Broken Social Scene, Dears To Remix Stars
By John Benson, Cleveland
Inspired by the 2004 Super Furry Animals' remix album "Phantom Phorce," indie pop act Stars is moving forward with a similar project involving its recently released third full-length, "Set Yourself on Fire." Fellow Canadian acts such as Caribou, Junior Boys, Broken Social Scene, Metric and the Dears will be remixing tracks from the Arts & Crafts International album, with an eye on a fall release.
"We're hoping that they will bring us something that will make us look at the songs a little differently," Stars principal Torquil Campbell tells Billboard.com. "And they are all people who listened to the record a lot and are all close friends of ours, so it's kind of an interesting experiment from our point of view. It's kind of like saying to your friends, 'If you were going to decorate our apartment, how would you do it? Using all of the things that are in there, how would you rearrange the furniture and what color would you paint the walls?'"
Campbell says he is open to incorporating any of the reworked tracks, via preprogrammed material, into future Stars live sets. As for the inherent danger of asking friends to dissect his material, thus in a way testing their friendship, the English-born, Canadian-raised singer is optimistic.
"If you hate it, I guess that's the danger, but I trust these guys," Campbell says. "I'm always ripping them off so I can't imagine they are going to come up with something that I won't like."
Stars has a week's worth of Midwest and East Coast dates beginning next week before leaving for the summer European festival circuit.
"I think Stars will probably keep touring fairly hard," Campbell says. "We'll hit Europe in the fall, because our record doesn't come out there until the end of August. And there are just so many people in the States. I think as an indie band these days, you really have to devote a year of your life almost to just trying to get the record heard. That's what we're trying to do and I think we'll probably start working on new material in January or something like that."
Campbell says he'd like to see Stars record and release a new CD every year. "I think too, if you let it stagnate for long enough, the question of what to do next becomes bigger and bigger, and more and more difficult to answer," Campbell says. "So I would like to try to just go with the energy that [we] have at the moment."
As for other new material, next up for Campbell is a third Memphis album, which he hopes to write with partner Chris Dumont next month.
Duh!
stars. 
