Stars - 'Elevator Love Letter' (2003)

 http://www.musicstack.com/

   In 2003, I was still a student and because students are stupid and introspective, I began to delve into twee pop. Today, I'm so out of touch with my emotions that I can justifiably claim to have left my feelings in my other trousers. But some things stay with you and this song is one of them

   Stars is a Canadian pop outfit almost unhealthily concerned with love, death, love, isolation, love, major emotions, guitars, love and keyboards. On a side note, founder and male singer, Torquil Campbell, was a walk-on in an episode of "Sex and the City, crowning his achievement with his sole line, directed at Sarah Jessica-Parker: "Is that pleather?" I spent a reasonable amount of time with their first three albums, fell hard and then removed them from my affections almost as quickly. Perhaps it really was a question of feelings in the end. Still, 'Elevator Love Letter' is quite possibly their indelible classic, or at least as close to a signature song as they had developed before releasing 'Ageless Beauty' in 2004

   The thing is, songs that are bleak, wistful and disappointed at the core but dressed up in melodies and beats of earworm-like properties are neither new nor uncommon, but few of them have as delicate and accomplished a happy-sad balance as this does. Although Torquil has a part to play as a cynical, blithe Lothario in the second verse, the song rests much more on the beautiful vocal performance of Amy Millan and her realisation of the equally cynical and emotionally stunted yet yearning, depressed and insecure rich girl whose woes and fragility drive the song. If her story was not so slight, I'd actually like the song less, since Stars already had 11 other emotional situations to navigate through on the song's parent album, Heart, to say nothing of the rest of their output

   'Elevator Love Letter' tells me just enough about its characters, says enough about what a rich girl with a nearly frozen heart really wants out of life and woos me just enough with a fast paced, lightly melodic production and singing that actually affects. And all with a chorus that turns the mundane into something transportive, although it helps when there's various layers of instruments playing in perfect synergy underneath it

   Maybe I've not grown up fast enough - I may still have the albums somewhere