When I was seventeen, I hit rock bottom. I was woken up at 2 a.m. on a January Monday and told my life as I knew it had violently ended. Hours later, I drifted through an airport as if in a fugue state before ending up in an airplane window seat against my will, tear tracks drying on my cheeks. As we took off, I pressed play on my iPod Nano with my teeth chattering, trying and failing to process just how much of myself had been murdered that morning. As luck would have it, Ariel Engle\u2019s voice was the one to ripple through my head: \u201cFuture\u2019s not what it used to be,\u201d she sang. \u201cBut we still got to go there.\u201d It was Broken Social Scene\u2019s \u201cGonna Get Better,\u201d which felt like a cruel maxim to hear at that moment. But it ended up being precisely what I needed: \u201cThings\u2019ll get better \/ \u2018Cause they can\u2019t get worse.\u201d The logic of that seemed to hold true. So I sat there and replayed the Hug of Thunder track again and again, watching my home, my life, myself shrink into pinpricks beneath me as I flew towards a future I would have died to prevent.<\/p>\n
Since their 1999 inception, Canadian supergroup Broken Social Scene has been that salve for more people than could possibly be counted. Their 2002 breakthrough record, You Forgot It in People, soundtracked innumerable lives and influenced just as many works of art in the years after its release, inspiring two decades of indie bands and even an anthology of short stories based on each of the album\u2019s songs. The band\u2019s songs move from generation to generation; just look at the resurgence of \u201cAnthems of a Seventeen-Year Old Girl\u201d after its inclusion in the trans epic I Saw the TV Glow.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou want to always be there for the one who\u2019s hurting,\u201d frontman Kevin Drew tells me over Zoom. \u201cThat\u2019s the point of why we do this: for community. When \u2018Anthems\u2019 went viral through the trans community from I Saw the TV Glow, that just re-awoke us into the idea of \u2018Well, this is why we did this in the first place.\u2019 It\u2019s for the idea of safety and protection. That\u2019s what music always meant to us. It\u2019s identity.\u201d<\/p>\n
For twenty-seven years, Broken Social Scene has always stood out for their willingness to be vulnerable. Vulnerability as a one-person singer-songwriter is one thing, but vulnerability shared across seventeen-odd members of an extended band community is another, and Drew has always led by example. Take, for instance, 2002\u2019s \u201cI\u2019m Still Your Fag,\u201d a song he\u2014an otherwise ostensibly straight man with a string of girlfriends and wives\u2014wrote about a love affair he had with a man. \u201cI swore I drank your piss that night to see if I could live,\u201d he sang then. \u201cBut my wrists couldn\u2019t stand the life that we missed.\u201d \u201cVulnerability is what art is there for,\u201d he says now, leaning forward in his seat. That\u2019s what he\u2019s interested in\u2014so much so that, when we start getting into the nitty-gritty of the album\u2019s creation in-studio, Drew cuts himself off and sighs, \u201cCasey, I feel like I\u2019m going down here. I want to get more into the blood.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cblood\u201d here was grief. During the making of the record, Drew, producer David Newfeld, and Brendan Canning lost their mothers. Ariel Engle, her husband Andrew Whiteman, and Sam Goldberg lost their fathers. \u201cGrief is everywhere. We\u2019re all older now, we all have kids and have parents gone and all of that. But you discover these new educations within your grief,\u201d Drew says. \u201cThe past is gone, and you have to live for the present. When you do look back at a time when it was easier and better, it can be easy to wish you were there, but you still have to keep going. You still have to continue.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
This emotional openness, Drew argues, is all the more important in the modern day, considering my own generation\u2019s ever-intensifying discomfort with intimacy and preference for hiding behind screens. \u201cWhat your generation was brought up on was reaction,\u201d he declares. \u201cVulnerability and reaction do have a relationship together, but not the way reaction was taught to you guys. You were taught to divide. You were taught to defend. And defensiveness, that is the anti-reaction to vulnerability. So I feel for you, for your people. It\u2019s a lonely time.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the whole point of Remember the Humans, including its title: \u201cCharlie joked that if You Forgot It In People came out in today\u2019s day and age and was written by AI, it would be called Remember the Human,\u201d Drew explains. \u201cWe have still forgotten it in each other\u2014more so now than ever. There\u2019s a tone to the spiritual suicide beneath our feet that makes it it feel like to even speak about those feelings is to be a stereotype to your own campaign.\u201d The role of the artist, then, is not to make art they believe will \u201cfix\u201d things. That is, in Drew\u2019s mind, a heavily narcissistic perspective. \u201cYou have to get outside the mindset of thinking it matters. You actually have to accept that it doesn\u2019t. It\u2019s in that that you actually get into the real work of helping things change.\u201d We live in an era of unprecedented division and callousness, and empathy feels harder to come by than ever\u2014the awful phrase \u201ccompassion fatigue\u201d exists for a reason. But that\u2019s where Broken Social Scene comes in: their entire ethos is grounded in community, in simply wanting to make art with the people you love. Drew concludes: \u201cFriendship is the greatest protest we have going right now, and yet it\u2019s not something that\u2019s being promoted.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Broken Social Scene itself is less a band than it is an extended friend group. What began as a two-person instrumental project between Drew and Brendan Canning quickly became something much larger, as more and more friends and acquaintances were brought into the fold, rotating door-style. It\u2019s long since become a meme: \u201cjust by sheer numbers, all musicians have a greater chance of being in Broken Social Scene than part of nearly anything else,\u201d one Tweet<\/a> reads. Nobody seems to know how many people are in the band at any given moment, or even how many people have been in the band overall: Wikipedia lists twenty-two, other articles say nineteen, still others say two dozen.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI think this band is everyone\u2019s band at the same time,\u201d Drew shrugs. \u201cIt\u2019s my band, it\u2019s their band, it\u2019s the team helping us set up press right now, it\u2019s you giving us this space for this interview.\u201d Drew might be the one doing the interviews, but that doesn\u2019t mean he considers Broken Social Scene to be \u201chis\u201d band by any means. Really, he admits, it\u2019s just that nobody else wants to do press. Besides, the lore is too complicated and interconnected for anyone to untangle, including Drew himself. \u201cI feel like I let you down because I couldn\u2019t quite remember everything,\u201d he says, before mentally scrolling through his bandmate Rolodex, trying to figure out who I should talk to in order to get the full story. Charlie? At a seven-week silent retreat (??), so no. Feist? Probably not available. He lands on guitarist Andrew Whiteman, in part because he runs a poetry label and is currently getting his PhD, and I had referenced Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cThe World Is Too Much With Us\u201d earlier in our conversation. So he punted me over to Whiteman, who\u2019s mostly baffled by the hand-off when we chat a few days later. \u201cI don\u2019t know why Kevin\u2019s asking me,\u201d he scoffs. \u201cI live in Montreal. I wasn\u2019t even there for most of the recording.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But funnily enough, this whole interaction seems to have been an unintentional microcosm for the way Broken Social Scene made Remember the Humans: a constant game of hot potato, songs tossed from person to person, each eager to add their part then pass the baton to someone else. At this point, no one in the band actually knows which songs they played on\u2014something I found out when I mentioned Whiteman\u2019s contributions to \u201cRelief\u201d and \u201cThink of You\u201d and his response was one of utter confusion. \u201cThis is part of the Broken Social Scene thing,\u201d Whiteman tells me. \u201cWhen the record\u2019s done, we go into a room and start dissecting it and try to figure out who\u2019s playing what. Like, \u2018Are you doing that bass line, or is that me?\u2019 Some people remember better than me. They don\u2019t smoke as much weed as I do. But I don\u2019t remember and have to be told what I played.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The only constant seems to be the grounding presence of producer David Newfeld (\u201cNewf,\u201d as the band affectionately calls him), who produced You Forgot It in People and Broken Social Scene. \u201cHe\u2019s the architect of the record,\u201d Whiteman affirms. \u201cIt\u2019s really his album.\u201d It\u2019s been nearly two decades since Broken Social Scene and Newf last worked together, but there was some guilt in leaving him behind to try out new styles and new producers after 2005. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t part of the band, but he was part of the band,\u201d Drew tells me\u2014and, while they don\u2019t regret those explorations, the fact that their collaboration with Newf never continued after Broken Social Scene always seemed a waste.\u00a0<\/p>\n WITH <\/b>REMEMBER THE HUMANS, <\/b>Broken Social Scene is finally back in Newfeld\u2019s orbit once more. \u201cHonestly, I didn\u2019t know if I was going to be able to do it, because you really relinquish control when you work with someone like David,\u201d Drew says. But his passion, his drive, his love\u2014he still hasn\u2019t lost his innocence towards wanting to make the greatest drum sounds, to make songs so joyous and adventurous. I was so grateful to be back in his laughter, because when he starts laughing, you can\u2019t help but laugh too. It just feels good, Casey, to honor history with someone again.\u201d He pauses, then grins. \u201cAnd he made us an absolutely phenomenal album, too.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s not wrong. As Ryan Reed put it in his review<\/a> of the record last week, \u201cGoddamn, hearing [Newfeld and BSS] back together again is magical.\u201d You can immediately tell that this is a band that\u2019s played together for almost thirty years, too. Drew says as much himself: \u201cIt\u2019s a sonic memory muscle. I know their playing inside out, I know what everyone sounds like. We\u2019ve all figured out how to play around each other: we figured out how to have sixteen people in a room sound like six, and six people sound like sixteen.\u201d Remember the Humans is a gorgeous album through and through, at once wholly encompassing and encompassed within the spectrum of human emotion\u2014simultaneously of, about, and for humanity itself. An ode to and a letter from.\u00a0<\/p>\n And baked into that humanity comes strife, both in content and in process. How could it not? A band of four people, each with different tastes and opinions, is hard to keep together. Try seventeen. People change, too: Whiteman has begun worshipping at the altar of techno (\u201cI\u2019m tired of this fucking indie rock sludge! Give me BPMs above 120!\u201d), while his bandmates remain rooted in their lo-fi indie roots. Apart from a few shows here and there, the members of Broken Social Scene\u2019s have lived separate lives since Hug of Thunder nine years ago. (Rumors of a new album floated around in 2019, but when I mention that potential record to Drew now, he just laughs: \u201cWell, we fucking threw that out the window.\u201d) There was never a total sense of certainty that they would ever reconvene for another album. Everyone simply felt comfortable taking things as they came.\u00a0<\/p>\n Deciding to reunite now was like reluctantly accepting an invitation to an extended family reunion (\u201cYou\u2019re like, \u2018I don\u2019t want to hang out with my second cousins,\u2019\u201d Whiteman quips). It\u2019s not because the musicians stopped loving each other, but because it\u2019s always hard to re-enter the lives of people who only knew you as you once were. \u201cFriendships and families are like photo albums,\u201d Drew says. \u201cThey keep you handcuffed to who you were supposed to be, who they think you are. And you can go to your ayahuasca retreat and you can read seventeen self-help books and you can pay a therapist thousands of dollars to say that you\u2019ve changed, but not when you\u2019re in a band. So there was a little bit of PTSD in encountering that again.\u201d<\/p>\n Even so, Whiteman pushes back on the framing of Broken Social Scene \u201cgetting back together\u201d for Remember the Humans: \u201cIt\u2019s not getting back together, because we never left.\u201d He tells me the story of a very early member, Johnny Crossingham, who decided to quit after You Forgot It in People to focus on other projects. The decision baffled everyone. Drew kept telling Crossingham, \u201c\u2018Dude, you don\u2019t need to quit. Go do other things, whatever. You\u2019re still part of the band.\u201d (Crossingham did end up \u201cquitting,\u201d but also not really\u2014last time the band played St. Catharine\u2019s, guess who showed up to play alongside them?) Once you\u2019ve entered through that revolving door, you\u2019re in for life, even if you walk back out again.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not as if the recording of Remember the Humans went seamlessly. Whiteman divulges a little more than Drew, here: \u201cIt got into this, like, unholy triumvirate of Kevin, Newfeld, and Charles\u2014the three of them fighting and battling over everything,\u201d he laughs. Charles started out more removed from the record, living his own life instead. But at some point, Whiteman recalls, he jumped in \u201cfull hog\u201d and the spats began. \u201cCharlie was really the only person, I would say, that could kind of step in, elbows up, to Kevin, and say \u2018No, no, send me tracks, I think this should happen this way.\u2019 I got into a couple of battles with Charlie, too\u2014about things like the groove, the syncopation; \u2018why are you playing this long sustained chord over this thing?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n After having Whiteman walk me through the Broken Social Scene process\u2014at least on this record, at least in his personal experience\u2014I can imagine how these arguments break out. \u201cEvery few months, I would drive about four or five hours to Newf\u2019s studio, and I would just smoke pot with him for three days and record,\u201d he recalls. Newfeld would show him an isolated piece of a song, one he might\u2019ve never heard before, and ask him to play something on it. The problem\u2014and the beauty, really\u2014is that it ends up being a kind of exquisite corpse: \u201cYou add more, someone else adds more, I would come back after not listening to a certain song for four, five, six months, and I\u2019d be like \u2018What the fuck happened here? Who did this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Sometimes, there\u2019d be too many people eager to hop on a track. This was especially the case with Leslie Feist\u2019s song, \u201cWhat Happens Now.\u201d \u201cWhen she showed up, the whole entire band wanted to be on the song,\u201d Drew laughs. \u201cSeventeen people saying, \u2018I\u2019ve never been on a song with Leslie. Can I play on that one?\u2019 It was inevitable. There\u2019s certain things in life that you need to try to achieve, and being on a Feist tune is one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n But sometimes you pass the hot potato to someone and there\u2019s no one there to catch it, like while making \u201cThe Call.\u201d \u201cNewf and I were so excited when we first started making that song,\u201d Whiteman remembers. \u201cWe only had a drum loop, another percussion loop, a chord progression, and maybe one other thing, but at that point, we knew we had to stop. If we kept adding, people would get turned off. You have to leave space for other people. But I was excited anyway. I kept thinking, \u2018Whoever gets to sing on this song is gonna kill it.\u2019\u201d He throws his arms up in the air. \u201cAnd then no one picked it up! I kept bothering Brendan, saying \u2018Dude, lay down some fucking bass! Come on, man!\u2019 And no one did anything! I couldn\u2019t believe it.\u201d In the end, Whiteman himself had to take point, although touring vocalist Jill Harris did hop on to duet. He\u2019s satisfied with how it turned out, but, well, not entirely. \u201cTo be honest, the version of \u2018The Call\u2019 that lives in here,\u201d he says, pointing to his own temple, \u201cis a different version, and kicks ass over the album version.\u201d<\/p>\n Whiteman isn\u2019t actually mad about it, though. \u201cThat\u2019s just part of being in this group,\u201d he acquiesces. \u201cYou have to give things up! You must let go of control just to get shit done. There\u2019s too many of us to do anything else. You know, anarchism and anarchy, they\u2019re beautiful utopic thoughts, and they can work for short periods of time in specific places. But to get something done sometimes, there has to be someone doing it; the decision does have to reside somewhere.\u201d As much as he demands the death of mid-tempo music, his favorite song on the record is a ballad: Kevin\u2019s ode to his mom, \u201cThink of You.\u201d He also loves Lisa Lobsinger\u2019s \u201cRelief,\u201d which he calls \u201cthe hookiest thing ever\u201d and a \u201cbubblegum classic.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Most of the time, it\u2019s about compromise\u2014a word, Drew points out in our conversation, that has multiple meanings: compromise as in to come to an agreement, and compromise as in to put something in danger. Broken Social Scene might talk a big game about friendship, but don\u2019t get it twisted: when they talk about friendship as a crucial force, they don\u2019t mean it in a hokey, \u201cour souls are one\u201d way. Sometimes, friendship is hating one another\u2019s guts and coming together anyway. As Feist sang twenty-four years ago on You Forgot It in People: \u201cWe\u2019ve got love and hate \/ It\u2019s the only way.\u201d<\/p>\n They are, after all, called Broken Social Scene for a reason. It\u2019s true that the group started out impossibly tight knit, but that closeness is what caused cracks to form in the first place. \u201cWe all fell in love with each other back in that era,\u201d Drew says. \u201cThat was an era where we kept looking around, trying not to fall in love with each other, but because of the immense skydiving adventurous emotion we were dealing with every day, it was just hard not to love who you were with.That caused as many problems as it caused joy.\u201d Now the band is simply not as close as it used to be\u2014but that\u2019s not a bad thing. That\u2019s just part of growing up. \u201cI do think, though, that if anyone called anyone and said they were in trouble, people would drop what they were doing. That\u2019s friendship.\u201d It\u2019s true: we fight because we love each other. We fuck up because we\u2019re trying.\u00a0<\/p>\n Whiteman recalls listening to \u201cNot Around Anymore\u201d and finding wrong, clashing notes, six different bass parts, and \u201ctotal mistakes everywhere.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s true for the whole record. There are actually so many problems and inconsistencies\u2014and thank God,\u201d he emphasizes. \u201cThe flaws are to be celebrated. I didn\u2019t title it, but that\u2019s what Remember the Humans is about for me: human frailty, the human ability to make mistakes. In this era of AI and optimization and efficiency, we need to push back against this idea of a \u2018perfect society\u2019 as much as possible. We don\u2019t want that. Let\u2019s not look for perfection. Let\u2019s look for each other instead.\u201d<\/p>\n Casey Epstein-Gross is Associate Editor at<\/b>\u00a0Paste\u00a0<\/b>and is based in New York City. Follow her on X (@epsteingross<\/a>) or email her at\u00a0[email\u00a0protected]<\/a><\/b>.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I was seventeen, I hit rock bottom. 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