I had the good fortune to sit down at The Blue Line, a bar near the Damen stop in Chicago’s Wicker Park, with Chi-town shoegazers, STAR. Singer Shannon Roberts, guitar player Scott Cortez, and bass player/programmer Ted Beck shared a beer and talked about inspiration, their upcoming album, and why touring sucks so bad.

SuburbanHorror: I know from doing some research that Ted’s last project was centered out of Minneapolis and that Scott has arrived by way of Arizona, East Michigan, and South America. How exactly did the three of you come to Chicago to form a band?
Shannon: I moved here for college when I was eighteen, and then Ted came to live with me when we started dating. Then we all worked together doing market research on movies

SH: What influenced the band’s decision to use a drum machine instead of a live drummer?
Shannon: It was just the easiest thing and the stuff was already covered. Two songs that Scott had did already had a drum machine, so it just happened that way, and Ted did beats right away, and since we were writing the songs, we never thought about it. We’re thinking about getting a drummer maybe now, but we haven’t met one yet, and we need the extra space. I’m amazed whenever I see a whole band with a drummer coming someplace from a long distance. But it does add a lot.

SH: Ted, what concerns do you try to keep in mind when programming the beats? Is there a certain aesthetic you try to preserve?
Ted: I don’t know, I just like simple beats that don’t have. . . It’s a drum machine, so I don’t like to pretend like we’re doing a lot of crazy fills and stuff like that. I just like simpler things, and because they’re always so simple, I kinda try to make each one sound a little different even if it’s a similar type of beat, you know? So they kind of need to have their own personality, a little bit. Sometimes I make a real simple one and Scott does some music, some guitars to it and then I‘ll kind of change it a little bit, give it back to him and we’ll work on it.

SH: So no Deep Purple drum solos in a STAR song?
Ted: (laughs) No, that won’t be happening.

SH: Shannon, your lyrics for both STAR and your own solo project seem to illuminate the darker side of romance: deception, control, abuse. What draws you to this subject matter?
Shannon: Just because stuff like that is always happening. Romance is so full of control and abuse, you know what I mean? And I guess that’s just what I choose to write about instead of more cheery things, although we still try to make the songs more cheerful, even if the lyrics aren’t . In some ways, some of them, I think, are cheerful.

SH: You stated in an interview with "Foggy Notions" that music helps you come to terms with "living in a world as messed up as ours without completely losing your sanity." What do you find particularly troubling about the state of the world today, and in what way does music help you cope with it?
Shannon: I think everything is fucked up. Our whole country, people in general, just how cruel people are naturally. And even in myself there’s a tendency to be cruel that I have to fight against, where it’s like, "Don’t be that person that’s being mean." Like puppies being tortured, I was just telling them the other day that it’s really hard to do anything when there are a million things going wrong all around you at the same time. And just listening to music and making music is the one thing where I forget everything else that’s going on.

SH: Scott, are you still making music for Loveliescrushing or Astrobrite?
Scott: I’m just releasing old material. The only music I’m working on is STAR. There’s tons of old tapes, which comes in handy when I need to make a little chump change. People still ask for stuff, so it’s no big deal to release it.

SH: Is that just on hold temporarily or do you feel like you’re done with that phase of your career?
Scott: Yeah, that stuff involved my ex-girlfriend Mellissa, so since her and I aren’t together, all that we have has been archived. We’re not going to ever play again.

SH: How does your guitar work for STAR differ from the sort of work you do with your other projects?
Scott: I think it’s a little. . . sometimes it’s more conventional. STAR allows me to do things that I never would do in those other bands. I guess in some ways [Astrobrite and Loveliescrushing] were really, really simple guitar-wise, like one song’s just a cord. So the simplicity of those other bands was super-minimal, but with STAR, actually, the songs are a lot harder to do. It’s more complex.

SH: Shannon, how do you find time to balance STAR with your other projects?
Shannon: Oh, it’s not a problem at all! STAR I’m actually serious about as a band. With STAR, I wouldn’t want to do anything that’s just silly, whereas with the solo stuff I just wouldn’t care what the topic was about, like a cat peeing or something.

SH: So you’re solo work is something of a creative release valve?
Shannon: Yeah, it’s gotta be something that I would feel comfortable with all three of us being a part of.

SH: You’ve stated in several places that STAR has a significant backlog of recorded material. Will "Violence Against STAR," your next album, cull any tracks from this reserve, or are you working on all new material for the album?
Shannon: A lot of our favorite songs are the ones we’re slowly recording and some of the ones that we do in our live show a lot. We want to get a lot of our old stuff out, but after the first album we just kind of wanted to take a break and not think about STAR at all, but now we’re getting back to the studio.

SH: Are you planning a national tour to support your next release?
Shannon: (Laughter) We hate leaving! We wouldn’t even go to Detroit if we didn’t have friends there or a place to play where we know people, like the last time we went. So maybe we will. . . I say maybe, but I can’t say that we’re super-excited. Really, it’s just making up the songs is the best part, and if we could just go out and play here, you know, there’s lots of great places to play in Chicago. But getting on the bus and doing that every day and not having the comfort to just record, or to read, to do whatever you want, that’s really hard. But possibly?

SH: That seems like it would be the worst part about being in a band.
Shannon: Well with gas prices, too, it’s just trying to see if it’s really affordable. Because everyone’s like "You have to tour," but every band that we have come play with us, they get maybe one or two people to come to their show, they end up not getting any money and they paid, like, a hundred dollars to come there. So I don’t know how that really builds you up until you have people and a place to go to. There’s places that we go-- like Detroit-- so we could go and do a show with a decent amount of people. There’s some people we know out in California, where it would be fun to maybe go out there. . . But just going to really tiny towns where one person is going to show up isn’t on our to-do list.
Scott: Yeah, the benefits don’t outweigh the problems on something like that. We’ve done some things. It’s like we’ve flown to the moon, kind of, those kind of mistakes. Like, "We shouldn’t have done that. There’s nothing here. Why are we here? This is bad news." Detroit is closer or Milwaukee. . . have we been to Milwaukee?
Shannon: Yeah. [Detroit’s] a little funner than Milwaukee.
Scott: We can do it within that circle, but anything farther. . .
Shannon: That’s why I’m so jealous of bands that live in Europe, and you can go anywhere and go home at night in two hours, but here it takes you so much money and you’re so far away.
Scott: It’s like how horror movies start.
Shannon: That’s really what would happen, too.
Scott: We’d have to have a really big truck flown in, and everything paid for with billboards, then, I think maybe we’d tour around the nation. But, no, it’s much better just to make really good albums.

-Joe Hemmerling