• Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) members Keith and Cathy Latinen with their dog

A slew of fourth-wave emo bands are descending upon Chicago this weekend to perform—some call Chicago home, others are from Missouri or Florida, and most have a connection to a small Michigan town about an hour outside of Detroit called Fenton. It’s the headquarters of Count Your Lucky Stars, a small label run by Keith and Cathy Latinen, the husband-and-wife duo behind gorgeously melancholic outfit Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate). Count Your Lucky Stars’s catalog has ballooned since its start in 2007—in the process the label played a major role in establishing the emo scene’s current position as a creative source of indie rock that can chart on the Billboard 200. And, yes, many great musicians in the scene that have worked with the Latinens are performing in town this weekend, including Foxing, who are at Beat Kitchen tonight and Wicker Park Fest tomorrow; Dikembe, who play at Township tomorrow; and Pet Symmetry, whose members have released tunes from other projects through CYLS and who will appear at Beat Kitchen tonight and Wicker Park Fest tomorrow.

Keith Latinen: My standards generally for lyrics are if they’re not strong enough to stand on their own as their own separate work—as a poem or piece of work—then it’s not good enough. So I wanted people to view my piece in the work before they attached it to the music part of it. So, essentially it would take a seriousness as its own quality of work.

I always write the music first. I’ve never been able to write lyrics first. The way I kind of look at it is when you’re writing, when you have the song done you have this much space to put everything that you’re going to say in. It’s sort of like when you’re writing an essay for school and you have “X” amount of words or “X” amount of pages, everything you want to say has to fit in those pages, you can’t go over.

What I really wanted to do with this new album was I want to do all the work for you, for the listener, the reader, so all they have to do is imagine themselves there. Give them enough details about everything so there’s not a lot of metaphors, it mostly it is what it is, I’m not trying to hide anything.

Home After Three Months Away by Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate)

OK, well, this was the beginning of my hyperrealism, my hyperliteralism—that’s not a real word but you know—I was becoming very, very literal so this was like you can trace the steps, especially from this point on.