Song Exploder - Stars - No One Is Lost

Episode Date: November 26, 2014

Stars is a band from Toronto, who have been making music together since 2000. Their seventh album was released in October 2014. For this episode, I spoke to several members of the band: singer Amy Millan over the phone, and to Evan and Patty in their studio in Toronto along with their co-producer Liam O’Neil. In this episode, they talk about the inspiration for the phrase No One Is Lost, which is the title of this song as well as the album. And you’ll hear the original version of the chorus: one that they wrote, recorded, mixed, and finished but then, ended up changing completely.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hurway. Stars is a band from Toronto, who have been making music together since 2000. Their seventh album was released in October 2014. For this episode, I spoke to several members of the band, singer Amy Milan over the phone, and to Evan and Patty in their studio in Toronto, along with their co-producer Liam O'Neill. Coming up, they'll talk about the inspiration for the phrase, No One Is Lost, which is the title of this song, as well as the album. and you'll hear the original version of the chorus, one that they wrote, recorded, mixed, and finished,

but then ended up changing completely. My name is Evan Cranley. I'm in Stars. I play bass and synth. I'm Patty McGee. I play drums. And this is Leo O'Neill. I engineered and produced this with these guys. Even though this track is the last on the record,

It was the first one we started. The first music that was written was really that long, sweeping, filtered intro that you hear off the top. So we put all of these different synths into this filter and had it kind of side-chained from the bass drum so that it would kind of pump with the beat. To that, we added Evans' bass guitar.

I write music with my bass guitar, so a lot of my musical ideas actually come initially from the bass guitar. You still get this human fingerprinty sound of the strings. It has a human and a synthetic kind of quality all at once. The filter is slowly opening up. It's incredibly anticipatory. It's a really kind of amazing, anxious feeling.

You get that feeling of there's a party happening in the next room and you're slowly walking down the hallway and opening the door and all of a sudden you're there. We had a sketch and Torquell Campbell, one of the two singers heard the verse and as he was hearing the verse he literally just sits there and writes in his notebook

he comes up with lyrics on the spot usually about 99% of the music the lyrics that he comes up with are done on the spot and what he writes is what you get Another night Another weekend Another message checker looking for a friend

You got a pulse You got a problem We know the real you So why do you pretend? Torque will write verses and he'll say, look, there's a chorus here and I don't know what to do for the chorus. Can you write the core? This is Amy Milan and I sing and play a little guitar and start.

The chorus is actually really different when we originally wrote it. Put your hands up if you know you're going to lose. It's a little bit more kind of songwritory. And then we let a friend of ours... James Shaw from Metrick. Mix another version. And he listened to it. probably 30 times before he called me and he said what's happening in the outro of your song

is actually your chorus. Amy was repeating that melodic hook. And no one is lost, no one is lost. And he was like, that's the bit that you need to hear on the choruses. It was a little bit of like a nothing to lose scenario where it's like, all right, well, Jimmy has an idea of something that could potentially make the choruses more exciting. Why not let him do it and see what it sounds like? And it was just about choosing what we wanted the song to be. And now it just seems like one big hook and less of a chorus.

It's a banger. But the drums that are on there on the choruses are the drums that Patty originally played to different music. I admit originally I found it somewhat traumatizing when I heard the Jimmy mix. I was so used to hearing the original version that it took me a long time to finally hear it for what it was. But I wasn't there in the studio for when these changes were made. So everyone who was there was really enthusiastic about it and really felt great about it. And I thought they were insane a little bit. I was like, don't you hear that that sounds wrong?

I had to throw that aside and accept and trust them. Like I was like, I'm just going to have to walk away from this one and believe in it. And that hope that my mind will switch. The synapses will start firing on the same wavelength at some point. As soon as we started learning it for our live show, That was, I think, the first time I could actually hear what it was supposed to be. And for me, it was just getting back into it and physically engaging with it that allowed me to hear what was going on.

We had a friend who got diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, and he's really young, and we had to kind of go forward in blind hope that he was going to get better, and he was going to come through it in the end, okay. and Tork wrote No One is Lost on his T-shirt. He likes to write things on T-shirts. That was the inspiration of that song. It was just the feeling that we had to have throughout the album that no one was lost and that we weren't going to lose him.

And now here's No One is Lost by Stars. Oh, long as a month of fact, the consequences A new Repet and repeat Justk O Sommé Personne de rest, Personne de rest, Personne de rest.

A new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Keesher Way. I started making Song Exploder

when I was feeling lost in my own music career and then for over a decade I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music talking to other artists and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs.

And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabond, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city,

like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, Rishikash.co, or just go to SongExploder.net,

slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can find all the past and future episodes of songexplor at songexploder.net or on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you download podcasts. Find the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary story-driven shows. Learn more at at Radiotopia.fm. My name is Rishi-Kesh Hirwe. Thanks for listening.