Broken Social Scene Explain Becoming A Band Again

Anyone who expected Broken Social Scene to release their tightest effort to date more than a decade into their career, raise your hand.

Yeah, right. You totally didn't call that.

Forgiveness Rock Record, the band's fourth studio record, cuts away almost all of the fat and jam-band tendencies that plagued 2005's sometimes excellent but often frustrating self-titled record.

In the process of its recording, the BSS core — Kevin Drew, Brendan Canning and Justin Peroff — found themselves with a solid lineup, featuring touring vocalist Lisa Lobsinger, guitarist Sammy Goldberg, and Social Scene regulars Charles Spearin and Andrew Whiteman.

Before Drew embarked on what he was calling "two years of touring," CHARTattack caught up with him to talk about Forgiveness Rock Record's Chicago roots and the easing of band tensions from the 2005 album's recording and touring.

CHARTattack: Before, Broken Social Scene was you, Brendan, Justin and a rotating cast. Now, it's like a real band. Was that in an important part of moving forward with the group?
Kevin Drew: We just needed the commitment. We loved the rotating cast, but we needed the commitment if we were gonna go for it and go out there and book all these tours, you know, set a precedent of putting this record out there and work it. It had to be a team effort, couldn't just be Canning and I.

And also, we didn't want to do the Canning-and-I thing any more. We really wanted to be a band. So we made this record, start to finish, as a band. It was awesome.

Was it a thing where, when you were done touring and promotion of the solo records you were like, "Well, that was fun, but it would be nice to do Social Scene again"?
Yep, exactly. You're very much on point in that; that was what we needed to do. We did it.

And now we want to get back to being part of something. Being part of something is way more fun than doing something solo.

When you finished doing the two records, was there an actual point where you said, "It's time"?
No because it just kind of happened where we did Spirit If... for two months, and then [Whiteman] and [Spearin] showed up again. It had been almost two years since we were all together like that.

But when Canning's record wasn't even out — didn't come out until July — in that January we started playing. Andrew and Charlie came back in and started touring the world as Social Scene, playing Spirit If... and starting to play Canning's tunes. We just incorporated it into a big show and it was fun.

White and Charles and Sam, who we grabbed from the Spirit If... band, they really embraced Canning and my record — Charlie was all over mine — but they were really great about it. And there was a definite bruise, a leftover bruise from touring the self-titled album that just slowly, without speaking about it, just slowly washed away.

And we had, I think, the most fun we've ever had in 2008, just playing. It was just a lot of fun. It wasn't frustrating. All summer, we went away on weekends, played all over the place. We went to Taiwan, went to Singapore, went to Mexico, went to New Zealand, went to Australia, went to Japan. If there was a time to come back together as a band, 2008 was it, and it was great.

In that fall, we met [producer] John McEntire, went to his studio for a day and had some fun. Then 2009 rolled around, we discussed doing a record, we chose May. People finished up doing what they needed to do and then we got back together. Charlie still had Do Make Say Think to do, so he was very much Do Make Say Think-involved, but he was there. He was very much present for the making of the record.

So it was good — we took a lot of time making the record, we took a lot of time off, we did it here in Toronto and Chicago. It was really the most fun I've had doing something like this.

The songs themselves have so much more of a streamlined, focused sound. Was that something you aimed for?
Yeah, but also, I'm not 26, Andrew's not 33. We never really wanted to make the same record twice. We love experimenting in sound, so we're always gonna make these mix tapes.

I know we're gonna have haters and I know we're gonna have lovers. I know there are diehards who want the noise and distortion, but we did what we wanted to do.

We didn't know how it was going to end up — that Johnny was gonna give us a more focused sound. But we wanted that. We wanted to work with McEntire, we wanted to still write songs that were close to why we did it in the first place and take some liberties, shorten things out, see what the three-minute-thirties do. But it was never a conscious effort to change things up. We just felt fresh when we walked into the studio and didn't deny ourselves anything we wanted to do.

Was there a bit of a feeling like you were going back to how you started? You say everything felt very fresh. Wondering if it was more like how it was with You Forgot It In People than it was with the self-titled record.
No, every record is just different. This was a different process. Time changes things. Or, you can make a conscious decision to stay within a certain sound. We didn't want to do that that and never really have.

And obviously not working with Newfeld drastically made a change anyway. But we were all for it. Newf and I were just kind of getting back on track when were deciding what to do with the record. He didn't particularly want — he really loves the musicianship of the band, but like I said, there was a bruise left over. And he was really busy, he's doing really well.

We needed to get out of the city and take a break, and we needed someone like Johnny, who is very open to letting you figure things out. Newf's a very dominating creative energy, which is incredible and amazing, but we weren't going for that this time. I think because we came back together, we had to form as a team, and then Johnny slid in as the time went on. Like anything, we took on a lot of his love and there's a lot of odes to Chicago, too, on this record, with certain beats and sounds. A lot of us grew up heavily into his albums and the sounds of Chicago, so it was nice to go down there and pay tribute.

You did a little bit of it here, though, with James [Shaw] and Sebastian [Grainger], right?
Oh, yeah, we did a lot here. We had to split it up, too, because of Factor, we had to make sure we followed the rules. The arts grants are amazing in this country and they've been so amazing to us that we make sure we do it the way they need it to be done. It's important, and they've been an incredible help to us when it comes to making records and touring.

So we did a lot at Sebastian and Jimmy's, more than we thought we were gonna do. And Sebastian really became my sort of vocal guy. I spent a lot of time just with him doing vocals, trying out takes, trying out different words and stuff. He was wonderful. And we actually became — we were never really close before, but we became friends.

And then Eva, his wife, I went to their wedding in August, and suddenly, in November, I find myself spending days with this man, just singing songs. I was very grateful toward him and he was a massive help. The band was all for it, and that's how he ended up singing on the album.

Did John come up to work there?
John came down for a little bit. He needed to meet everybody. I wanted him to meet everybody. It was important. We had a great week where everyone was in town. [Feist] came down for a couple of days, Amy [Millan] and Evan [Cranley] came in, and the horns came in — just Johnny meeting everyone who we had been speaking about over the period of a few months before we got there, it was important. And he really wanted to meet everybody because he was really amazed by all the energies and all the music everyone was bringing to it.

Was it a core group of you that went to Chicago?
It was. It was the six of us. But then, people slowly started coming down. Jimmy Shaw came down, at one point Ohad Benchetrit was down, Marty Kinnack was down, Lisa [Lobsinger] was down a bunch, Sebastian came right at the end, so we had people coming in and out.

You guys wrote a whole set of stuff for the band you and Scott Kannberg played with at Sled Island, Human Milk, right?
Yeah, we wrote a whole album with Human Milk.

Did you ever do anything with it?
No [laughs]. We never had time, and then we started making a record and Pavement was getting back together... so it just kind of fell apart.

Lisa's been with the group for five years now. Nice to finally get her on a record?
Yeah, she came down and walked coldly into this thing. She took a lot of hits, stood strong, and I have to tell you, she's one of the kindest people I know, and I'm not exaggerating. I've toured the world with her and she's so sweet and so gentle from the strangers we meet to the crew that we're working with. And there was no way that we weren't going to be able to do it without her because she's tons and tons of fun as well. And that's what I want to have in a bandmate, as someone who's representing the name out there. She's very loyal and honest and strong.

Do you ever find it funny going back and hearing Brendan on say "Stars And Sons" eight years ago and then something like "Water In Hell" now, how far he's come as a vocalist?
He's come very far. I was thinking that the other night. We were playing together and I thought, "He can really sing now." And he really loves to sing. That was something that, when it started, it was like, "How's this gonna go down?" But he really found his voice. As did I. As did Whitey, who's been singing forever. But he really got his distinct niche down so that we could all be our own sort voices to this thing. So did Charles. Charles is singing now! [Laughs]