Stars

There is a particular kind of loud that does not feel like aggression. It feels like weather. Hum's "Stars" opens with one long, heavy chord that hangs in the air so long that, according to a famous mockery, two cartoon teenagers on television assumed the song was over and changed the channel.^[3] They were wrong, of course. The song had barely begun, and what follows is one of the most quietly devastating pieces of heavy music to reach American radio in the 1990s.

It is a song about watching someone you love drift out of reach, told through the language of space, distance and slow orbit. It is also, improbably, a hit.

A band that came from the cornfields

Hum formed in Champaign, Illinois, in 1989, after Matt Talbott and Andy Switzky met at a café in neighboring Urbana where Switzky worked.^[2] The band took its name on the suggestion of a member of another local group, and found its drummer, Bryan St. Pere, after overhearing him play along to a record in another room.^[2] Early on, Switzky was the main singer and songwriter, and the lyrics leaned toward the political and the humorous. After he left and Tim Lash joined on guitar, Talbott took over, and the words turned oblique and conceptual, filling with the space and science imagery that would define the band.^[2]

By the time of their second album, Electra 2000, that imagery was fully in place, and the distribution of that record helped bring the band to the attention of RCA.^[2] The major label deal arrived in the middle of the decade, when labels were scouring the underground for the next big alternative act. Hum, a Midwestern band that sounded more like a slow landslide than a radio single, was an unlikely candidate. Yet the gamble nearly paid off.

Where the song came from

"Stars" was not a product of the label machine. By the account on its Wikipedia entry, the band wrote it years before the RCA contract existed, and recorded it in 1994 for the album that became You'd Prefer an Astronaut, produced with Keith Cleversley.^[3] The album followed on April 11, 1995, and the song was released as a single in May of that year.^[1][3]

Radio did the rest. The Los Angeles station KROQ played the song heavily before its release, so much so that RCA reportedly rushed the single out about a month early.^[3] It climbed to number eleven on the Modern Rock chart and number twenty-eight on the Mainstream Rock chart, making it the highest-charting song of Hum's career.^[1][3] The band took the song to late-night and cable television, and its video, which shows the band playing in a dark room intercut with a heavily tattooed man handling candles, a mask and a clock, was a staple of MTV and a punchline on Beavis and Butt-Head.^[2][3]

What the song is about

Talbott has never offered a tidy explanation of this song, and he has said that his own lyrics walk a line between impressionism and what he jokingly calls pure mountain gibberish.^[5] That candor is worth keeping in mind. Any reading of "Stars" is an interpretation, and the song is built to invite several.

The most common reading, and the one that fits the words most naturally, is a portrait of emotional abandonment. The music publication Dork describes it as a narrator watching a loved one withdraw from daily life: she has stopped going to work, to school, even to bed, and the single thing she still does with any devotion is look at the night sky.^[7] The narrator, meanwhile, comes to believe that he is the cause of her retreat. The writer notes that the song suggests depression or dissociation without ever naming it, and that it never resolves.^[7]

That refusal to resolve is what gives the song its force. There is no confession, no reunion and no catharsis, only a man standing at the edge of someone else's sadness, convinced that he broke something and unable to repair it. The vocabulary of astronomy turns this domestic helplessness into something enormous. The stars are far away, indifferent and beautiful, and the person he loves is turning toward them and away from him.

Distance as a language

This is the territory that Hum made its own. The album's title, drawn from a line in another song on the record, sets the tone: the idea of preferring a spaceman to a human being, and what that says about a person or a relationship.^[1] Across the album, space is not a place of adventure. It is a metaphor for emotional remove, for the way two people in the same room can be separated by unbridgeable distances.

The sound enacts that idea. Critics have traced the song's lineage to the quiet-loud dynamics of the Pixies, and have compared the guitars to Dinosaur Jr. and to the shimmering haze of My Bloody Valentine and Lush.^[3] Reviewers looking back at the album have placed it among the earliest American shoegaze records, a genre that was not yet widely embraced in the United States when the album came out.^[6] Vox, as quoted on the song's entry, called the track achingly melancholic but kept from sentimentality by Talbott's detached delivery.^[3]

That detachment matters. Talbott does not wail or plead. He sings in a level, almost sleepy voice, as if the narrator has been awake too long to raise it. The heaviness of the guitars carries the emotion that the voice withholds, so that the listener feels the grief the narrator cannot say out loud.

A song with a second life

The story might have ended there. RCA dropped Hum in 2000 after weak sales and a wave of label mergers, and the band played its final shows that year.^[2] A one-off set in 2003 and sporadic reunions followed.^[2] For most of the 2000s, "Stars" was a cult favorite, the sort of song that fans press into the hands of friends.

Then came an advertisement. In 2007, a Cadillac commercial licensed the song, with the guitar blast landing as the driver pressed the accelerator.^[6] According to the account on the song's entry, Talbott had casually told an advertising contact that licensing was fine, and then called his lawyer when the scale of the campaign became clear.^[3] He saw the finished commercial by chance, in a hotel, and then his wife called to tell him that people were phoning the house about it.^[3] Billboard reported that digital sales of the song jumped in the months following the ad.^[3]

The song's afterlife has continued. It was used in a promotional spot for the 2015 National Hockey League All-Star Game, which cast star players as celestial bodies playing among the stars, and the commercial ended on the song's crunching bridge.^[8] It has been covered by bands from the metalcore scene, including Evergreen Terrace and Bleeding Through.^[3] The irony is rich. A song about being unable to reach someone has become, again and again, a song that reaches strangers.

Alternative readings

Because Talbott's words are slippery, other interpretations are available. One is that the song is not about a lover at all, but about the narrator's own estrangement: that the person gazing up and away is a stand-in for a part of himself that has gone somewhere he cannot follow. In that reading the guilt in the song is less about a failed relationship than about the inability to be present for anyone, including oneself.

Another reading takes the astronomy more literally and hears the song as a meditation on scale. When you look at the night sky, you are looking into the past, at light that left its source long ago. The grief in the song might belong to that time delay: the sense that by the time you notice what has been lost, it has already been gone for ages.

Talbott himself has suggested, in general terms, that his songs change for him over time. He told Alarm in 2008 that the hardest part of playing old songs is rediscovering what they meant, because he was a slightly different person when he wrote them, and that some lyrics now express new ideas or fit later experiences.^[5] That is as good a defense of ambiguity as any. A song like "Stars" is not a puzzle with an answer. It is a space that listeners enter with their own histories.

Why it still resonates

Part of the endurance is sonic. Writing about the vinyl reissues in 2024, Christopher J. Lee called it a smart and catchy track with big, grunge-heavy guitars and loud-soft-loud dynamics, and one that still holds up as an artifact of its era.^[4] The album it came from has accumulated its own reputation, too. Deftones singer Chino Moreno has credited it as a heavy record and a tonal influence on his band, and The A.V. Club called it an overlooked masterpiece.^[1][6]

But the deeper reason is emotional. Most songs about heartbreak are about the ending of something. "Stars" is about the long, slow period before an ending, when you can see someone disappearing and cannot find the words or the gesture that would keep them. Many listeners know that feeling, from either side of it. The song does not offer comfort, only company.

Conclusion

It is odd to think that a song this heavy and this sad reached the Billboard charts, and odder still that it did so by way of a brief hit followed by a car commercial and a hockey promo. But the strangeness suits it. "Stars" lives in the gap between the enormous and the intimate, between the cold distance of the cosmos and the small, human ache of watching someone leave without moving. Nearly three decades on, the opening chord still hangs in the air, and still asks the listener to wait for what comes next.