Broken Social Scene's last album was 2017’s Hug of Thunder.Kevin Drew/Supplied
The core members of Broken Social Scene are gathered in multi-instrumentalist Charles Spearin’s backyard around a charcuterie situation on the sunniest of spring afternoons, having just completed a rehearsal in Spearin’s garage. The group is preparing for a North American tour this summer with their Canadian indie-rock associates Metric and Stars.
Between bites of cheese and prosciutto, they talk about And I Think Of You, a slow-burning jam from Remember The Humans, the band’s sublime new album and first since 2017’s Hug of Thunder. Drummer Justin Peroff first heard an early skeletal version of the track built around singer Kevin Drew’s vocals.
“Halfway through the song, Kevin’s getting very emotional,” Peroff recalls. “I’m thinking, ‘Is he reaching for a Bono place?’ I did not feel good about it.”
Other band members felt the same way. Mild-mannered Brendan Canning, who formed the Toronto indie-rock icons with Drew in 1999, was elected emissary to let Drew know the group wasn’t digging his singing on the track.
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But the next version of And I Think Of You was much more developed. Producer David Newfeld, who helmed the band’s breakthrough 2002 album You Forgot It In People and the self-titled 2005 follow-up before the group moved on to different producers, was brought back for the new record. On And I Think Of You, he constructed a wall of sound to match Drew’s emotive wail.
Newfeld’s mother had died recently, Drew explained. “The song is about love that you can’t have. Newf poured his grief into it.”
The built-up track “made sense,” to Peroff’s mind.
When Spearin heard the finished song, he had one question. “I wanted to know who was playing bass,” he says. “It was crazy.”
In fact, the bass parts were from Spearin himself.
“Newf designed songs on this album where we didn’t know what each of us even did on them,” Drew says. “And that was how it used to be with Newf, 20 years ago. The band used to get angry about that. Now, we’re in our late 40s and our 50s. Some of us have kids. We’re living our lives.”
Broken sprawling scene
If one wishes to learn about what Spearin calls the “chaos” of Broken Social Scene songwriting, you really must hang with the band. Which, apparently, is some mean feat.
“This is our first-ever group interview,” Drew says, pouring white wine. “We’ve never done one before.”
Broken Social Scene is often referred to as a “sprawling collective,” and, these days, they’ve never been so sprawled. For the weekday rehearsal, guitarist Andrew Whiteman flew in from Montreal, where he lives with his wife Ariel Engle, a solo artist as well as a Broken Social Scene singer. (The band’s female vocalists, an essential part of the BSS sound and attitude, did not participate in the first rehearsal.) Drew now lives in a village two hours east of Toronto, not far from Trenton, where Newfeld has a recording studio.
The band members have solo careers and side projects. When their schedules align, they play shows. Earlier this year, BSS released a live recording from the 2018 Pickathon music festival in Oregon on its Bandcamp page.
“There’s a lot of egos and there’s a lot of relationships,” Drew told the crowd, referring to the band members and affiliates. “But we keep doing it, we keep making it.”
One of those egos belongs to Newfeld, a key collaborator in the development of BSS’s horn-happy euphoric aesthetic. The soundboard maestro remembers the time he worked with the band in the early 2000s as highly productive but “tumultuous.”
After the release of You Forgot It In People, the band toured the world. While they were on the road, Newfeld says he often worked on the follow-up record alone, sometimes adding parts to tracks that left less room for the band members to contribute themselves.
“They found that annoying,” Newfeld says now, on a phone call. “They told me they needed to move on. I think they wanted to prove they could do it without me, like ‘We’ll show Newf.’
“I felt wounded.”
Twenty years later, he says the “weirdness” is gone and that his close working relationship with the band’s de facto leader Drew has been restored: “I love this band, and I’m happy to have Kevin back in my life.”
When Newfeld worked with BSS in the early days, Hannah Georgas was in university. Now the Juno-nominated singer-songwriter is one of the singers (along with Drew, Whiteman, Engle, Feist, Amy Millan, Lisa Lobsinger and Jill Harris) on the new album.
“My first experience listening to Broken Social Scene was back in university,” Georgas said on a recent phone call. “An ex made me a mixed CD with their song Sweetest Kill on it.”
She lives in Belleville, near Drew and Newfeld. Given three demos of songs in progress, Georgas picked one and added a vocal melody line with lyrics that reference the Smashing Pumpkins and Canadian musician Julie Doiron. The result is Only The Good I Keep, a wistful, tuneful ode to adolescence.
The reunion of Newfeld and Drew was organic. The former dropped by latter’s house one day and “cracked me up,” Drew says. What he describes as a “very casual conversation” led to Newfeld being invited back into the fold. “My thinking was, ‘Let’s see what happens.’”
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Remember the producer
The new album is what one might expect from a Newfeld-produced BSS record: plenty of big-hearted indie-rock expressions of groove and vulnerability that are somehow cathartic and chill at the same moments. Sonically, it demands proper headphones or audio speakers the size of refrigerators − to use a Bluetooth device is to offend the band and producer.
What’s missing, however, are the anthems of the past − the towering haze of 2002’s Lover’s Spit, for example, or the energized instance of 2010’s Meet Me In The Basement. The signature horns that once blew so triumphantly are much mellower now.
Drew describes the crescendos and celebrations found on previous BSS records as “Are you alive?” moments. To not create those for the reflective Remember The Humans was a conscious decision, made in the divisive times we find ourselves in.
“Hope needs a new publicist,” he says. “Rallying the troops is not something we were trying to take on with this record.”
The album’s lead track and first single is Not Around Anymore, a serene manifesto set to a sick beat and bird chirps. “I guess it’s called the times,” Drew sings. “There’s no need to fight here anymore.” The song is about the choices we make; the advice is to live in the present because the past we remember is gone.
This summer of Canadian rock is the summer of reunions. Legacy bands Rush, Triumph and the Guess Who are back together for blockbuster tours. The reconciliation between Newfeld and BSS for Remember The Humans feels just as important and less about nostalgia.
“There’s only a small window we’re going to exist in,” Newfeld says. “A magic moment is only a moment, and if you don’t participate in it, you’ve squandered it. And you’ll never get it back again.”
Broken Social Scene and Feist, Alessia Cara and Paul Langlois headline the free TOgether wellness festival and concert at Toronto’s Nathan Phillips Square on June 6.