Stick with JAM! this weekend for our coverage of the Virgin Music Festival, including reviews and tons of photos!
Sunday night, British rock group Editors are headlining the Future Shop Stage at Toronto's Virgin Festival around the same time The Killers will probably be muttering on about putting one's bones on another. But while The Editors also have a song called Bones, theirs deals with a weightier issue: death.
"The songs do touch on that topic, they're not documenting events that have actually happened," lead singer Tom Smith says en route to a Boston show Thursday. "Things will happen that will make you think about life or things that go on. I mean we're not going to write a book about it, I'm not an expert on the subject."
The Birmingham band made a splash in 2005 with their debut album The Back Room but have branched out with their latest An End Has A Start. Smith says the new album's direction was guided somewhat by two songs (Bones and The Weight Of The World) already in the can.
"In a way those two songs polarized this record from the previous record," Smith says. "With Bones it's the most obvious song of the way we were on the last record and what we became successful for. Weight Of The World is different from that one, it's a ballad. As soon as we recorded those two songs, we knew what we were heading for."
The album was also produced by Garrett "Jacknife" Lee who is currently working with R.E.M. on their upcoming studio effort. Smith says Lee has a way approaching sounds and textures which meshed well with Editors.
"We were excited about it because he makes amazing modern-sounding albums and that's what we wanted," Smith says. "In a sea of post-Libertines, cheap, bullshit-sounding albums we wanted something as far away from that as possible."
What the album doesn't stay away from are tight but rampant dance-rock nuggets such as the title track and The Racing Rats. Yet there are also many grandiose, bombastic flourishes found on When Anger Shows and the opening Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors which brings Coldplay to mind.
"I remember having that imagery of people outside of hospitals and I just couldn't stop it from finding itself on the page," Smith says of the leadoff tune. "When you're a lot younger, you think about things like illness and hospitals and they can kind of leave their mark. With that song it came coming back. It's almost arrogant or there's a certain air of importance about it. We could only really start the record with it."
An End Has A Start also finishes with the sparse and quiet Well Worn Hand which was recorded in one take.
"There's so many huge, huge textured moments on this album we wanted to try and get something that was at the other end of the spectrum," Smith says. "It's one of those moments where there's a power to it. If we had gone back and tried to work out the song and do it again it would have lost that."
As for festivals, Editors performed their share this summer in Europe including a plum spot at Britain's Glastonbury Festival which Smith says turned out quite nicely. But for now they'll be content riding the bus around North America.
"We enjoy touring America a lot," Smith says. "Sitting on a bus and touring across the States is one of those childhood rock and roll fantasies that anyone in a band wants to do."
Stick with JAM! this weekend for our coverage of the Virgin Music Festival, including reviews and tons of photos!
