Broken Social Scene back with first album in a decade: ‘To say the band is happy and grateful is an understatement’

Broken Social Scene. Photo by Norman Wang.

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During the course of a half-hour conversation with Broken Social Scene co-founder and frontman Kevin Drew, he is contacted by both Amy Millan and Ariel Engle.

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On the surface, this isn’t overly surprising. Both vocalists appear on Remember the Humans, Broken Social Scene’s sixth studio record and their first since 2017’s Hug of Thunder. Millan performed with the collective off and on since the band’s early days, but is also a vocalist with Stars, which is currently sharing the stage with both Broken Social Scene and Metric on a tour. Engle’s call is a little spookier. It comes just as Drew is being asked whether (Engel) will be part of the tour.

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“Oh my God, do you know who’s calling me now? Ariel,” he says, in a phone interview with Postmedia. “She’s on tour in Europe, and you mention her name and . . . “

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The question is apparently far more contentious than it was meant to be. Broken Social Scene has always had a fluctuating lineup that could range from six to more than a dozen at any given time. This has included a who’s-who of notable Canadian indie musicians over the years — Engle, Millan and Evan Cranley of the Stars, Metric’s Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw, singer-songwriter Jason Collett and Calgary expats Leslie Feist and Lisa Lobsinger, among others. So, it always seems natural to ask who might be joining the lineup for shows. It may be even more relevant given that the new record features songs penned and sung by Feist, Engle and Lobsinger. But Drew has apparently grown tired of these roll-call-type questions after politely fielding them for more than two decades.

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“I don’t do that question anymore,” Drew says. “There was someone else who said, ‘Who’s going on the road?’ My answer is Broken Social Scene. I’m sorry to be curt, but that doesn’t exist in my life anymore. We spent many years doing that: ‘Oh, well, this person is coming to be there … ‘ Do you know who’s going to be there? The music. The songs. What I’ve realized over time is that as long as the songs are playing, people are happy.”

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So, without belabouring the issue, we can probably assume Engle won’t be there if she is in Europe. Lobsinger, an ex-Calgarian who has been absent from the lineup for years, isn’t likely to be there either, but sent the band a song called Relief for the new record. Feist, whom Drew affectionately calls ‘Feisty’ at various points in the conversation, won’t be there either.

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“If Feist was coming out with us, she would be her own entity, her own castle amongst all of us,” says Drew.

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Millan, Cranley, Haines and Shaw, on the other hand, will likely all be pulling double-duty to perform with both their respective bands and BSS. Haines co-wrote and sang Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl, one of the beloved classics from the band’s 2002 breakout album, You Forgot It In People.

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“If we can do Anthems with Emily Haines, who wrote it, and Jimmy Shaw, that’s an achievement in itself,” Drew says. “We don’t do that very often with them. One of the reasons we took this tour is so we could honour this song that became such a milestone in all our lives.”

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That said, Drew rejects the notion that the band is running on nostalgia, even if Broken Social Scene does represent a specific time in Canadian indie rock. Alongside The New Pornographers, BSS rose to popularity as a sprawling collective after starting as a two-piece basement band featuring Drew and co-founder Brendan Canning. The somewhat haphazard cross-pollination in the band’s membership represented a communal vibe that defined the Canadian indie scene just as bands were gaining international attention in the early 2000s.