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It’s Not Exactly A Captain’s Chair, But It’ll Do | With Murray Lightburn (seated, with black leather jacket) at the helm, The Dears’ Missiles CD arrived safely into port.

THE DEARS

w/ Jets Overhead, Black Diamond Bay. The Starlite Room (10030-102 St). Wed, June 3 (8pm). Tickets: $20, available through Ticketmaster, Blackbyrd, Listen, and Unionevents.com

Stardate 2009. Starship Dear-prise, guided by Captain Lightburn, is continuing its mission of entertaining new life forms with its cocktail of romantic indie-pop. Well, not quite.

“I don’t really think I’m Captain Kirk,” says bandleader Murray Lightburn, who has filmed a series of short documentary “webisodes” about The Dears’ 14-year history, each of which begins with a quote from the skirt-chasing Star Trek hero. “The Captain Kirk reference is more about his priorities for his crew and his prime directive. You need a certain level of those rules to stay intact to navigate The Dears. Being a bandleader, there are hilarious parallels to being a captain of a ship.”

Some of these parallels are more intense than hilarious, however. Recently, Lightburn and bandmate/wife Natalia Yanchak stood alone as the only original Dears left to produce 2008’s Missiles. (The Dears’ Wikipedia page lists two current members and 12 “former members.”)

“The Dears aren’t a Pop Idol project.” Lightburn says. “I think stuff happens for a reason and you have to weather the emotions that those changes come with. I guess that’s why the album wound up being called Missiles — like, a feeling of being threatened.”

The press frequently likes to lump The Dears in with other Montreal indie groups like Stars and Arcade Fire — and that’s if they’re not too busy comparing Lightburn’s vocals to Morrissey and Blur’s Damon Albarn.

“Both comparisons are equally annoying,” Lightburn says. “Anything to do with categorizing The Dears annoys me. The different flavours — the innocence of End of a Hollywood Bedtime Story, the meticulous orchestration of No Cities Left, the grittiness of Gang of Losers, and the melancholy of Missiles — they’re like different courses of a whole meal.”

Not that Lightburn is exactly a gourmet: following the band’s gruelling North American tour, which ends in July after five months on the road, he’s looking forward to returning to his Montreal home base for his favourite delicacy. “Me and [Stars keyboardist] Chris Seligman love to rock a late-night poutine at [Montreal restaurant] Fameux Viande. Being raised in Quebec, I know what good poutine is. The fries and the sauce have to be a certain way. If the cheese isn’t curd, then its not real poutine. That’s absolutely key.”

While The Dears website announced a few days ago that they’ll soon be “cracking open a case of new tunes,” Lightburn remains tight-lipped about the project. The most he’ll say is: “It’s still too early to make any real significant comments on it, but the seedlings have started to
be planted.”

He was happy to comment on his favourite Star Trek episode, however. It’s episode 28: “The City on the Edge of Forever.” “The one where they go back in time,” he says. “The one with Joan Collins.” The moral of that episode is that even if you get a chance to change the past, you should leave things be and let events play out the way they always have.

You get the feeling Murray Lightburn feels exactly the same way about The Dears.