![]() The 14-track collection contains plenty of gems, including “Canada vs America,” a raucous jam from 2004, and “This House Is on Fire,” a gentle but melancholy outtake from 2009. “When we started going through all the archives together, we came across all songs we like: songs that easily could have made it on an album.” Canning says the project came about as the band was preparing to reissue their early albums. That collaborative spirit can be heard all over “Old Dead Young,” a career-spanning collection of B-sides and rarities the band released in January. “We tried a couple remote Zoom sessions and they’re just so unfun,” Canning said. While many artists and bands continued to work during the pandemic, the idea of writing or recording new music remotely seemed hostile to the Broken Social Scene ethos. “No one wants to see anyone … So yeah, it was in a lot of ways, like really debilitating.” “There was no band at that point,” Canning explained. That momentum was stopped in its tracks with the arrival of the pandemic in 2020. But you can’t cap it there because, in 2017, we were playing Brixton Academy in London for the first time. “In 2010 we sold 5,000 tickets in Central Park in New York. “We had a heck of a run from 2002 to 2010,” Canning said, when asked about the band’s golden era. “It’s just a natural evolution for people wanting to stretch their legs a bit and expand their wing capacity.” “We’re just a band with so many different tentacles popping out,” Canning said. #Broken social scene tour movie#The music - buzzworthy enough for late-night appearances but a bit too weird for the radio - generated legions of fans around the world.Īlong the way, members of Broken Social Scene dabbled in film scores, movie soundtracks or started their own projects - Canning himself has released three solo albums. Since then, Broken Social Scene has released four more studio albums and amassed a long set list of festival-ready jams: the rousing, road-trip standard “7/4 (Shoreline)” from the 2005 self-titled album, to the anti-oil industry protest track “Texico Bitches” from 2010s “Forgiveness Rock Record,” to “Halfway Home,” a rousing singalong from 2017’s “Hug of Thunder” and nostalgia-inducing cult classics like “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old-Girl” and “Sweetest Kill.” One gets the sense that the particulars - who wrote the song or who is playing what instrument - matter less than the simple experience of creating music as a collective. In the video, the backlit band swells in size, as faceless and silhouetted figures dance through the musical chaos. It was 2002’s “You Forgot It in People” that introduced the band’s uniquely democratic approach to songwriting and recording, perhaps best exemplified by the song “Almost Crimes.”Īn angsty duet between Drew and Feist, the track is packed with sounds and ideas to the point of nearly rupturing - there are countless layers of guitar, distorted bass, a saxophone solo, a midsong noise freakout. Over time, a core group of musicians - consisting of Canning, Drew, Andrew Whiteman, Charles Spearin and drummer Justin Peroff - emerged, around which a revolving door of musicians would orbit. The duo initially invited their friends and other artists to join the band in order to flesh out their live performances. Their debut album, “Feel Good Lost” (2001), was a subdued, mostly instrumental project, filled with the reverb-drenched guitars that would come to characterize the band’s later works. “We just decided to hang a banner up and put a name on it.”Ĭanning co-founded Broken Scene Social with Drew in 1999. “I mean, every city has a scene,” he added. “We’re kind of like a Wu-Tang Clan or something,” Canning - a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and one of the band’s core members - dryly remarked during a video call with the Star this month. Today, one could easily spend a couple of hours on Wikipedia trying to trace the tangled web of Canadian artists and acts associated with the band, whose ever-changing lineup has ranged between six and 19 members - including heavy hitters like Leslie Feist, Emily Haines ( Metric), Amy Millan ( Stars), Jason Collett, Ohad Benchetrit ( Do Make Say Think) and Lisa Lobsinger ( Reverie Sound Revue), to name a few. Written by Brendan Canning and Kevin Drew but featuring contributions from dozens of local musicians, the album managed to harness the freewheeling energy of Toronto’s burgeoning indie scene - a winning formula that makes Broken Social Scene one of the most influential alternative groups of the 21st century. It’s been nearly two decades since the release of “You Forgot It in People,” a bona fide indie rock classic that transformed Broken Social Scene from a two-man basement project into a sprawling and amorphous music collective. ![]()
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