dream pop song. So I remember sketching that out with Chris. And I remember when we demoed it, Jimmy Shaw from Metric for a couple of days with us setting up the studio. And I remember he arranged the drum part and he wrote the drum part for that. And I remember playing the guitar and bass, Chris playing the keyboard. His drum ideas were really cool for that. 

Chris Seligman: Evan and I will write music and then we'll, we kind of have a sense of like who should sing on it sometimes. So we were definitely like, “Amy's going to sing on this.” And then it was one of those things where. We had it for months and there was no vocal. 

Amy Millan: “Ageless Beauty” was, the music was written in the house, but nobody lept on it yet. And so I remember it was recorded because we were recording the whole time. And so there was a demo of it. And then we came back to Montreal and I just was tortured with this song. I just wanted it to be so beautiful. And I remember kind of singing, I called it whale music because I would kind of do like, and I was doing different tracks and layering what kind of stuck with me the most. 

I remember “Ageless Beauty,” like it was yesterday. I was so self conscious everything that I did and still do in this band is I just want the other guys to like it, you know what I mean? I really don't care about the rest of the world. It's really about the opinions of the people in this band and them getting excited about what they hear. And so I remember feeling so worried that I wasn't going to give this song, I just wasn't, I felt like I wasn't going to be able to live up to what the music was and I was so self conscious and scared and inside myself and I wouldn't let anyone be in the room when I was trying to write. So I kicked Chris and Evan out. And I was sitting in the room at 939  going over and over and over. And I had like, probably like 57 different vocal tracks of different ideas. And it's interesting because that (sings) “See it for yourself or see it,” that part was one of my many, many, many attempts at trying to find something. And what was interesting is when I found, “We will always be a light,” I kept kind of like pressing on other parts that I'd had and trying to listen to them together and that was like I had done that like say track 15 and then the chorus that I came up was track 37 but when I was playing around with it, the two of them came together so beautifully.  

Torquil Campbell: I remember coming to the studio one day, I think I'd gone away and I came back and they'd made it and I was like, “That sounds incredible” (laughs). You know, “That's a great song. I don't really need to do anything to that.” I don't think I even sing backups on that song. It just came out and it was a perfect thing. 

Chris Seligman: It took Amy a while to get to it and then she started writing it. And so the excitement of the song that you always had, like became fulfilled with when she did the vocal, because it was so awesome, you know?

Evan Cranley: I mean, Amy naturally can have a really dreamy, dreamy quality to her voice  and the tune stays in this dreamy pop world and to this day, she doesn't really like multiple tracks of her in a tune. She likes to kind of be direct with her vocals, but this with having all those cool backing vocals and the double track stuff in the verse really makes this even more dreamlike, so it was a cool side of her that she doesn't normally do all the time. 

Amy Millan: It was so crucial to have a melody that worked for that music that's such a banging, like, if you take my vocal out of it, you know what I mean? It's such a banger of a track and I felt so much pressure to like give it what it deserved. And I worked really hard and really tore down any part of myself. Like, I just tried to be inside the song, I just tried to not be me and that like egoless person that lived inside what the music was and have it tell me what to do. And it did. And so that's how “Ageless Beauty” was born. 

“Reunion”

Amy Millan: “Reunion,” I love that song so much. And to me it doesn't, it's like, it's a really different song on the record. They're all sort of different, but that feels like it lives in a little bit of a different world. Which I think helped the record a lot. I remember the guitar, I remember Evan Cranley plays that guitar solo on the record. And I remember being pretty excited because it was such a killer guitar line. And it just being so alive. And yeah, I just remember the ripping guitar solo and the jaunty spirit of “Reunion.” 

Torquil Campbell: A big, big thing that happened too in Set Yourself on Fire was that Evan started to play guitar a lot. And, you know, everybody in the band kind of has these meeting points in terms of their taste where they really, really vibe with each other. Like me and Chris really love Bjork. Me and Amy really love the Smiths, you know, me and Evan really love Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson and sort of new wave, early 80s pop songwriting. And that's when Evan and I started to have that conversation musically. So you get songs like “Reunion.” 

Evan Cranley: The song “Reunion” on Set Yourself on Fire. I remember doing that in the basement again, at the house in minus 25. Actually, I had this guitar that I bought off a guy in Toronto on Parliament Street  and I went to his house to buy it and it ended up being Jeff Healy's old, uh, Squire Telecaster. It's a late 70s, early 80s model. And I remember when I laid down the bass line for that, I remember, “I'm going to use this guitar and do this kind of like cool Television-y, I was listening to a lot of Television. I wanted to do this cool like Television-y style, Stratocaster sounding guitar with this and solo with this. So I remember like tapping into my late seventies, you know, New York Television side of myself for that. 

Chris Seligman: That one's kind of interesting. I think like Evan had these initial chords, like in the verse, like he was just playing on guitar. There was this initial idea and then for some reason, I just came up with that riff for the chorus. Because I don't usually write that way, but it's just like a riff. And then we kind of like, we would double the riff on guitars and it somehow became like this much more like 80s. It's like a 12-string kind of feel on the guitar.

Torquil Campbell: I love that song. That's really like where me and, and Cranley really express our love for Elvis Costello and for just trying to write the perfect pop song, you know, like we as a band, as a group of people have always been really obsessed with just getting a song where we cannot argue with it, where no one in the band thinks anything other than, “Man, that is just a brilliant song.” And we've never done that. Like this band is eternally discontent with its product (laughs). But not me, I love everything we've done, but other people are much more picky. 

Amy Millan: “Reunion,” like we hadn't been out of high school for all that long. So thinking that was kind of an interesting ahead of its time for our own time song. But I loved the way it made me think of those relationships in high school. You know, you never know if you're going to see the person again. I love that song.

Torquil Campbell: “Reunion” is a story. What Set Yourself on Fire has, what I contributed to it anyway, is that it was the first time where I was like, “Oh you can now we have, me and Amy, there's these two characters, we can talk about them for the rest of our career.” Like they're not me and Amy, they're extreme versions of me and Amy and Amy and I aren't a romantic couple, but we definitely love each other and we have this intense intense close relationship because we're sharing space, we're sharing space, we're sharing our creativity, you know, we're sharing songs, we're on stage, we're sharing everything in the art. So Amy being there as a muse with the notion of like, “Okay, we've had ‘Your Ex-Lover Is Dead,” now we could write a song about them meeting in another 10 years, what would happen then you know, or if they were slightly different people.”  

Evan Cranley: The lyrics from Torq are interesting. I think he had a pretty interesting time in high school. And he kind of shows us that lyrically on that song. 

Torquil Campbell: I was what, 26, 27 when I wrote that song, 26. So I was only, what, eight years out of high school? You're still litigating your teenage life at that point in your life. Do you know what I mean? You're still, like, trying to make sense of it. You're still trying to rewrite the history of your awkwardness and your loserdom and your loneliness and your depression and all those things that you went through and cast them as kind of revenge. Like, “I'm going to make a song that's revenge against all of that,” you know, like “fuck all those people that made us feel like losers, we're here. We're going to be young and wild and free.” So a lot of Set Yourself on Fire was me litigating my youth and  casting it in a different light for myself. Because I had grown up in Toronto, which at the time was a very parochial, very Midwestern, very Presbyterian uptight place, everybody in my school listened to Guns N’ Roses and the fucking Doobie Brothers and I hated all of it, you know, I was obsessed with the Velvet Underground and De La Soul and the Replacements, like, people were like, “What the fuck is this?” There was no internet, remember kids? So I could not go on a Reddit thread and share my love (laughs). I was just a loser who didn't listen to music that anybody else listened to. So it was just a way of being like, “I made it. I actually did this. I'm in a band. I told you I would be, I knew it was going to work.” And I think “Reunion” on some level is like a victory dance for us, for ourselves. 

“The Big Fight” 

Evan Cranley: I remember when we were writing and demoing and recording “The Big Fight,” I mentioned earlier that everyone was getting along, but I don't think Torq and Amy were necessarily getting along at a particular moment during the creative process. And that might be talked about on the lyrics of that record. So, I remember she wrote the lyrics for those, but maybe her, she's going to have to explain this, but her maybe working out a situation that she was in with the other singer in the band, perhaps. 

Chris Seligman: The actual song “The Big Fight” was a big fight in North Hatley when we were all up for a month. So that's probably what would stick out to me the most is that there was like, we have like these large fights every once in a while (laughs). And that was one of them. And it probably happened like halfway through all living together in the house. So at some point, something was, especially when we were younger, at some point, something was gonna break emotionally between us all. 

Torquil Campbell: Well, we had a big fight (laughs). I remember that. Me and Amy, we can have some big fights sometimes. And we had a big fight. 

Chris Seligman: It was between them for sure, but of course, it then starts to immediately affect everyone. 

Amy Millan: “The Big Fight” is called “The Big Fight” because it was the biggest fight that we had ever had in the band between Torq and I. So I had written most of “The Big Fight,” but I was having trouble finishing the second verse. So I asked Campbell to help finish it, and he wrote some lyrics, and I didn't love all of them. I liked some of them, but I didn't love all of them. And I felt that because, you know, the song was mine in a way, like all of ours, obviously, and musically, as I said, Chris and Evan write all the music, but I felt lyrically that the story was mine to tell and that I was just a little bit stuck. And so he wrote some lyrics and then I then changed some of them and he didn't think that I should be doing that because as I've said about his lyrics, he's fairly confident. So I just said, “Well, that's, I don't want them to say this.” Like, “I'm the one like that started the story. It's my story to tell and I don't like those words and I don't want them to be in the song.” So anyway, it became this massive meltdown. It was like two days or three days of like tension and arguing. And yeah, but I changed them so ha ha.

Torquil Campbell: Set Yourself on Fire and In Our Bedroom After the War, Amy and I were fighting a lot. We were really threatened by each other, I think, and really trying to find our space and feeling like the other person was constantly there threatening us, even though we were kind of obsessed with each other too and obviously  partying our asses off together. We were  struggling a little bit, I think, for power in the band and we couldn't find our balance. And that was, in some respects, like a really creative thing. Like it brought out really great because it was competitive, you know, like we were trying to write better songs than each other, but it wasn't very fun. When it went wrong, it was not fun. And we had some huge fight and so Amy wrote a song called “The Big Fight,” even though the song is not about us at all actually, the song is a pretty classically structured song about betrayal and about a couple falling apart. And I remember that Amy had written most of the tune, but there was some reply, like give and take. I think she wrote it as a kind of olive branch. Like she wrote this song where it's like, she says one line, I say one line, she says one line because she was like, “Come on, Torqy, let's be together again. Let's do this thing together again.” So that's structurally, I think was why she wrote it that way was as a peace offering to me.

Amy Millan: Well, what became sort of evident in that moment and what spoke to the future of how we wrote is that we couldn't do it together. You know, I never asked Torq to come in and help me write a song ever again. And I never really would edit his lyrics for his own stuff. You know what I mean? So it kind of put a stake in the ground between the two of us and how we wrote our words. But that fight, that big fight made it so that we just knew to stay in each other's own lanes. 

Evan Cranley: I really wanted to do like a smooth kind of R&B style tune. And I really wanted to have that horn play going, which was really cool because the horn section is an alto sax, trombone, french horn. And that blend of horns is really unique, that trio of that timbre that we got. So I remember really loving that horn section. And then that weird section that happens in the end, I don't know if it has a title, but then it gets all kind of dancey and synthy and sub bassy. That was just weird (laughs). 

Torquil Campbell: The back section of it, which is that like, sort of, you know, bedroom house section, the instrumental section. That was one of the first pieces of music that I wrote in the band, that piano riff and those chords are mine. And I think that was sort of my idea to put this dancey section on the end. I'm a massive Saint Etienne, massive Saint Etienne fan, massive New Order fan. And so I wanted to bring that element of dance pop to it. 

Evan Cranley: A lot of Set Yourself on Fire, “The Big Fight” in particular, but we started  collecting a lot of vintage synthesis at this point too, which, so we have this really nice orchestral chamber pop style record, but we have these kind of interesting kind of vintage synth tones throughout it, you know, which is something we started to get into and we got further into with records we did after Set Yourself on Fire as well. So you're kind of seeing a bit of the journey into vintage synthesis as well with us on this record. 

“What I’m Trying to Say” 

Amy Millan: Oh so I remember this song being written. We were at North Hatley, but it wasn't the winter house. It was after we had been there in the wintertime and we were back there at Torq's place in the summertime. And Evan was on the porch playing acoustic guitar and they just like wrote it in five minutes, Torq and Evan. And I just thought it had such a cool Elvis Costello feeling. 

Evan Cranley: I remember it was a beautiful afternoon, I had an acoustic guitar, I remember I was just kind of playing this riff. And I remember him writing lyrics like he does in 5 to 15 minutes. And we just had this song, which is rare, because it's rare, it does happen, but it's rare for two people to come in with an idea, like, “Here's a song.” It has happened, but it was the first time I've done it with Torq, and so we had this thing. 

Torquil Campbell: That's one of those songs too, where in terms of the lyrics, a lot of times, it's important not to read too much into lyrics. I just think I just wrote shit down that sounded cool. And then years later, I look back and I'm like, “Oh, that meant something.” You know, “You look so good in the clothes of a poser,” is just a funny thing to say. I don't know. That's just a funny, I just like that line, you know? 

Amy Millan: Well the interesting thing too, is on that record, you know, Torq met his wife right before that record was made. And on Heart, you can feel like he'd had this girlfriend for a long time and there's sort of more breakup songs on that record from him because his, you know, he was kind of going through this breakup. But on Set Yourself on Fire, he had met his wife. And so many of those songs are for Moya. He just completely fell madly in love with this woman. And, you know, they're still together, and they have a child, and, you know, that was right before that record was made. They were having a very intense love affair. And I think that they kind of both knew that this was going to be it. But they were so much, you know, they were just a young, young love. They were deeply, deeply, deeply in love. And so like all of that was inspired by Moya O'Connell, definitely. 

Torquil Campbell: So “What I'm Trying to Say,” “The First Five Times,” “Reunion,” lots of songs on this record are informed by me being madly in love with Moya, with the woman who's now my wife, who I'm still madly in love with after 25 years, but we had just kind of gotten together in the previous few years. And I was writing love songs for her. I was writing songs to try and impress her. She was selling our merch at the time, sometimes she was tour managing us, she was driving us around. So she was very much in all of our lives. And I wanted to write songs that would make her happy and make her smile and make her dance. And that was one of those songs where I was just trying to express my sense of like, that I had found my person who was going to understand how insane I was, and how combative I was, and how driven I was, and she was going to love that in me, you know? 

"One More Night (Your Ex-Lover Remains Dead)"

Chris Seligman: Sometimes we'll have bits of music, and Evan's really good at just saying like, “Let's put that here,” like, I think like with “One More Night,” we had this riff, like I had written this riff, which was the intro to “One More Night,” but I think we were writing it in respect to like,  another song. So Evan's really good at saying like, “Let's take this and put it at the beginning of “One More Night” or something. 

Evan Cranley: I remember “One More Night” being demoed with Chris. I remember he had a lot of the piano going on it and I just laid down bass and guitar. I like the kind of R& B quality. 

Chris Seligman: I actually think that Torq and James from Metric initially wrote that song. Like I think James came up for like a night and they like went downstairs and like the simple progression, Jimmy wrote. And the vocal is like, interesting because it almost felt like, to me, like a different kind of vocal than Torq would have written, like with us. Like it just felt like a bit of a departure vocally. In my mind, I was always like, “That's probably, like, that's a Jimmy influence.” James from Metric. So we had this idea and then he left. And then I think it was like, “Well, what do we do with it?”

Torquil Campbell: So I really, really love the song “One More Night” by Phil Collins. I thought it would be really funny to write a song called “One More Night,” because that is like the ultimate MOR soft rock melt. And I love that shit. So I think it just started with the title and me wanting to echo the title of that song.

Amy Millan: I remember hearing Torq writing “One More Night” in the basement and he was singing sort of high. And I said to, I don't remember, I think it was, I think Jimmy was there from Metric. And I said to Jimmy, “Oh, he's writing this one for me.” And then Torq came upstairs. I was like, “That was for me, right? You want me to sing that song?” He said, “No, I'm writing it for me. Like I just, I'm trying to, you know, work with my falsetto.” And then, you know, arguments ensued. But Chris and Evan just said, “Just try it as a duet.” And so it turned out to be a duet, which was the best way to kind of split the songs. 

Evan Cranley: Another cool duet on the record. There's so many cool back and forths on this record. I think maybe more than any record we've done is this play between Torq and Amy, which also the listeners in the audience and over time, I think respond to the most is really the,  the play between the two singers. 

Torquil Campbell: What I have always taken from music and what I've always been drawn to in music is extremity, you know, whether it's extremely beautiful or extremely loud or extremely sad or extremely celebratory and nihilistic, whether it's the Smiths or it's Kevin Saunderson or it's, you know, extremity is what appeals to me in music and in lyrics. And that's a kind of dark, S&M murderous world that that song exists in. Again, like an examination of a relationship that I would never in my life be in. And that's the fun of writing, of writing fiction, whether it's rhyming fiction or it's prose fiction. When you write fiction, you can say whatever you want and imagine whatever you want. And as somebody who was just like deeply happy at that moment in my life. It was fun to think about a relationship that was deeply scary. 

Evan Cranley: And then the second half, well, the tension between these two people, it builds. And so does the music, you know, so I just thought it was kind of a good dynamic to have this outro kind of, and the tension between these two people, maybe. And it was just, it's fun to just rock out sometimes. 

Chris Seligman: I think Evan came up with that outro. And then it was a question of arranging the song kind of to reach that climax. The biggest way to describe it is like creating like tension and release. 

“Sleep Tonight” 

Amy Millan: “Sleep Tonight.” I love this song so much. The reason I was able to write these songs, it's because Chris and Evan took care of me, you know, and they would, it was really important for them. They loved the way I sang and they loved the way I wrote. And so they were always really careful with me, Chris and Evan. They really held space for me and made it so that I was safe enough to be able to let all the guards down to be able to express myself in that way. And I feel like, you know, the way the music is in “Sleep Tonight.” I feel like that's a cradle of them just protecting me to be myself. 

Evan Cranley: I remember Amy and Chris kind of sketching that one out between the two of them actually talking about like in the creative process how sometimes it's two or three or four or one and I remember that being Chris and Amy and I remember that happening in a bedroom outside of the basement that we were working in in this house. And he had a cool kind of Rhodes-y thing going and she was writing the lyrics and singing and it was cool. And then I added that chimey chimey guitar, which is, it's just in a really funky, like Sonic Youth-style tuning. It's really open and jangly. I really wanted to kind of have something like that on the record, but I remember just kind of sitting in with the two of them and playing guitar to the song. And it's one of those rare songs on the record, “Sleep Tonight” is where Amy's kind of vocal was ready. And I can kind of play to it, which was super fun because a lot of the times there's music and then you wait for the vocal idea to come. This had the opposite origin to it, which was really cool. 

Amy Millan: The youthful spirit of coming into your own sexuality is such a prominent thing on this record, I feel. You know, you're becoming an adult, you know, and so you're able to love like an adult. You know, you're coming out of being a teenager. We were in our mid twenties and the twenties are such a crazy time. You know, you don't, you're still an ingenue and people don't really take you seriously, but you're broke and you're on your own, but you're considered to like, get your shit together. You wonder if you'll, what will happen in the future. You're so curious about like, “Will I find love? Will I find this, this forever person?” And I just, I wanted to write a song about that kind of vulnerability of being with somebody and really allowing yourself to just be a grown up, be vulnerable, be with the person and be alive and be brave enough to give yourself in all ways. I just love writing, you know, I really love writing. I love words and how you can bring a whole life into something that's three minutes long, which is a song and just the idea of, you know, the sun coming up and the window shakes and all that stuff of like, just being able to create that imagery of two people. 

Evan Cranley: To be honest, I think that might have been Torq’s melody. I think he maybe played it on melodica and then actually played trumpet on that line on the record. So that was his horn arrangement contribution is that hook. So I'll give it up to him. 

Torquil Campbell: I remember writing the horn line on that song. I was very proud of writing the horn line on that song. I used to play trumpet a lot in Stars. Then Evan made me stop because he's a snob and I wasn't good enough (laughs). But I got away with playing the horn line on that. 

Evan Cranley: And then I love Chris's warbly synths, those kind of detuned things. Those mono detuned synths, I think are really, really cool. That's again, one of my favorite songs on the record and I love how that came together. That one seemed from my perspective, really easy. 

Chris Seligman: I always love that song. I feel like there might've been like a technical problem with it at some point. When we mixed the record with Tony Hoffer, who's kind of like this famous mixing guy, we kind of like slowed it down, like through a tape machine, maybe.

Torquil Campbell: I remember the wobbly tape. I guess everything was going through this tape delay machine that Tom had. That gave the whole thing this like slightly like a tape that has been pulled out too long, you know, like a warp flavor. And I remember being sort of like, “Whoa, that's, I don't know about that.” My instincts are bad in that respect. I think as a producer, I tend towards the safe, like the milk toast sonically. And Tom and I think Evan, maybe Chris even, were like insistent that that was a cool direction because the song was so gentle. Amy's voice was so gentle and the words were so gentle. There needed to be something that was slightly disconcerting or slightly off in the song in order to give it some tension. And it was a great decision. And now when I listen back to it, I'm like, “Right, of course,” that puts the song in this slightly off kilter world that sounds a bit like a dream or like it's coming through a radio from far away. And I think that's what made that particular record really work. 

“The First Five Times” 

Evan Cranley: That is some drum programming that I think, actually, James Shaw helped us with, and that was kind of, we're delving into more like drum programming and synthesis, and I remember during when we were demoing “The First Five Times,” I wanted to kind of have an acoustic guitar to go along with these cold electronics. So I remember coming up with the acoustic guitar stuff, and we had the drum beat going, And I just love the way the kind of the verses are set up when that big synth kind of comes into the end and it's more of this kind of celebration at the end. I remember it being, coming together with the drum machine first, then the acoustic guitar, and that was very arranged and flushed out. We had that arrangement and I remember Torq writing to that. That was very much kind of like, “Hey, here's a cool pop song.” 

Amy Millan: “First Five Times,” again, I come back to the passion of, you know, Torquil falling in love with his wife of 20 years at that time, like that song to me is like so much of that is just inspired by him finding the love of his life, which is really beautiful. 

Torquil Campbell: That's probably the most blatantly autobiographical song I've ever written in my life, actually. It's just a pretty forensic detailing of the first five times I had sex with my wife (laughs). That's pretty much what it is. You know, I don't know what else to say about it. I can't believe I shared that information, but there it is. It's like the first time we had sex was in a front yard of someone's house in a rainstorm, we crawled, they had plastic covering over their, I guess, their vegetables to keep the squirrels from eating them or something. They put like plastic over it and we just got under this tarp and fucked. It's insane. Yeah, it's just a celebration of my love for her, and of the craziness of falling in love with someone when you're both supposed to be with other people, and, you know, it's totally not okay what's happening, but you just can't help yourself, it's just like, you love each other, and there is nothing that can be done about it, it's gonna keep happening. 

Chris Seligman: And then the idea of “The First Five Times,” I think I wanted it to go somewhere else, so we wrote, like, another kind of outro. And then the release would be like the second section, we change progressions and then we go to like a less rhythmical place and we go to a more emotional place. 

Torquil Campbell: And the end, you know, is sort of an acknowledgement of that. “Every day it's changed since then, in every way I'm changed since then, driven outside and driven in.” And meeting Moya, finding Moya made me want to be okay. It made me want to be okay. And I had no commitment to being okay. Prior to meeting Moya, I was fine with being absolutely not okay in any way. And I think my life probably would have continued in that vein until I dropped dead at 40 of a drug overdose or of depression or of whatever, because I can't imagine having become as mildly sane as I find myself today without her influence in my life. 

“He Lied About Death” 

Torquil Campbell: Well, you know, I was talking about this recently. “He “Lied About Death” and “Celebration Guns” as well, reminded me that we wrote this record in a time quite similar to the one that we're presently in. September 11th had happened, it was world changing, nothing was ever quite the same again. It kind of shut the world down briefly, people stopped flying, everybody was scared. Like people don't realize if you're 25 years old, you don't realize that like we didn't have to take our shoes off before that day when we went through security. We didn't, none of the things that you just take for granted all the surveillance culture that we live in, that was a result of September 11th. And then there was the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. So there was this, in our opinion, deeply fucking evil U.S. foreign policy going on and a president who was morally demeaned and an idiot. And sound familiar? You know, like it's, here we are having come out of COVID, which completely fucked the world, maybe even more than September 11th. And we've got a fascist in the presidency and so that song was an expression of my rage and disgust at Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and all the people that we were recently told by the Democratic Party we should completely trust for some fucking reason. They thought that was going to work. Nice strategy, you got there, guys. “Hey, Dick Cheney likes us. Please vote for us. Uh maybe I'll just kill myself instead” (laughs). But you know, that's like in another world, that's what Stars sounds like, you know, without Amy, that's probably where Stars goes is, we just turn into a noisy punk band that screams about politics.

Amy Millan: “He Lied About Death” is such a great song, and unfortunately, so relevant still. You know, these songs, we've just playing them live 20 years later. The relevance, it's pretty wild. It's unfortunate. I wish they weren't as relevant, you know, but Torq and I particularly were always quite political and we were raised political, we were raised to go to marches. And George Bush had been elected and the wars were starting and the lies began and the propaganda and it's from a place of protest. It's a protest song. 

Evan Cranley: Torq and Amy are very vocal when it comes to, you know, they talk about what's happening in the world and this was a song that kind of speaks for the time and still speaks for the time. On the record, I remember wanting to do something really kind of like clubby and atonal. Tom McFall who helped produce the record, did some drum programming for that actually in the studio, like off the cuff during a take. He slid in some drum stuff and then I played some, all that brash drum stuff in the middle and the outro, that tune came together pretty quickly.

Chris Seligman: I think that, “He Lied About Death” was the song I was most not happy with in terms of the production, but I feel like now, like when we play it live, it's actually part of the set that can be like the most fun. It's a really cool idea, it just needed a little bit more time, I guess. Cause you, sometimes you'll go down a road production wise, and sometimes it can get away from you. And then you don't have, you don't really have the means or the time or like the perspective to figure it out, you know, so you kind of just have to go with it. 

Evan Cranley: Yeah there's a lot of stuff we threw at the wall on that song, the synthesis, real drums, horns, the vocal play, they atonal stuff. Yeah it's basically, we had all this paint and we just threw it at the wall. And I love that, that weird saxophone solo that Eric Hove plays on alto sax. 

Torquil Campbell: And we had this amazing friend, Eric Hove, this saxophone player, who was just a total jazz head, like a crazy jazz player. Still is. He's amazing. Eric is incredible. And we wanted to give him a track to just let go on. 

Evan Cranley: It was, has a kind of horror soundtrack kind of vibe to it. 

“Celebration Guns” 

Amy Millan: It's interesting that the two songs that come is “He Lied About Death” and then “Celebration Guns,” which are both protest songs, and it's so interesting because to me that's such an anima animus, like, they’re such a yin and yang, there's such a kind of like, two very different, like, there's a very kind of male energy in “He Lied About Death” and a very female energy in “Celebration Guns,” but really saying kind of the same thing. 

Torquil Campbell: Well, Guantanamo Bay had been opened. And we were seeing the images from Abu Ghraib and from Guantanamo Bay and the horrific shit that was going on there. And Amy, I think, wrote that song after she had, like, been sitting on the porch in North Hatley reading the New York Times. And, again, like, I think maybe “He Lied About Death” had been written first. And so she, as she often does, kind of tried to reflect what I had done in a more peaceful, more reflective way. Yeah. I just remember that that was, it was a tricky lyric that it took her some time to write, and she was trying to express some fairly complicated ideas without saying, “Close down Guantanamo Bay.” You know what I mean? Like, look, political songs are bloody hard to do. They are incredibly hard to not make temporary. They can mean something for a year and then they don't mean anything. Writing a political song that lasts and that means something over time, but it's really hard to not sound cliched and not be too on topic. And I think that song beautifully kind of achieves that place of pointing you towards what we're talking about, but not giving you every single piece of the map. 

Amy Millan: I had for a long time had this image about when you're reading the news, which is back in our day, at that time, there was email (laughs). It wasn't, you know, there wasn't internet the way it is now. And so all of our news came to us through the newspaper. And we would get the newspaper every day at 939. And I just remember thinking, like, you're reading this terrible news about it actually like was something that happened when the genocide happened in Rwanda was like when I first sort of came up with this idea that like reading, all you have is the ink on your fingers and you just feel so powerless to do anything about it. You feel powerless to do anything about anything, I mean, I still feel that today about so much about what's going on in the world right now. And just the idea that like, it stays with you. And then the beauty of the music underneath was able to carry that sorrow. 

Evan Cranley: I remember that was Chris Seligman's piano and keyboard idea. Yeah and I think Chris and Amy maybe got together as a duo for this one. Chris actually demoed out and sketched all his French horn with that as well. So that was, I remember Chris and Amy kind of really sketching that one out well. 

Chris Seligman: I think originally Amy and I, we wrote that in North Hatley. I guess like it became, it started to become evident that it was just going to be like a quiet, sometimes we'll do that. We'll be like, “No drums, no bass.” And then at that point, then it was just, “Okay, I'll see what I can do in terms of the arrangement.”

Evan Cranley: I remember kind of having a light touch on that one and kind of watching that tune come together. Sometimes you have to do that, you know, sometimes you just have to let  things happen. You can't always assert yourself  on every tune, you know, you kind of have to just let the process happen and if you can find your way in on some things, great. And if you can't, you can't. So sometimes it's very much like, “Let's just watch this idea bloom.” Don't really get in the way sometimes, it's a good thing to do. 

Chris Seligman: “Celebration Guns,” I think was just like piano and voice for a long time. And then I think I would just be on a keyboard. You can kind of like, you can do one voicing. Like, say you start with like a bass, like a cello, and then you can just start to add different voicings on top of that. So I've like, I played French horn at Boston University. You learn like a small bit of theory. And you know, playing orchestral music my whole life, I had like a sense of, you know, bass, like cello, and then violin being like first violin, second violin, and then like viola. So if you kind of think of it in terms of, you know, bass, mid, and high, and then you're just kind of having fun with it. For me, like, that's a big part of my creativity is just finding the things that I find interesting within the harmonies. With my limited abilities, figure out how a string quartet would play it. 

Evan Cranley: It was really cool to have another lullaby on the record, which it very much is, just a dark lullaby. I remember like a stack of tambourines on top of a bass drum, that really shrill long tambourine. I remember it being like there was seven tambourines stacked on top of each other and then like hit with a drum, I think, with this, that cavernous kind of shimmery tambourine thing. And then I remember Amy picking the, I think she picked the sample and Chris flew in the sample. Yeah, there's like a cannon. Yeah, almost from like the 1812 Overture kind of canon sample, maybe. 

Amy Millan: I can't speak for the guys, but like Chris and Evan, that's how they express their sorrow and their frustration and their love and their sex and their death is all through the way they write that music. And so it catches Torq and I and it enables Torq and I to launch from their beautiful structures of their melodies, you know. 

Torquil Campbell: Chris is mysterious and brilliant. I don't remember much how Selli did it, he just showed up and did it. He and Evan, they've been playing together for a long, long time. And they do that stuff remarkably quickly. You know, they're both extremely gifted players. When you play classical music, as much as those two guys have played it, your harmonics are very fine and it doesn't take you long to find paths to the waterfall. 

Amy Millan: This is the thing about the protest song. And this is the thing that's still so frustrating today is like, “He Lied About Death” and “Celebration Guns.” It's like “Celebration Guns,” it didn't get a single person out of Guantanamo fucking Bay. Did it? You know, it's still open. It's still open! Oh, so depressing. Okay so moving on, what's the next song? 

“Soft Revolution” 

Amy Millan: Oh, “Soft Revolution,” well, this is funny because this is the first time that Torq is referencing us as a band. And he has continued to do so throughout the years now, but this is sort of the beginning of that. The idea is that he's writing about us and not just us, but us as a, you know, group of, like Broken Social Scene and like Metric and Feist and all the bands that were coming up at that point. You know what I mean? It was really, it was a song for all of us and the audience, you know, and it was about this new relationship that was beginning because we were starting to find people and people were finding us and like the band and the audience and what we were going to do together as an anthem. It’s an anthem song. I remember thinking it was so interesting and brave really to like, to talk about ourselves like that. You know, I remember just being like, “Wow,  he doesn't have any filter to worry about what people think.” It's really incredible, like the bravery kind of to just have that much confidence. And I love singing it now because now it really is true. 

Torquil Campbell: So “Soft Revolution” is to me the kind of constitution of the band. It's the spirit the band was started in. It's what the band stands for. It's how we see ourselves and how we want to be perceived in the world. I think, no, I know that sitting in your room, listening to music can change the world because it can change you and then you can go and change the world. And that may sound hokey and full of shit, but if you don't believe that, I don't know why you're listening to this podcast. I bet you do, otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this podcast, which concerns itself so deeply with the making of records and with why records matter. And, you know, I had spent my whole life in a theater family, in a family of people who were actors, theater artists. And I had been an actor myself, I had been a child actor and then become a grownup actor and I was okay at it, but I never really loved it. It was just what the family did, it was just my family business and I was good at it so I did it. But my whole life, music was this thing inside me that even though I was listening to bands no one else listened to and even though I was alone in this thing, it made me feel like a part of something huge. When I would put on, you know, a Smiths record or a Fraser Chorus record or a Public Enemy record or whatever it was that I was into at the time, it made me feel like I was part of something that mattered. And that song is saying to the people who are listening to it, “You matter. The fact that you love music, the fact that you're a nobody that just loves music, is all that, that's all you need. You don't have to know how to sing, you don't have to know how to play anything, you don't have to be cool. You can just get a bunch of your friends together, and do the best you can, and feel like the world is changing in front of your eyes.” 

Chris Seligman: That was kind of a neat song for us because there's just vocals in the verse. And then the chorus is just music, which is rare for us, but it's kind of like a nice departure. 

Evan Cranley: “Soft Revolution,” I think I remember like playing that live before we really went into the studio with it. I remember it was a lot synthier before Patty played on it. And then he gives that nice backbeat live drum element to it. I remember, again, wanting to have instrumental passages in these pop songs that stood out on their own and to make it like, to make it be the chorus. It was super cool to have this brash instrumental chorus without any lyrics, kind of being the chorus of the tune. I remember it being really unique at the time. And then having a bass solo in the bridge (laughs), I just think it was kind of like, it's a classical pop song, but it has kind of odd decisions. And again, the lullaby at the end, between Chris’s keyboards and Torq, kind of echoing other dynamics from earlier on in the record. 

Torquil Campbell: You know, the Velvet Underground, they couldn't fucking play except for John Cale. None of those guys could play, but they were the Velvet Underground (laughs). They didn't need to play. They were the Velvet fucking Underground. You know what I mean? They didn't need to show anybody anything. They knew who they were. And to me, that is the essence of what punk music means. Like punk is not about what the music sounds like. Punk is how you approach your life. Punk is a sense that what you have is enough and that it might not be enough for everybody, but it's enough for you and your friends to believe in. And if you can achieve that with a community, large or small, the potential for everything to change is massive.

And the other thing that that song  is about is the word soft is important, which is that, what my father taught me is like, “You must never in this life pick a fight that you are not certain you will lose.” You understand what I'm saying? “Always punch up, always pick on the bully. If you think you can win a fight, guess what? You're the fucking bully now (laughs). You just turned into the bully. So you better be fighting battles that you are certain you're gonna lose against forces much more powerful than yourself or you're not living a good life and you're not a punk and you're not an artist.” And that to me is what that song ultimately is about is like, “After changing everything, you couldn't tell we couldn't sing,” because you believed in us. And it didn't matter if I sang off key, it only matters that you believe in me. Hey, that rhymes. I should write lyrics. 

“Calendar Girl” 

Amy Millan: So “Calendar Girl,” Torquil did write for me. And there's this really funny story about this song that Torquil told me, where he was at dinner with his wife and friends of his and his friend was saying, “Oh, you know, I just, I love the record and blah, blah, blah.” And he's like, “You know what though? I always like, you know, I usually really love Amy's songs, but I just hate ‘Calendar Girl.’ Like, I just, I don't understand, she really missed the mark with that one.” Torq was like, “I wrote that one” (laughs). But he's alone in that, there's so many people who have come to just, it's such, it means so much to so many people. And I felt so honored to, you know, that Torq would just give the song to me and, you know, him and I both are actors as well, you know, we both went to acting school. It was so fun for me to not have to feel the pressure of like, “These are my words and I'm singing my own words and will people like it?” It was like, “Okay, I'm just here to like be the diva and perform,” you know, what the message is of the song and be this sad person, who's that line of, ‘a friend I forgot to send home, who waits up for me all through the night.’ And again, the fear of death. But I felt, I really still feel really lucky that he let me sing it and gave it to me to sing. 

Torquil Campbell: So “Calendar Girl” is a big one for me. “Calendar Girl,” I wrote “Calendar Girl” for Amy. I was like, “Amy needs a big Carole King ballad on this record. We have this girl with this gorgeous voice. We got to get like a big ballad for Amy.” And Chris just playing, you know, really simple C chord progression. And that was one of those songs that probably took 10 minutes to write. It was just so obvious what to say and you know the song is, in some ways, it's about Amy, you know. Amy suffered a lot of loss in her life. She lost her father when she was very young. It hasn't always been easy. She didn't live a particularly easy life up to the point that she met us. And she had been in Los Angeles, really trying to make it and it had all kind of fallen apart with her band. And she was in a place of like, “This is it. If this doesn't work, I don't really know, you know, if I can keep doing this.” And that song is like a testament to her spirit. Amy is a very powerful human being. And she's very okay in difficult places. Like, she's okay with facing sadness, and she's okay with facing anger, and she's okay with facing loss. Because she's had to, and she endures. She just keeps going and I was just trying to write a love song to my friend. 

Evan Cranley: I remember that was Chris. That was his piano. And I remember Torq again, writing something really quickly. And it being this crazy amazing story. The song came together quite quickly between Torq and Chris, I remember more. And it was Chris's string arrangement, “Calendar Girl” was. 

Chris Seligman: Well, on a nerdy level, I remember doing the string arrangement because I was like, so rushed to do all the arrangements. I like, I wasn't in the actual sessions of recording the string quartet sometimes. Some of the time I was still writing. So, for this session, I was still at my apartment writing. So I had given the arrangements to Evan, and then somehow, like, there was like a lost in translation, the arrangements kind of got subverted. It was like a good mistake. Because I wasn't there and because Evan was there and he probably just went on like what sounded good. The arrangement got subverted or it was like reversed, but it actually worked out perfectly. So it's like just one of those weird things with music sometimes. Like sometimes mistakes can totally work out.

Evan Cranley: I remember feeling pretty bummed out when we did that song. The tune's a bomber, but I think it's definitely gotten people through some heavy times in their lives. 

Amy Millan: Yeah and it's such a great closer. And one of the things I remember about “Calendar Girl” is getting some mail about, and this happened more than once, where people had said that it saved them from wanting to commit suicide. And we got a call from Payless Shoes and they wanted to use it in one of their commercials. And I just remember thinking, “How could we give them, like somebody, who it saved them from wanting to take their own life to get them to buy shoes.” It felt very wrong, so we said no. 

Torquil Campbell: Yeah, I mean, one of the great moments of my life, absolutely, is like on this last tour, we sang that song with just an acoustic, and we let the audience sing it, you know? And watching 1,500 people a night sing back words to you that you wrote on a piece of paper 25 years ago for your friend, realizing that it's like, “Oh, this is exactly how a lot of people feel about their life,” is, you know, a privilege very few people get. I feel very lucky. 

Amy Millan: We were trying to finish the record. And again, like Chris Seligman, it's hard to take it out of his hands because he never thinks it's good enough. And Torquil came in and he yelled at Chris and he said, “It's time to go, man. Like we've got to finish this. It's not the Sistine Chapel!” And he left and slammed the door. And then Chris Seligman like was, you know, visibly upset. And he just said, “It's not the Pristine Chapel” (laughs). Anyway Chris Seligman is constantly searching for the Pristine Chapel. 

Chris Seligman: I'll speak for myself, being a perfectionist. Sometimes you're always hearing things that you don't like or things that could be better. You can get caught up in like the technicalities of things. 

Torquil Campbell: So when we finished Set Yourself on Fire, we had been talking for ages about getting my dad to do some kind of, like record something on the record. 

Amy Millan: The very beginning of the record is Torquil’s father, Douglas Campbell. It was the last day we were mastering and Torq was in Vancouver. We were mastering the album and I said, “Torq, it's ending today. Like the record's going to be finished by the end of the day. So if you don't get your dad to say something,” cause you know he'd had this idea that he wanted his dad to say something on the album. I said, “If you don't get him to say it today, it's not going to happen.” So he said, “All right, well just, okay call my dad and tell him to say, um, “When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.” Like it was like that. It was like not planned for months. So it was just, it just came out off the top of his head right in that second. And I was like, “Okay,” I wrote it down and then I had to call his father. And his father was, you know, Douglas Campbell is a legend. And he's this, you know, famous actor. He's been, you know, acting for all his life, he started Stratford Theatre here in Canada. He's just an icon. And so he always, you know, he was wonderful and he was really supportive to us, but he always slightly intimidated me because he was this kind of larger of a life person. And I called him up and I said, “Uh, hi Douglas, sorry, um, I just talked to Torq and we were just wondering if over the phone you could just say,” because I had a microphone there, you know, the people in the studio did, “when there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.” And he said, “Well alright.” And then he said it and I was like, “Okay. That's great!” And he goes, “You don't want me to do it again?” And I was like, “I'm not gonna direct Douglas Campbell,” like, I'm a wee child at that point and I didn't have any notes for the legend himself. So I was like, “Nope, that's perfect.” So it was like, one take wonder. And the joke was for years is that Douglas always said, “I'm still waiting for the check.” 

Evan Cranley: I just remember an end of a very, very long process like this had multiple stages to it. You know, there were sessions in a bedroom, there were sessions in a house in the middle of winter. There was sessions in the springtime on the Plateau at the studio with Tom McFall. I remember it just being like a year and a half of work that came to an end. And I just remember being really fulfilled and really tired of it. 

Amy Millan: My memory of the ending of making that record is hell. And I feel like the ending of any record is hell because you've listened to the songs so many times it's, you know, the face melt emoji? That's always how I feel at the end of making the album. So we were in mastering and it was going terribly and it felt like it was sounding like a completely different record that we made and we were melting and I just honestly when it was over I didn't ever want to listen to it ever again. 

Torquil Campbell: Oh you know I'm sure I thought it sucked. I'm sure I was like, “Fuck! Oh no!” (laughs). My big memory of that is we had a gig and Jeffrey Remedios who ran Arts & Crafts at the time. We went into the van, into the band van, we had like a CD of it, and he hadn't heard it. And he was like, “I gotta hear it, you gotta take me to the van.” It was after soundcheck, and we went and sat in the van. It was like a cold winter night. It was really cold, and there was nowhere really to go other than the van, cause we were playing some weird place. And we sat in the van, and we listened to the whole record. And he turned to me and he was like, “This is gonna change your life. Everything's changing after this.” And I just thought he was just a record company dude, you know, like I thought, “Bullshit,” you know? But he really did seem  convinced, and so at that point I was like, “Huh, maybe we've got something here.” 

The first day we went out on tour with Set Yourself on Fire, Funeral came out, okay? Like, we put that shit on in the car and we were like, “Well, we're done.” Like, “We are fucking cooked. This record's unbelievable,” you know? Like, “These guys are gonna kick our ass,” and indeed, they did (laughs). But, you know, Feist was putting out Let It Die, Broken were putting out You Forgot It In People. Like, all these amazing records were being put out by our best friends. I mean, we didn't really know Arcade Fire, but we lived in the neighborhood with them, we knew them a little bit, you know? And it was just like overwhelming how much good music was coming out. So we felt like total losers. We were just like, “Here's our shitty little indie pop record.” And we really didn't expect anything to happen. You know, the big change for us was going on tour with Death Cab for Cutie. They took us out, you know, 600 seat rooms to just 2,500 seat rooms. They were just blowing up. The Postal Service had just happened, then Plans came out, Ben was becoming a huge star and they took us out and they treated us like co-headliners, the goddamn darlings that they were. They gave us an hour to play. They paid us like two grand a night, which is totally unheard of for an opening band. They would have us on stage to sing “Transatlanticism” at the end of the night, then would do this shtick every night about how much he loved Stars and how everybody should go listen to it. So when we left on that tour, we were selling maybe 200 copies a week in the states. And when we came back from that tour, we were selling 2,000 copies a week. And it just, after that, it just completely took off. 

Chris Seligman: But honestly, like from the moment this record has come out, there's just been like this energy about it, which now looking back on like, it’s just amazing, like a small miracle for us.

Amy Millan: I remember very well when I realized that it was actually quite a success was I was in the car and I was listening to the radio and “Ageless Beauty” came on the radio and I was so excited. I never heard my song like that on the radio and then I changed the radio channel to a different channel and “Reunion” came on the radio. And so within five minutes, two of our songs from the album were playing. And then I was like, “Hey, maybe we're going to be huge.” 

Chris Seligman: We all feel so lucky that people have found meaning in this record, you know, and now it feels kind of like freedom in a way, like it feels like you can finally let go a bit. 

Evan Cranley: It's given us a career, to be honest. It's helped us continue in our career. And I think that after Set Yourself on Fire was done, we knew we were going to make more music, but we never thought that this would be the kind of touchstone record for people. Because personally, I think there are better records in our catalog.  

Amy Millan: It's wonderful, but at the same time, we made a bunch of other records, and we wrote a bunch of other songs. So in some ways, it's a little bit of a bummer (laughs). You're like, “Well, we did just put out Capleton Hill, some great jams on that, guys.” You know, I had a joke that I wanted to make a shirt that said, “Oh, Stars, I loved them in high school.” I think it's incredible to be able to connect with people, it's the whole point. But, as Randy Newman said, you want to keep getting better, you don't want to get worse. So, you know, go check it out, we wrote many other records since that record. And there's some really great songs out there. 

Torquil Campbell: You know, it's my sixth favorite Stars record. It's a good record (laughs). It's not even close in my mind, but it's not for me to say, you know, it's for other people. So I'm perfectly willing to accept their verdict. And you know what, if you get one record that 20 years later, some fine gentleman with a great podcast wants to talk about with you, you're a lucky son of a bitch, you know? Don't stop at Set Yourself on Fire, keep going. We love you. 

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Stars. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase Set Yourself on Fire, including the recent 20th anniversary edition. Instrumental music by Aistis(Aystis)Thanks for listening. 

Credits:

"Your Ex-Lover Is Dead"

"Set Yourself on Fire"

"Ageless Beauty"

"Reunion"

"The Big Fight"

"What I'm Trying to Say"

"One More Night (Your Ex-Lover Remains Dead)"

"Sleep Tonight"

"The First Five Times"

"He Lied About Death"

"Celebration Guns"

"Soft Revolution"

"Calendar Girl"

© & ℗ 2004 Arts & Crafts International

Produced by Tom McFall and Stars

Engineered by Tom McFall and assisted by Drew Malamud at Studio Plateau 

Mixed by Tony Hoffer

Mastered by Brett Zilahi and Drew Malamud at Joao Carvalho Mastering 

Stars

Torquil Campbell: vocals, trumpet and keyboards

Evan Cranley: guitar, trombone, bass, bass synth, percussion, drums on “He Lied About Death”

Amy Millan: vocals and guitar

Pat McGee: drums, glockenspiel, percussion

Chris Seligman: keyboards, string arrangements and french horn

Eric Hove: saxophone

James Shaw: additional guitar and production (from Metric) 

Cy Scobie: additional string arrangements “Soft Revolution” and “One More Night”

Todor Kobakov: string arrangements

Rachel Moody: violin

Lana Tomlin: violin

Markia Anthony-Shaw: viola

Anne-Marie Leblanc: cello

Choir on “Calendar Girl”: Murray Lightburn, Natalia Yanchack, Ibi Kaslick, Moya O’Connell, Dan Seligman, Aaron Seligman, Noel Sobara

Dad’s God voice by Dougblas Campbell

Episode Credits: 

Intro/Outro Music:

“Comfort Like This” by Aistis, from the album, Caviar for Seagulls

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam