Live through this and you won't look back

I've loved music for pretty much my whole life, but 2005 was the year I really became a Music Fan, the year that I started going to concerts all the time and music became one of my main obsessions. And I've loved many, many albums over the course of my life, some from before that era (that set being dominated by Pearl Jam) and countless in the years since, but there will always be a special place in my heart for albums that I fell in love with in the early days of me being a Music Fan. Albums like Rock and Roll Part Three by Ozma, Chutes Too Narrow by the Shins, Let Go by Nada Surf, and Picaresque by The Decemberists. Although not quite as significant in my life, Set Yourself on Fire by Montreal-based indie pop troupe Stars is definitely another such album, so I was very excited when I saw the album's twentieth anniversary tour would be hitting the Beachland Ballroom on February 13.

 

Erin and I went (shout-out to our friends who tag team babysat when our original babysitting plans fell through, making it possible for us to attend) and it was a great show! It was also a timely show, which I'll get to in a bit.

Making this show extra special for me was that, in my 19+ years of being a Stars fan, I'd only previously seen the band live once, also at the Beachland, and that was way back on March 31, 2008. Yes, someone who was born on the day I first saw Stars live would be able to drive by the second time I saw Stars live. Scary, huh? Fun fact (to me, at least), this was a new record for the longest gap between consecutive instances of me seeing a band live, eclipsing the previous record held by Ozma (July 2007 to December 2019, also a 20th anniversary album show).

A really great thing about being a music lover, and a thing that's really cool because you don't know it when you first become a music lover and then you become more and more aware of it the farther into life you get, is that listening to a certain beloved song or album can transport you to a time in your past when you were listening to the same music. Perhaps when you first heard it, or when you were listening to it a lot, or a particularly memorable instance of you hearing it. And the more music you accumulate in your brain over the years, the more opportunities there are for this to happen.

Set Yourself on Fire takes me back to my first year of grad school. Back to a time when I was working in the same lab where I now work, with the love of my life (sea slugs)*, but when my life was otherwise completely and staggeringly different, and there's no way the me of then could have imagined the events between then and now.

*this is an inside joke, the first of many (well, of several) in this post

Thursday's show started out with a lovely set by Toronto singer-songwriter Lydia Persaud, whose powerful voice filled the room. Her soulful songs seemed to command the attention of most of the audience; it's always nice when you don't encounter too much of a notoriously chatty concert crowd, especially during an opener's set.

Persaud was accompanied by guitarist Christine Bougie, who it turned out is her partner. Erin almost instantly recognized Bougie as having been part of the Weather Station's backing band at shows we saw in Toronto in December 2023. I'm frequently in awe of Erin's memory.

 

Not surprisingly, the musicians, both opener and headliner, commented on the horrifying events currently unfolding in the United States. This wasn't the first time I've seen a Canadian artist say something about how they really like Americans and really like playing here and express their sympathy and worry about what's happening to our country. It seems appropriate, so I'll just quote myself from when I wrote about another Weather Station show in September 2021:

There was another thing that [Tamara] Lindeman said during the show that really struck me, in a sad way. She said that it was good to be back in America. She noted that the news from here is "intense" (no kidding!), but whenever she actually comes here, it's really nice. It's a nice place, she said, "and it always will be."

The way she said "and it always will be"... it was one of those things where you say something and the words you use express certainty, but you don't actually feel certain, you actually are just hoping that it will be true.

These really are scary times. And as I drove home, I was thinking about how, when I was a kid, I was told all this stuff about the USA being the greatest country in the world, and a lot of it was BS, but I do think that back then, it was at least generally the case that this country was admired by people in other countries. Nowadays, people in other countries feel bad for us. And for very good reasons! I've been aware of this before, but Lindeman's words really drove it home for me. And it did make me feel sad.

Good lord, how I wish times now were merely as scary as they were in September 2021.

Persaud and Bougie were collecting donations at the merch table for TransOhio and I joined a lot of other audience members chipping in on our way out of the venue.

Set Yourself on Fire is an album that's catchy and beautiful and at times dark but more than that hopeful. Stars are a very earnest band, so much so that when I was a young Jeff, I think I probably felt a little self-conscious about liking some of their especially earnest-sounding songs. I think I'm past that now. Live, they came across as very endearing. The flower arrangement decorating the drumset definitely fit their vibe.

The album begins in a memorable way, the authoritatively declared spoken words "When there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire" seguing into the opening notes of "Your Ex-Lover is Dead." Stars' set started the same way, a recording of those familiar words playing, and then the music kicked in and we were off!

There were several points during the show with great audience sing-alongs, and the outro of the opening song was one, with Torquil Campbell urging the crowd to join in singing the repeating line "Live through this and you won't look back." The song is about a breakup, but the words "live through this" seemed to carry an extra sense of urgency in light of, well... *gestures in the general direction of everything* this.

The way the bouncy synth intro of third song "Ageless Beauty" enters on the heels of the dreamy ending of title and second track "Set Yourself on Fire" is one of those perfect moments in music. "Ageless Beauty" is such an infectious song. I was obsessed with the song for a while when I first got the album, and every time I hear it it's easy to understand that obsession. It was a thrill to see live. Amy Millan's vocals really shone. As co-lead vocalists, Campbell and Millan are each indispensable to the Stars sound, and the way their voices played off each other, sometimes within and sometimes between songs, was great to experience up close.

One thing about this album is that it's inextricably linked to an era of time not just in my own life but also in history. Several songs are directly about or seem at least partly inspired by the Iraq War, and it's unsettling to look back on the years of the George W. Bush administration and think about how it seemed like things couldn't get much worse in our country, and then contrast that with what's happening now.

(To be fair, I guess I should mention that the Bush administration was worse for the people of Iraq.)

The lines "Keep watching the sky/'Cause you might get lucky again" from "He Lied About Death" are an obvious 9/11 reference. Indeed, Bush did greatly benefit from the horrific events of that day. Hearing those lines today, though, I can't help but think about how the sky-high approval ratings he experienced in the aftermath of the attacks (peaking around 90%!) could never under any circumstances happen for any American president in our modern hyper-polarized political climate. And yeah, in retrospect I feel silly for having temporarily approved of the job Bush was doing, but the loss of even the possibility of having real national unity in the wake of immense tragedy (see, for example, the conspiracy theories that rapidly spread after the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Helene last year) is just so sad.

There were several small lyric alterations in response to current events. The line "We're gonna chase the demons out of town" in "Soft Revolution" became "We're gonna chase the Nazis out of town."

The liner notes of Set Yourself on Fire, now twenty years old, include the words, "by the time you hear this the world might be ending, or beginning... whatever happens, BURN... goodbye fascists everywhere..." Maybe it's worth reflecting on how the epithet "fascist" has so often been hurled at various people, many of whom were really bad in various ways, but who weren't really fascists. And now here we are, with actual fascists in charge. Like, Elon Musk was literally doing Sieg Heils at the inauguration.

This isn't fun material for a review of a mostly very fun concert, but this is the world in which we live!

The last song of the album, "Calendar Girl," is another one I really love, and it ends the album on a beautiful and hopeful note. Interestingly, I remember long, long ago really loving the lines, "But I can't live forever/I can't always be/One day I'll be sand on a beach by the sea." Interestingly, because that was many years before I felt a strong personal connection to songs grappling with mortality (see: most of Typhoon's discography). The live performance of the song was an acoustic audience sing-along with the band bringing out a trombone and French horn to add to the saxophone that had been nicely utilized through most of the concert. The band and audience together singing "I'm alive... I'm alive..." was really a lovely way to end the main set, another of those special moments that can only exist when you get a band in a room with a group of people who love their music.

I've been seeing more and more of these album anniversary shows in recent years. It seems to be a trend, and it's a trend I like! Seeing a band play a career highlight album front to back and then follow it up with a sort of abbreviated greatest hits selection from the rest of their catalog is a great way to spend an evening. After the thirteen songs of Set Yourself on Fire, Stars ended up playing nine additional songs, and while there are certainly other songs of theirs I wish had been included, every one of the songs was great to experience. I was especially glad to hear "Elevator Love Letter" and "Dead Hearts." At times, I marveled at Millan's ability to still hit the high notes in her songs. Campbell gave an amusing reaction when he, on the other hand, wasn't quite able to in "The Ghost of Genova Heights" and then settled for singing that section at a lower pitch.

Millan wasn't present on stage during that song, then reappeared for encore closer "No One is Lost" wearing a rad "Ageless Beauty" jacket - a fun way to close out the show.

 

Erin hadn't really been familiar with the music of Stars previously, but she "did her Stars homework" before the show and ended up really liking it. It was a great show, and it was great that we could enjoy it together. I feel more and more that music is a fundamental and nearly essential part of human life, and times like these make it all the more apparent.