Stars’ new album, The Five Ghosts, begins with Torquil Campbell asking bandmate Amy Millan to tell him a ghost story. “Tell me everything that happened, tell me everything you saw,” Campbell sings on the opening of “Dead Hearts” before Millan joins in to give her hushed account of an other-worldly encounter.

Talking to Millan over the phone, she has another ghost story to tell, one that involves Stars' keyboardist Chris Seligman.

Ghosts, spooks, vampires and – depending on how you interpret it – a few mere mortals roaming the earth with “dead hearts” – haunt the dream pop of The Five Ghosts. And it was inspired by a fright Seligman experienced while he was being put up in a Vancouver bed and breakfast during the making of the album, Millan says. The keyboard player was kept awake by feelings of a mysterious presence, Millan explains. “He only spent two nights there and we had to relocate him to a hotel because he just kept dreaming that he was awake and the ghost was trying to enter his body and kill him, so that’s where the haunting began.”

The haunting theme of the The Five Ghosts, that is. Once Seligman had checked out of the B&B, the band wrote what became the first song to make the album, “He Dreams He’s Awake” – a mournful piece featuring a speaker who longs for sunlight, who sings over a blend of atmospheric, Vangelis-style synths and baleful trombone. “The ghosts came from the fact that the first song on the album that we wrote was ‘He Dreams He is Awake,’” Millan says of the album’s recurring supernatural motifs. “I think we’re all into the spook. We used to all go to Torquil Campbell’s summer house in North Hatley [Quebec], which is like a couple hundred years old, and he used to read ghost stories. … We like the spook, we like spooky things.”

Not that everyone in the band is necessarily a believer. “I think for everybody – that’s why it’s called The Five Ghosts, because all five of us have a different opinion, and feeling about that,” she says, referring to bandmates Campbell, Seligman, Evan Cranley and Pat McGee. “I feel it’s about real ghosts. It’s about trying to understand if there are ghosts, if they are alone. And hopefully they’re not. Hopefully it’s not lonely being a ghost.”

To make the album, Stars uprooted themselves from their spiritual (and, for four fifths of them, physical) home in Montreal to record on bandmate Torquil Campbell’s Vancouver turf. Recording began in late summer, Millan recalls, and took the band into February. And apart from the change in scenery, the album marked another new development: the first time Stars ceded credit as co-producers. Re-united with Tom McFall, the producer of their Juno-nominated 2004 album Set Yourself on Fire, Millan says the band decided to give him “all the reins.”

“We just said, ‘Thomas McFall, you have an album to produce, and if it sucks, it’s all your fault, and if it’s amazing, you get all the credit.’

“It was just our fifth album, and we were just sick of it, you now,” Millan says of the control that goes with co-producing. “We needed somebody to be able to push all our buttons. When you say you’re co-producing it means at the end of the day … your decision is the last decision, but when you give him full production credit, his decision is the last decision.”

The end product (which, incidentally, you can listen to now on Dose.ca) is a much more concise story than the band’s previous album, the Polaris-nominated 2007 disc In Our Bedroom After the War. At 11 tracks, Millan says it was crafted to have an old-fashioned LP feel, with a clear Side A and Side B. “We really wanted to make a short record,” says Millan. “We’ve made so many epic long albums, and it’s because we pretty much wanted it to be able to be on one vinyl. We’re pretty obsessed with vinyl right now.” (And should you still want to hear more Stars, an EP of remixed album outtakes, The Séance EP, is being packaged for free with pre-orders of The Five Ghosts. “We just picked our favourites of the extras and we got them to be remixed before people heard the original version, which is kind of exciting,” Millan says.)

Album opener “Dead Hearts,” a duet between Campbell and Millan, serves as an introduction to the record’s mood – sort of the ghost story equivalent to Set Yourself On Fire’s anthemic opening track “Your Ex-Lover is Dead.” From there, we leap into Millan’s fist-banging ode to lazy days, “Wasted Daylight.” (“That’s my favourite song to sing right now,” she says. “I like the way the chorus kicks in. It kind of reminds me of Flashdance – like ‘She’s a maniac,’ the way she’s running with the legwarmers at the stairs, that scene.”) “Side A” of The Five Ghosts keeps spirits high, trotting out pop melodies that culminate with “We Don’t Want Your Body” – the most summer-time pop tune you’ll find on a disc with so many spectral motifs, and featuring an infectious chorus that sounds like it was meant for a vampire version of the Mary Jane Girls. Side B gives way to a chillier mood, though the sounds are still sweet. “Changes,” sung by Millan, is a torch song fit for Twin Peaks.

To create this tightly crafted album, Millan says they relied on producer McFall’s judgment – though the result is arguably quintessential Stars. “He worked us very hard. And he worked the songs really hard,” Millan says. “We went in there and he shaped these 11 songs quite dramatically. He would make me change lyrics and I couldn’t really believe I was listening to him, but I did, and I think the record was better for it.”

The Five Ghosts is in stores June 22. Listen to it now on Dose.ca.

Stars’ Canadian tour dates include:

July 16, Ottawa (Ottawa Blues Fest)

July 22, Calgary (Calgary Folk Fest)

July 25, Guelph (Hillside Festival)

© Copyright (c) dose.ca