![]() ![]() Drew had dated Haines Haines had dated Shaw Feist had dated Canning, and the band's first album, 2001'sįeel Good Lost, is a mostly instrumental ambient rock disc. Still, the opening salvo is sounded: Broken Social Scene is back and reunited, ready to embrace the world with a hug.ĭrew and Emily Haines of Metric perform with Broken Social Scene.īSS starts in west-side Toronto in 2000, when Drew and Spearin's band, KC Accidental, merge with Canning, who had ties to Feist, and they'd get together with Drew's friends from high school, Haines and Millan, to perform on College Street with Shaw and Cranley at Ted's Wrecking Yard. It's an exclamation mark of a performance, with Haines, Shaw, Stars' Amy Millan and Evan Cranley, although Drew later says he's chagrined Feist couldn't be there, stuck rehearsing her Leonard Cohen tribute for the Juno Awards. ![]() Halfway Home, Hug of Thunder's first missive on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on March 30. "Friendship, ladies and gentlemen, friendship," he says, when the band performs ![]() Social media, pornography, Donald Trump, terror: For himself and for his audience, Drew wants to provide something else. Metals Pleasure, her latest, sells 5,600 units in that same time – a compulsion drives the band back together. "We have new management getting paid banana peels because we can't afford bananas."Īnd yet, despite knowing the limitations of a rock band in 2017, the peak time of digital downloads, an era when audiences aren't getting behind even their most beloved performers making intimate, accessible records – Feist sold 37,000 units in Canada in the first six weeks of her previous album, "We're a middle-class band with upper-class needs and a lower-class bank account," Drew says. "We all got our wants and our desires and our pride."įrom a financial and logistical perspective, running a band with (at least) 10 artists, two married, three with children, is a challenge. "There still seemed to be some unfinished business as far as some meaningful tracks," says Canning, who's made three solo albums, written film scores and DJs vinyl when he's not on tour, ideally getting paid that same night. "I didn't feel like we could sit on the sideline," he says.īrendan Canning, the band's 47-year-old bassist, is ready. It could have been BSS that night, or its audience. The two bands have played the same bills. The band is in the fourth year of its hiatus when a terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris at the Eagles of Death Metal show kills 89 people. Hug of Thunder, BSS's rich, absorbing new album, and it takes a too-familiar occurrence to get him to that point. He has a darker side, of course, but when he's at his best …" "He brings out the best in people, he makes you feel loved and there's nothing artificial about it. "When Kevin is at his best, there's nothing like him," says Charles Spearin, Drew's longest-serving bandmate. "It's my curse."ĭrew – who sports a beard, has a herniated disc in his back and is 40 – is also temperamental, depressive, funny and at the centre of attention. "I don't buy neighbourhoods, I build them," says the BSS member, but also the co-founder of Arts & Crafts, the band's label. Walking around the area with Drew in April, he laments not investing in real estate. It's the group that made Toronto sexy while Drake was still a student at In 2014, when Vogue magazine calls Toronto's West Queen West the world's second-coolest neighbourhood, some of that is because it's where Broken Social Scene partied in 1994. Because all of the BSS members make their own music – often together – and while some break out and some falter, the band is less like SNL and more like NBC, the network umbrella they all live under. Saturday Night Live, its most popular members having departed to make their own solo stabs at fame. The band, Broken Social Scene, hasn't been together onstage with new music in seven years and there's a double-album worth of reasons why. "Everyone has their own OCD ways of how they need to be treated, but these are the moments that get us together onstage." "I'm sitting there with all the kids, and no one knows who we are, no one cares, and I'm thinking: 'This is what we do,'" Drew says. There he is, sitting in the park with his friends, including musicians Leslie Feist, James Shaw and Emily Haines, drinking wine. One night in May, on the west side of Toronto, Kevin Drew is reminded of a feeling his band had back in 2002. ![]()
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