Torquil Campbell (center) and Stars, courtesy.

Torquil Campbell of Stars says his band is both beautiful and deadly.

“We cover things in flowers. We make them beautiful and pretty, and if you swallow them, you might get poisoned,” he said. “And that’s kind of what the point of the music is.”

Stars have a new record out and Campbell is not taking anything for granted.

“It’s incredible that we’re still here, from all the shit, and now we’re having children, and we’re still doing this,” he said. “People are still buying records. It’s such a fucking lottery win. You have to kind of ride it for as long as you can.”

Who is that speaking at the beginning of  “The North” during the introduction?

Torquil Campbell: Glen Gould was a great pianist, a great interpreter of Bach, and a pretty eccentric guy. Some people think he’s semi-autistic or maybe (had) Asperger’s. He used to hum when he played on his records. You could hear the hum in the background. He died very young and he was a huge star in Canada in the ‘70s and ’60s.

Your songs are much more restrained this time around. A few times I found myself waiting for a hook that doesn’t come. Was this intentional?

Torquil Campbell: In a way, there’s more dynamics. In terms of guitar power, there’s definitely louder bits on this record. We’ve always had a few loud bits. But I think there was an effort not to be quite so on-the-nose, and maybe leave a little more room in the songs. That was definitely something we were thinking about. If you’re playing in a big studio, like we made some of the songs in … the reason you’re paying 500 bucks a day is because you’re trying to get the quality of the room. If you go full-blast to the point where the only thing that the human ear is hearing is the electric impulse of the guitars, then you’re not really getting your money’s worth, in a strange way. Those rooms were built in the ’40s and ’50s when instruments were less powerful, and they were supposed to give you a tambour and a power you couldn’t get just with instrumentation. We wanted to exploit that.

How has this band grown since the  “In Our Bedroom After the War” album in 2007? To me, it seems like your direction has shifted.

Torquil Campbell: The direction never shifts, no. The direction in terms of what we’re trying to do, honestly, man, it really doesn’t shift. What shifts really radically is the message by which we want to achieve it. “In Our Bedroom After the War” was made in a big, professional studio – one of the biggest professional studios in the world – and we spent seven weeks locked down in there. We wanted to make what we thought was an early ’80s L.A. pop record. It didn’t turn out that way. Nothing turns out the way you think it’s going to. It becomes what it is. In “The Five Ghosts” (2010) was made in Break Glass Studios, which was beautiful, but really cold. It’s hardcore Montreal. It’s as Montreal as it gets. This one (“The North”) we made in lots of different places, so those things, and those approaches, and what’s happening in your life, those things change the way you get to this direction. For Stars, we’re a band where we’ve always wanted to do one thing, which is write, beautiful, perfect pop songs. It’s pop songs you keep in your life for a long time. We want to make records that people listen to for years. That doesn’t change.”

How much of of your lyrical content is fiction and how much is biographical?

Torquil Campbell: I can’t speak for Amy, who writes some of the lyrics and works differently than I do. I very pointedly try to not write about myself, but I think if I was honest with myself, I’d say despite my efforts, there are still moments where my life creeps in to the world I’m trying to create about other people. Even without me knowing it, there’s going to be aspects of me because I can’t hide from myself. But I really, mostly want to tell stories about other people, and I have a cast of characters in my head that I’ve been living with from a long time. Some of them are stolen from other people’s books, or other people’s records, and some of them are completely invented by me, and some of them are me. They’re all hodge-podged together in there.

What are your hobbies?

Torquil Campbell: I’m starting to like music for the theater. I come from a theater family, and I had a life in the theater. Until I was 30 I was a professional actor. That’s what I did for a living. That’s a big part of my life, and it continues to be. My wife is an actor, and I live amongst actors. A lot of my close friends are classical stage actors. I’m trying to get back into that world, and I’m writing things with a couple of people – plays and musical ideas, and I might be doing something in the way of a collaboration down the line. As I get older, that’s definitely a part of my life that I want to try and reconcile with my life as a musician. Once I became a musician, and people bought our records, and we went out on the road, I just walked away from 30 years of being an actor. I feel like I need to go back and look at what I was doing, and see if I could retrieve some of that. And I raise a 3-year-old, and that’s about 90 percent of my life experience, as anyone with a 3-year-old could tell you. It’s not (only) that they’re a lot of work … but it’s that you’re so unbelievably in love with them that you’re obsessed and can’t really get anything else done.

When you’re in San Francisco, is there anything that’s on your to-do list?

Torquil Campbell: San Francisco is my favorite city in North America. I’m totally in love with it. I’m kind of a routine person, so … I go to North Beach, I have a coffee. I walk up the hill, and then I figure out a way to get to Golden Gate Park, and then I walk until I get to the sea. And then I go and play the show at the best venue in the world, The Fillmore.

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter