You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, your way.

Stars is a band from Toronto who have been making music together since 2000. Their 7th album was released in October 2014.

For this episode, I spoke to several members of the band, singer Amy Milan over the phone and to Evan and Patty in their studio in Toronto, along with their co-producer Liam O'Neal.

Coming up, they'll talk about the inspiration for the phrase No One Is Lost, which is the title of this song, as well as the album.

And you'll hear the original version of the chorus, one that they wrote, recorded, mixed and finished, but then ended up changing completely.

My name is Evan Cranley, I'm in Stars I Play Bass, and synth, I'm Patty McGee, I play drums.

And this is Liam O'Neal, I engineered and produced this with these guys.

Even though this track is the last on the record, it was the first one we started. The first music that was written was really that long sweeping filtered intro that you hear off the top.

So we put all of these different synths into this filter and had it kind of side-chained from the bass drum so that it would kind of pump with the beat.

To that we added Evan's bass guitar.

I write music with my bass guitar, so a lot of my musical ideas actually come initially from the bass guitar. You still get this like human fingerprint-y sound of the strings.

It has a human and a synth that in kind of quality all at once.

The filter is slowly opening up.

It's incredibly anticipatory. It's a really kind of amazing, anxious feeling.

You get that feeling of there's a party happening in the next room and you're slowly walking down the hallway and opening the door and all of a sudden you're there.

We had a sketch and Torque will Campbell one of the two singers heard the verse and as he was peering the verse he literally just sits there and writes in his notebook.

He comes up with lyrics on the spot usually but 99% of the lyrics that he comes up with are done on the spot and what he writes is what you get.

Another night, another weekend, another message checker looking for a friend. You got a pulse, you got a problem. We know the real you so why do you pretend?

Torque will write verses and he will say look there's a chorus here and I don't know what to do for the chorus. Can you write the chorus?

This is Amy Molan and I sing and play a little guitar and start. The chorus is actually really different when we originally wrote it.

It's a little bit more kind of song rightery and then we let a friend of ours, James Shaw from metric, mix another version and he listened to it probably 30 times before he called me.

And he said what's happening in the outro of your song is actually your chorus. Amy was repeating that melodic hook.

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