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What Once Was (Almost) Broken Is Now Whole Again

By John Norris

There has been no shortage of excellent albums already this year, and 2010 is only half over.  But no return – hey, call it a comeback – was a greater cause for celebration than the May arrival of Forgiveness Rock Record the first full length in five years from the sprawling Toronto collective Broken Social Scene. As that title suggests (actually it refers to a few things, as you will see below) a lot has happened over the years within the far flung BSS diaspora, including relationships, breakups and so many spin off bands and solo careers that we’ve lost count, and some interpersonal fence mending had to be done before there could ever be a new BSS album. But with the addition of a couple of new full time members, a new core lineup of seven emerged, and set about working throughout ’09 with a new producer, John McEntire (The Sea and Cake) to create what could pretty fairly be argued is, start to finish, the finest BSS record to date. And there’s even guests appearances from the stellar alumnae of Leslie Feist, Emily Haines, and Amy Millan. Broken Social Scene are spending much of the summer touring Europe and Asia – they’ll be back here in late August – but I managed to spend some time with two core members of the collective, Kevin Drew and Charlie Spearin, for this week’s Noisemakers on Noisevox. Go to NVTV to watch the entire interview, or check out some of our conversation right here.      

JOHN NORRIS: Does this feel like a comeback, in a sense?

CHARLES SPEARIN: A little bit. I mean it is a new record and we have been working the record, but we have been working the record and touring together pretty much the whole time.

KEVIN DREW: There was a couple of years off for you for sure, and for Andrew (Whiteman).

SPEARIN: Yeah but all close communication the whole time, it wasn’t like disappearing for five years.

NORRIS: And yet you guys have said that back in ’06 that it anybody’s guess whether there would be another album.

SPEARIN:  I think what happened is what needed to happen. Everybody needed to go their own direction, make a decision, whether it was put out a solo record, or Andrew put out his two Apostle of Hustle records. Everybody kind of needed to have their own time, and then when everybody got back together, we wanted to be together again. It felt like a fresh start. But yeah it’s true in 2006, we were kind of fed up with the whole process.

DREW:  Yeah there were strains and the time, we needed some time.

SPEARIN: I mean being in a collective you are constantly compromising your ideas, to let other people’s ideas in. And it’s difficult to have that much effort put in constantly and have to compromise.

NORRIS: And Kevin you’ve pointed out that a lot of BSS artists have their own things, and in some cases things that have become their full time projects and there’s no way that you can sort of expect that when you say ‘hey we’re doing a new record’, that everyone just shows up.

DREW: Yeah it’s hard to ask too. It gets harder and harder to ask the guys because they’re so busy and doing so well on their own and when we started there wasn’t all these managers and different labels and things like that so it can be difficult to get on the same page, but very very rewarding when it happens. And in terms of the old school, Collett and Stars and Feist and James and Emily, we weren’t too sure if they were gonna be on this album.

NORRIS: And you were quite fine proceeding without them? Sam Goldberg had come on board at that point?

SPEARIN: Yeah Sammy Goldberg and Lisa Lobsinger who’d been touring with us for five years, and she’s done a great job and we’re thrilled to have her as a part of the band now.

NORRIS: But you’ve also said that one of the good things about getting those old school members to come in and at least guest on the new album is that you weren’t going to have to answer questions ‘why’ weren’t they included.

DREW: Yeah I was hoping that they would come around, I thought just for the basic idea of the history, like why leave now? And also thinking about the listeners, just over all the years of listening to us, and just what torture it was to have to answer those questions again and again. But the main thing of course was just what they actually put into it. The all sprinkle a little bit of their magic in there.

SPEARIN:  And it was really nice that they all wanted to, even still. It’s not like anybody left the band with any bad feelings. They may have had success in other projects and not had as much time for the band but everybody still, there’s a love and friendships and everybody understands that and wants to come back when they can.

NORRIS: So when people hear the word ‘forgiveness’ in the title of course many will think it refers to intra-band forgiveness, the reconciling of friendships, “Sentimenal X’s” as the song says…how and when did that album title come along?

SPEARIN: During the process it came up then we kind of put it away for a while. But it kept coming back.

DREW:  Yeah we couldn’t escape it. Sam Prekop (The Sea and Cake), God bless him, we went out to dinner with him and he said ‘how’s the record going, what’s it sound like’? And I said “It sounds like a forgiveness rock record”. He just looked at me and said “That’s the title of your album”. So it stuck in our heads since that dinner, Charlie and Brendan and I.

SPEARIN: In a way I find the artwork sort of ties it together. Sort of like forgiveness blasting forth through all the people and blood red seas there’s a real sense of possibility.

DREW: And for me in the past five years I’ve realized it’s the most freeing emotion you can have. We’ve said before that everybody has something that they wish they were forgiven for and everybody has something to forgive.

NORRIS:  I think it was Brendan or Andrew who recently in something took it to a more sort of global level and referred to the importance of forgiveness in a political, social context.

DREW: That’s definitely what we were commenting on too. Because we were in America, down in Chicago you know only months after Obama was elected we were sensing everything that was going around. And when we were making this record a serious sense of limbo was coming over a lot of the people that we were speaking to and you could just sense it in everything that was going on. It was like you can’t really make a change even if you want to, it was as though nothing cold be done to move forward. Especially since we consider ourselves now a band for the people, a self-help experience, we want our shows to have a church gathering feel, a gospel sort of affair.

SPEARIN:  There’s a fear of socialism in America. But we’re Canadian, we don’t have that same fear. That’s sort of the essence of what we’re trying to do, is to get people together and be a band for people. And forgiveness is a way of sort of starting fresh and not blaming and pointing fingers and there is so much of that in politics not just in Canada and the States but everywhere.

DREW: And if you look at our band, or the intertwinings of our band, it’s the reason we’re all still here. We’re in an extremely healthy place. And we all get along, and some people are tighter than others, but there is a sense of family because we have gone through a lot together we have had the ups and  downs and we’ve pulled through.

NORRIS: Damian from Fucked Up, who’s of course Canadian, came out recently and had some things to say about the Arizona immigration law and back during the election Arcade Fire were pretty outspoken in favor of Obama, although I guess the Butlers are American by birth. But they got some flack for inserting themselves into the US election. Are you ever reluctant to voice an opinion on what is going on in this country? 

DREW: I find it’s a puzzle that’s difficult to speak about at times. I very much made sure that, I wanted to embrace all the things that happened in the last ten years. But I also wanted to go to the sides. To both sides of everything. I think on this record you can see there’s a lot of dark topics that we’re speaking about for it being such a  positive sounding album. You have to really choose your battles, choose your causes. And some times when we have lightly done that it’s come back and hit us in the face. But I feel a real kinship with this country. I mean we’ve done really well here and we did well at a time when you guys were suffering so badly. And I will never forget that - how much people here embraced us.

SPEARIN:  And America had a bad image for a while, there was a kind of “fuck the States” thing going on and we weren’t a part of that. And we tour in the States a lot and there’s so many good people in this country but there’s no ‘one’ America, everybody is different, everyone has different attitudes. You can’t generalize about America very easily.  And that’s where we are at. It’s about people you know? Yeah there’s Republicans and Democrats, but ultimately everyone wants to be happy and everybody wants to do the right thing. So you have to treat it with respect and find out what people really want or what they are afraid of. And just accept people as human beings.