To a casual music fan, it may seem that the lives of rock stars are glamorous ones. You get into any club without trouble, everything is given to you free of charge, and you get to date celebrities who are much more attractive than you are.

But lost in the fold are the hard-working bands that spend years making music they love, only to find themselves scraping together money to pay for their passion. They are not going to be found wining and dining in Vegas or L.A., but more likely touring nearly constantly to get their name out there. More importantly, they're just trying to play some music.

Ad Astra Per Aspera is one of those bands.

The band has played for five years in relative anonymity despite touring the entire continent of North America, like so many other bands do. The band recently released its first full-length album, Catapult Calypso, on its label Sonic Unyon.

"There's no real doing it for a living," Kurt Lane, the drummer for Ad Astra Per Aspera, said. "You just do it to do it and do it as much as you can. Nobody's really made any money from the band, so we just do it."

Despite that relative anonymity, the band recently played at Pop Montreal, an annual super-festival in the current indie capital of the world. Lane said the show was a very new experience for the band.

"This is our first time ever to come to Canada," Lane said. "At this point it's just kind of playing to people who know us through word of mouth, or know the record label's releases. It's a lot different than when we play in the Midwestern states."

The band has a larger following in the Midwest, having formed in Lawrence, Kan. when Lane began playing with the band's guitarist Mike Tuley in 2001. The five-piece band became whole in 2002 with the additions of Kurt's now-wife Julie Lane on keyboards, Brooke Hunt on guitar and Scott Edwards on bass.

"[Mike and I] had played in a band before, and we actually lived in the same house," Lane said. "Mike knew Scott through Scott's little brother. Julie and I were dating, and she'd kind of play piano."

The band quickly released two EPs over the next two years before beginning work on Catapult Calypso. Lane said the new album was a learning experience for the band.

"I think that we're still trying to figure out stuff like how we write songs together," Lane said. "I think it's more cohesive."

The band has a unique style, with each song taking on its own distinct form while maintaining a somewhat experimental rock style. Lane said the band's style may come from the Kansas roots.

"For a while, we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do as a group," Lane said. "For us, it's a pretty natural thing. Growing up in Kansas, trends are sort of slow to develop, so in that way it makes us free to do what we want and come up with our own sound."

That original grassroots attitude lends itself to the band's name, which in Latin means "To the stars, through difficulty," Lane said.

"We all like it because it's sort of indicative of the process you go through when you're trying to make music or a band," he said. "We all sort of like that aspect of it, and there's some sort of aspect of where we're from."

Lane said the songwriting process of the band comes from the same inspired feeling.

"For us, it's a process," Lane said. "There's always that moment of inspiration where Mike finds something on the guitar he wants to do, and we go off with that. There is inspiration, but a lot of that comes from just playing together."