Elastic Stars Is In It for the Long Haul

On Hobbyist, Elastic Stars’ Colin Cowan turns fatherhood, humour, and time into a cosmic personal archive.

By Kenna Clifford

Published on December 16, 2025

If you haven’t met Colin Cowan through his bouncy, warbled, experimental pop project Elastic Stars, or perhaps through one of the many other bands that he’s toured with (Destroyer, Analog Bell Studio, and Dada Plan, to name a few) you’ve probably encountered him as someone else: as the chain-smoking 75 year old Newfie who goes by Angel; or while teaching a flouncy masterclass in thespianism as Leopold Optimistico; maybe even when delivering an off-colour wedding speech as Danny Nice Guy, reminiscent of that out-of-touch uncle who might not believe in pronouns, but will ask you to call him “big man” after a few drinks. Maybe, like me, you’ve seen him in the background, bundling cables at the beloved China Cloud Studios, which he founded and has run for over 16 years. Character actor, standup, musician, dad, the list goes on. Being funny is busy work, but for Colin, it’s all a part of the music, and the cosmic archive that his new album Hobbyist represents.

Before and after I meet up with Colin, he’s working back-to-back shifts doing what he calls “dad duty,” which, for the evening at least, looks like taking care of his four-year-old daughter after daycare, then heading back down the block to cook dinner for her and his wife (Jen Bijm, who plays bass for Elastic Stars.) “I operate on the three C’s of being a softy; cooking, cleaning, crafts,” he jokes. This is a one-liner from one of his standup sets, but it feels nevertheless completely sincere. Colin is buzzy but calculated—he barely touches his mint tea, and leans into questions with his whole body, a trait which he attributes to his East Coast sensibility—but he’s always present. “I’m a deep analog human,” he tells me, “I’m always trying to be here, doing things the whole way.”

Colin brings an animated zest that is contagious, natural, and necessary to the breadth of his roles both inside both the Vancouver arts scene and at home. It’s all tangential. “[Music and comedy] have always co-existed for me; I auditioned for Second City when I was 18 and they let me in too early; at the same time, I was playing in bands in Toronto, doing improv and sketch and implementing it into the music. I learned music very meat and potatoes, being compositional came later when I started playing with older people and wondering what they were doing in academia. It’s all improvising. Comedy is the median, you know?”

His new album, Hobbyist, doesn’t shy away from that sense of multiplicity, either: it reads like campfire stories, or sketches of parable characters that pose Colin’s own internal world as if they are other people; an athlete dreaming of Olympic standard, or a talk show host shackled to a never ending 70’s television show. Theatrical in its lyrics yet ever down to earth, tinged with a hint of weed and hindsight. He tells me that the album is his way of exercising a sense of performance he felt he’s needed to shed. “I’ve had the word weird thrown at me my whole life, and I wear that proudly now. I decided one day I wasn’t going to be embarrassed of it, but I didn’t know that until I tried other things first.”

Now, Colin is looking to take his personal work with a sense of precision that can only come from slowing down, artistically. A collection of songs that spans the course of over four years, he describes the album as a type of personal, emotional archive which follows starting a family, releasing ego cultivated in youth in favour of letting the work come naturally, and, importantly, learning how to ride his fathers’ old 1979 Honda CB650 motorcycle. “I recorded the album like a hobbyist, with no plans; I recorded it in my off time, any time I wanted to go sit down and try to finish it, I’d say ‘No, I’m not going in, then.’ It had to be pure animal intuition. It’s cheesy, but the story is of the motorcycle, too. if you’re not going ‘Lalala’ while you bike, you’re not doing it right: being very safe, very chill. Sometimes a cool old car will pull up beside me and wanna race and I’m like, ‘Sorry buddy, I’m not that guy, I’m a softie boy!’”

I can’t help but imagine Colin riding that old refurbished 70’s bike off into the future, or up to the stars, with his wife and daughter riding sidecar. “I’m appreciating being an actual role model to a bloodline these days, it’s such a cosmic thing and it’s really made me see the value of being surefooted” he says. Colin tells me that the track “Falls Back” is about his daughters’ tiny head seeming too big for her body, and wanting to catch her when she falls. Despite having his head in different characters, different roles, or just up in the clouds, I get a sense that Colin will forever land back as himself, on his own two feet.