>>PREVIEW
MEMPHIS
Saturday, November 4
Liberty Lounge (MRC)
Anyone who has seen Torquil Campbell perform with his band Stars knows that the front man has a certain dramatic flair. Campbell (who, not coincidentally is the son of actors Douglas Campbell and Moira Wylie and has been acting since he was a child), lets it all go onstage, lurching and lunging while belting out his emotionally-charged lyrics with a theatrical panache that is only hinted at on Stars’s recorded work. With his other band, the introspective duo Memphis, audiences will likely see a gentler side of Campbell, right?
"The music is (quieter), but oddly, I’m a little more exuberant because I’m free of the shackles of people who are sick of my shit," Campbell says, laughing. "I can kind of let loose and have fun. I think there are two kinds of Stars fans – there are Stars fans who love it all and then there are people who are kind of like, ‘I wish the girl (Stars’ co-singer Amy Millan) would just sing and I think the guy is kind of this obnoxious dude who sort of irritates me.’ But the people who come see Memphis are the ones who like me, who say ‘No, no I don’t mind that he’s obnoxious!’ So I take the opportunity to be even more obnoxious than usual. Because I’ve got my people there, they’re ready to go with me. So what the hell?"
While Campbell promises to keep the drama level high during Memphis’ live engagements, he’ll admit that the band’s recorded work is a bit more low-key. This summer Campbell and his musical partner Chris Dumont released their second album A Little Place in the Wilderness. Like its 2004 predecessor I Dreamed We Fell Apart, the record is full of romantically melancholic pop songs. Campbell and Dumont have a rather unique writing relationship – with Campbell usually stationed in Montreal with the rest of the Stars crew and Dumont living full-time in New York City, the two maintain their friendship by regularly spending their summers together in Vancouver. While A Little Place in the Wilderness was recorded last winter in Montreal, the bulk of the record was written the previous summer on the West Coast. Campbell says that the daydreamy quality of the songs didn’t come by accident.
"It’s totally a product of being in Vancouver and the life out there – riding our bikes a lot and smoking a lot of weed and staring into space a lot and being in the midst of this huge wilderness and this imposing glorious natural beauty," he says. "Vancouver is a place where there isn’t a lot of community per se – there isn’t a lot of culture. People go out there to start their own lives and kind of get away from things and pursue a particular dream of some kind or another.
"There is a kind of disconnected quality to the West that I don’t think you find in more Eastern cities," he continues. "And that dreamlike quality and detachment definitely crept into the sound of Memphis and the sensibility of it. It was very much a private thing and you hear in the music a real unawareness. You really have to climb into our world. But I think if you do that you find it very rewarding and very rich and very beautiful, but if you’re the kind of person who needs the music to kind of seduce you in a way, Memphis might be a tough one because it really is a very singular experience. It’s a headphones record.
Ultimately, Memphis is an excuse for Campbell and Dumont, who have been making music together long before Stars’s inception, to hang out together. While Campbell is grateful that their summer days together have resulted in an album that people seem to enjoy, he says that at this point at least, Memphis is still mostly about the relationship between two musicians. Even if there were no opportunity to release the album or pull out those onstage theatrics, Campbell and Dumont would still be spending their summers writing in Vancouver.
"I think writing songs is a lot like having sex with someone," Campbell says. "Once you do it you either have to not see that person anymore or resign yourself to the fact that you’re going to have sex with them again. Once it becomes part of your language with someone, it’s hard to ever imagine letting go of that experience because it’s such a connective and pleasuring idea to share an idea and produce something with someone. It’s a great part of friendship." |
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