Stars (Handout)

Sad songs say so much -- and that's enough for Stars.

"I think there are enough happy people in the world," explains frontman Torquil Campbell with a laugh. "We're going to stay miserable."

But even these melancholy Canadian indie-popsters have never sounded quite as wonderfully haunted as they do on their aptly titled fifth album The Five Ghosts.

Another collection of impeccably crafted numbers about romantic obsession and mortality -- sample titles: Dead Hearts and I Died So I Could Haunt You -- The Five Ghosts is the first disc to feature songwriting contributions from all five Stars: Campbell, frontwoman Amy Millan, bassist Evan Cranley, drummer Pat McGee and keyboardist Chris Seligman.

As the Montreal-based outfit prepared to hit the road playing their new album in its entirety, the genial 37-year-old Campbell opined the essential ludicrousness of pop music, staying in touch with your inner teenager, and breaking away from the Broken Social Scene / Metric / Dears axis.

Q -- So, another album about love and death. One imagines you all riding around in your tour bus, pining and having seances.

A -- You know, that's really not that far from reality -- there's just a lot of cheese and Seinfeld episodes involved as well.

Q -- But even though those subjects have always been prevalent in your music, they seem more personal this time.

A -- Yeah. Well, my father passed away last year. I had a kid. We all got older in the last year in a lot of ways, and we were forced to deal with mortality on many levels. So the romantic notions that have always been themes for us as artists came home and took a nest inside us in a way we hadn't felt before. So this album has the sense of a real sadness as opposed to theatrical or literary sadness. I think we started out as a band that espoused sadness as an aesthetic. But you get better at it when you've actually felt sadness.

Q -- Does that make it more difficult to play some of these songs?

A -- There have been some days in the room for all of us when it's been hard for us to play the songs. We've written ourselves quite a little situation here, emotionally speaking. But ultimately, as we always do, we wrote enough distance into the songs to disguise ourselves. Because we're ultimately a band that doesn't want to be known. We want to be the biggest band nobody has heard of in the history of pop music. So to some degree, we always adopt a disguise and make it about the listener. Because pop music's about the kid who puts on the record.

Q -- As you get older, doesn't it get harder to identify with that kid?

A -- Yeah. But when I was 15, I think I knew all the things I know now. I wasn't dumb. Kids are incredibly complex human beings just like the rest of us. Geez, I have an 11-month-old and she's already incredibly complex. So I don't know if you change all that much.

Q -- Sonically, these songs seem a little less layered and lush than usual. It almost seems like a reaction to your last CD In Our Bedroom After the War.

A -- I think it was. We went down this path with (2004's) Set Yourself on Fire and (2007's) Bedroom. There was an energy in the community that we were a part of with Broken (Social Scene) and that gang. It was all about, 'How can we all find a way to be together all the time?' So the music grew out of that -- 'Hey, Emily's here, let's get her to sing.' But now we're all busy. So we have the opportunity to go back to the way we were before, when we were all just in bedrooms on our own trying to make this particular sound with our particular section of the crew. So the pared-down sound came out of that -- the dynamic of these five people as opposed to the dynamic of these five people as influenced by 100 others. Broken did that as well on their record. So did Metric. We all said, 'Hey, what if we just clear the room a little and try and do this as the four or five of us?' That's why all our new records sound more lean and focused.

Q -- Are we ever going to get a deliriously happy Stars album?

A -- It's probably not going to happen. I'm going to be completely honest with you. I genuinely wish we could. But we have a very dark sense of humour and a very dark approach. But I think a lot of that darkness is misinterpreted as genuine when it's more like watching Pretty in Pink. Yeah, there's genuine feeling there. But it's also ludicrous. That's what pop music should be. It should simultaneously make you feel like it's the silliest thing you've done all day, and it should make you cry.

darryl.sterdan@sunmedia.ca