Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew on Making a Band of Friends Last Forever

The first concert I went to after getting let go by Pitchfork two years ago was a Kevin Drew solo show. It was a coincidence, but it felt cosmically apropos. Like many others, I became a fan of Drew’s sprawling band Broken Social Scene after reading Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber’s rave review of their breakthrough 2002 album You Forgot It in People. It was a potent, early example of the website’s taste-making powers, elevating both the band and the publication in the name of triumphantly heartfelt indie rock.

By the time of the group’s next record, 2005’s Broken Social Scene, I was the Pitchfork writer named Ryan tasked to write about it. I still remember the shared studio apartment in Manhattan where I tapped out that review on a chunky Dell laptop. I loved the album’s careening ambition, and it became one of the first Best New Music write-ups I ever published. The review didn’t change the band’s life like the famous You Forgot It in People one, but it changed mine. It gave me confidence.

From there, I was unofficially, happily put on the BSS beat, writing about projects by the group’s members, including Feist, Metric, and Stars. I interviewed Drew a handful of times over the years too. Amid a world of sheepish mumblers trying to project coolness, he was always gregarious and open. It was easy to see why this guy was the de facto leader of a band with what seemed like a hundred members. He was fun to be around.

That longtime connection with the band’s music brought me to Drew’s show at Brooklyn’s Public Records on January 20, 2024, mere days after I lost my job alongside many of my colleagues and friends. News of the Pitchfork layoffs was fresh that night, and Drew lamented it in the middle of the show, in between songs. When he brought the topic up on stage, a few jerks cheered, and he wasn’t having it. He talked about how much the site altered his trajectory, how its losses would hurt everyone who cares deeply about music. He didn’t know I was there, but it felt like he was talking directly to me. In the dim of the crowd, I teared up and wobbled. My wife grabbed my arm.

I’m not the guy who tries to talk to the band after the show, but after that show, I needed to thank Drew for what he said. He saw me and hugged me. He graciously introduced me to his friend, the actor Busy Philipps, who expressed her sympathies about my sudden lack of employment. He took my wife and I up to the afterparty, bought us drinks, and hung out with us for a while. When I needed it most, again, he gave me confidence.

Since then, he’s checked in with me from time to time, and we’ve met up when he’s in New York. We’re friendly. Last year, at a showing of the Broken Social Scene documentary It’s All Gonna Break, he gifted me a stuffed octopus in front of the sold-out crowd (much to my, and everyone else’s, bemusement). After the screening, he told me about a new Broken Social Scene album he was finishing up. It was to be their first record since 2017’s Hug of Thunder, and the first one helmed by mad-scientist producer David Newfeld, aka Newf—who corralled the sounds on You Forgot It in People and Broken Social Scene—in more than 20 years. As we walked the rainy sidewalks of Williamsburg that night, he offered me a preview of a new song by singing it directly into my right ear.

That album, Remember the Humans, is now here. At a time of widespread inhumanity and corrosiveness, it’s a balm—the sound of friends who’ve known each other for decades working toward a common goal. The hallmarks of a Broken Social Scene album are there: the heartache, the horns, the hummable swirl of it all. There’s mystery too, lingering in the spaces between the notes. There are songs that eulogize teenage selves. There are songs that eulogize parents: Both Drew and Newfeld lost their mothers during the album’s creation over the last few years. Amid the grief, there is joy and relief, because there has to be.

“I’m a dyslexic ADHD kid that is turning 50 this year who somehow keeps going,” Drew tells me at one point during our lengthy video call, talking about the unlikeliness of his career with characteristic self-deprecating charm. He’s talking from the house outside of Toronto that he shares with his fiancée, the film producer and musician Rachel McLean. He’s in the kitchen, and every once and a while he steps away to check on a sauce that’s bubbling on the stove. As usual, he has a lot to say. As usual, I’m listening closely.

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I selfishly want to start with one of my favorites from the new album, “This Briefest Kiss,” which is this shadowy, extended R&B jam that draws you in with a wordless intro that goes on for two-and-a-half minutes. It’s got touches of New Orleans jazz and is not quite like any other Broken Social Scene song I can think of. 

Kevin Drew: I love that one too. “Briefest Kiss” takes time, and time is something that people don’t have, because they’re constantly getting programmed to not have time. That track was originally nine minutes and 30 seconds long, and I kept saying, “Let the whole song be on it.” It ended up being six minutes because we have to think about vinyl. We kept trying not to make this a double vinyl, just in terms of how hard it is financially right now for everyone, we didn’t want to turn around and have a $65 record. Even for record stores, we thought having a single vinyl might boost the greater good for everyone who’s selling the records too. So we put this all in one vinyl, and it works. It sounds punchy. It’s maybe a little quieter than a remaster of the Cure’s Disintegration—which was one of the first records that taught me about time and space before a vocal arrives—but it all comes together.

Clearly, we’re not a band that gets on mainstream radio because, 1) we don’t have the money to do it, and 2) ... actually, I don’t know what number two would be. In a just world, I wish we had some of our music on there, but we remained in the middle-class, independent zone. We stayed with the people who worked with us. We’ve always had a glass ceiling, but I think that glass ceiling has helped support the music to be better, because you know you don’t have to chase anything. It allows you to fall back into a world where you don’t have anything to lose. You’re making music for someone who’s choosing to listen to it, not for someone whose subconscious has been shopping and driving and watching television, and they keep hearing this song, and then eventually they go, What is this? It gives you a little more freedom to just say, Fuck it, let’s have a three-minute intro to this song.

Broken Social Scene never had a huge chart smash, but a lot of the band’s songs have reached many millions of people over time. I was just looking at Spotify to see which of your tracks are the biggest on there right now… 

What are they?

“Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” has the most plays, more than 60 million. 

Wow.

And Yeule’s cover of the song, which was featured in director Jane Schoenbrun’s haunting 2024 trans allegory I Saw the TV Glow, has nearly as many streams, too.

When that film came out, the trans community found safety in “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl.” You can’t ask for that kind of recognition. It’s a human recognition, and it’s one where you have to immediately become protective towards those who are part of the extended family that listens to your music. It was so heartwarming at a time when we were coming out of the pandemic, when there was so much derisiveness about identity and anger toward queer kids, and suddenly they’re saying, This song speaks to me.

Why do you think Broken Social Scene’s music resonates with the queer community so much?

We make music for the outsiders, we truly do. Our message is always: Be who you are, and we will continue to protect and support you, because the systems are built to try to change you. That is our music.

And, well, I was also in love with a man for years. I wrote “I’m Still Your Fag” [from You Forgot It in People] about him—that’s a love song about a love affair I had with a man. I was very bisexual in high school, until I met my ex-wife, and then I just went off on my path of women. But I was experimenting with boys and girls. I mean, I was prom queen.

What do you mean you were prom queen?

I was fucking prom queen! My friend Joris Jarsky and I were prom king and queen. I had a beautiful dress. I looked fantastic, and I won prom queen. They didn’t want to give it to me. But I had 25 more votes than the lovely lady they tried to give it to, and she went to the bathroom at the wrong time, and the whole crowd was like, You know it’s Kevin. And I got it. I’ll send you the photo. 

I also wanted to bring “Anthems” up because looking back at teenagedom has become an unofficial theme for Broken Social Scene. There are a few songs that follow in that on this new album, like “Hey Amanda” and “Only the Good I Keep.” How do you explain that theme?

The glue of this band is that most of us were teenagers when we first knew each other. I met Amy Millan at camp when I was 13 years old. I met Brendan Canning when I was 18. Emily Haines came up to me in high school when I was 14 and asked if I would do sound for her one-act play, which was called Escalator Over the Hill and based on a record that her father Paul, who was a very well-respected poet, made with [avant-garde jazz composer] Carla Bley. Emily asked me because she heard that I was into Dinosaur Jr., and she was looking for the ones that listen to music outside of the mainstream.

Then you go through the process of hardening and losing friends. You go through the process of becoming alcoholics. You get your heart broken. You have this bond of growing together and growing apart. So many people used music to help describe their identity in their youth, and then here you are, much older, using music to help remind you of what your identity was back then. Youth exists in our band because we fucking knew each other in high school, or even grade school. The map was written.

Speaking of Emily Haines, I was a little surprised she’s not on this new album at all.

Well, Emily and Amy came in and did this beautiful—and also kind of bizarre—little duet together, but we had so much music. Emily was also really working hard in the background on getting this tour with Metric, Stars, and Broken Social Scene to happen, so I felt like she was a part of it. And the history and the blood of Haines with us is so deep—probably the deepest out of all the female singers—that it was fine.

And in a way, Hannah [Georgas] filled that role with “Only the Good I Keep,” where she sings about listening to Julie Doiron and Smashing Pumpkins, and having a bush party as a teenager. Emily always told me throughout the history of Social Scene: Find others, get others, bring others in. A lot of us don’t see each other much anymore, so your main concern when you’re doing a Social Scene record is not, Are they going to be on the album? It’s just, How are they doing? Are they OK? If they’re busy and they’re good, that’s enough.

Talking about those formative teenage years brings to mind something Leslie Feist once told me in an interview years ago that has stuck with me ever since. She was talking about going through a period of uncertainty about her music career and she said, “It was about wanting to make sure I was making another record because I needed to do it and not because it’s just what I’ve done so far. I didn’t want to think that 15-year-old me got to decide what I’ll do for the rest of my life because she just happened to be in a punk band.” 

I’ve thought about that a lot as someone in their 40s who wanted to write about music since I was in high school. As someone who also had this idea of being a musician when you were young, what makes you still want to do it now that you’re almost 50?

The people. I mean, I went to Prince Edward Island in 2024 and played a solo show for 14 people. Fourteen fucking people. I could have said, What am I doing with my life? It’s all over—I had it, I lost it. But I had a blast at that show. 

Life is a state of mind, and this is what I know how to do: I know how to play music with big groups of people. I know how to make it about others besides myself. And my success is with Social Scene, it’s not on my own. In music, what’s kept me real are the people that I’ve been doing this with since I was 20 years old. Human spirit matters, and knowing what you’re good at matters, and I’m good at this. I’m not incredible at it, but I’m good. This is where I want to be.

Feist’s ballad on this album, “What Happens Now,” is definitely an emotional high point. It pinpoints this sense of existential longing that makes me cry whenever I listen to it.

Once we were done with the record, every time that song came on, I was very emotional around it. I was also very proud that it wasn’t a song that’s like, Hey everybody, look, Leslie’s still with us! It was more directed toward the listener, in the pockets of all those shadows that we live with.

Leslie showed up because she was going through a bunch of old recordings and found one of her and Brendan doing that song and she went, “I know you’re working on something, what do you think of this?” The lyrical idea of “what happens now, what happens next?” hit very hard. So she properly recorded it and sent it to Newf and just said, “Here you go.” There’s a point where Newf took her vocal and put it over this crazy bridge that was supposed to be instrumental. I wrote Newf and went, “I don’t think Leslie’s gonna like that you moved her vocals.” And she wrote back, “I love it.”

It speaks to the trust everyone has in Newf as a producer, since he’s been in the band’s orbit from the beginning. How would you describe his role on this album?

He did so much. He played all over it, he wrote, he produced, he mixed, he met us the same way that we met him. He really impressed me with how he was a team player and the driver of this album. Someone said to me, “I guess you’re the driver of the car.” Are you fucking kidding me? I was sitting in the backseat, I was running behind it, I was trying to get in the passenger seat! 

When his mother died so freshly after my mother died, I realized he was going to put some of his grief into this album. I remember one point when my partner Rachel and I were working on something with him in the studio after his mom died, and he had this little keychain thing with a kaleidoscope of his mom—they had made them together. We could see him in the control room through the glass, and he just kept picking up this little kaleidoscope that he had of his mom, and Rachel just turned me with tears in her eyes. I looked at her and said, “This is what we’re doing. We’re here with so many.” 

By the time we were done, Brendan lost his mother. Evan [Cranley] lost both his parents when we made Hug of Thunder. Ariel [Engle]’s father died. Sam Goldberg’s father died. Andrew [Whiteman]’s father died. People say, “Why did it take nine years for you guys to make a record?” Well, at the end of the day, we wanted our parents to live a little longer.

That idea of remembrance especially comes through on the song “And I Think of You.” 

That was the one where I saw Newf just go into his grief.

You sing that one, and it sounds like a tribute to your mother, with a lyrical specificity that is rare for a Social Scene song. What were you thinking about when you made it?

We weren’t thinking. Whenever I write lyrics down, it doesn’t make it on a Social Scene record. That was kind of a one-take, not-thought-out vocal that went down. I always don’t know what’s going to happen until my subconscious tells me when I listen back to the music. There’s something about the subconscious and how it writes your songs for you, and then you figure out where you’re at in life when you listen back. I can’t speak for the other writers, but that is my style. 

I understand longing, and my mother’s death really took that to the next level of wanting to have her still be here. Newf gravitated towards that, because he had just lost his mom too. Out of all the lyrics on this album, his favorite is from that song: “I think of you when I’m living my life”—I don’t know how much simpler you could break it down. I’m not an intellectual, and I’m not someone that can gather vocabulary in an incredible way. I have poets like Leslie and Ariel and Andrew and Hannah, whose lyrics are just so genius. I stumble into my lyrics most of the time.

That said, I wasn’t writing that song for my mom, though I definitely mentioned her. I was writing it for those who just aren’t here anymore—even friends that are still alive. I thought it would be nice to have a song that represents this notion we all know: Hey, was just thinking of you, how are you? Sometimes thinking of someone can haunt you so deeply it holds you back from moving forward, and the ending of that tune, the way we ended up designing it, with myself screaming out, “And I think of you all of the time”—that’s just pain. 

That part made Brendan Canning uncomfortable, because it sounds too personal. You’re right that I don’t do that with Social Scene. There were people in the band that thought, Oh, maybe we don’t put that one on there. But they eventually realized it was a song that Newf put his grief into. And once Newf was done with it, there wasn’t another song like it. All he had to do was turn my vocal down a little bit for Canning to go, OK; Brendan just didn’t want it to be like Bono. So Newf took Canning’s note and made my vocal sound like it’s trying to get out from underneath so much hurt. The music’s getting louder, and I’m trying to get above the band. The way he mixed that song was quite brilliant.

I wanted to ask you one more question about your mom’s passing. I’m very close with my own mom, who is doing well but is also getting older, like all of us. Do you have any wisdom to share as someone who’s been through that experience?

Ryan, look at me: press record. Do what we’re doing right now with your mom, because there’s going to be a day when she’s not going to be here. By the time I realized I should have pressed record, I thought, Why didn’t I do this earlier? You keep thinking you’re gonna have time. You don’t. Do it now. And you’ll have that forever. Ryan, you interview so many people—have you interviewed your mom? It will probably be your favorite interview ever.

You mentioned that your fiancée, Rachel, was in the studio with you. Is she on the album?

She is. She’s a drummer who has her own great band, Natural Light, and we’ve actually started our own project together too. Everyone loves her, and we’ve always embraced all the partners in this band. Anytime anybody wants to sing or play a horn or a guitar or a bass, it’s something that we do. We have this welcome mat that’s there to help amid a very unhealthy lifestyle. The main point is: Don’t stand sidestage and just watch if you don’t have to. You can be involved.

You were married before, during the early days of Social Scene. What have you learned about love since that experience?

I’ve learned that loyalty is irreplaceable. I’ve learned that if you have true love, there’s a part of you looking to destroy it. I’ve learned that protection is not a marketing campaign. And I’ve learned that if you don’t respect the truth that’s in front of you, you fall very hard.

I’ve always carried the shame of not being able to be a great partner to someone. If you’re single, or if you have numerous partners, no one looks at that as a positive way of education, or that you just aren’t part of that system of forever. But I’ve always been so intrigued by protection and learning from others, it’s what’s kept me moving in and out of relationships throughout my life. At times it’s fallen into a lot of personal pain, where you start to write your story based on a stereotype of tragedy. But I look back now and see myself where I am today because of the ones I shared my heartbeats with. I don’t look at it as something that didn’t work out. I look at it as a life that I’m living.

I ask because of another song you sing on this album, “Parking Lot Dreams,” which sounds like it’s coming out of that place of loyalty and protection.

I wrote that for Rachel and I. It’s about that connection: “We’ve got all of this and parking lots that dream of you and I.” The hardest thing to do right now is to stay together with someone. Whenever you have war, distrust, and uncertainty, it invades your bedroom. My ex-wife once said, “George W. Bush broke up our relationship.” There’s a brilliance to that, because you get so engulfed in the war of what is now, because we have to look at the others that are suffering from it, who are actually in it—getting killed, getting annihilated, getting pushed aside. It all impacts your place of peace, because, in empathy, you want to try to fix things. What petitions can I sign? What protests can I go to? What money can I donate? Meanwhile, it doesn’t stop. It just keeps happening, and it finds you getting pulled apart through the pain that you can’t fix.

Rachel taught me that so much of what’s happening now is put upon the individual to fix the system, but the system that’s broken needs to be fixed by other systems. At the same time, individuals can be a part of that reconstruction. That’s the conversation of streaming right there—what are we supporting that produces weapons? Is it actually everything? Is it our appliances, our cars, our shoes, our music, our entertainment? How deep does this go? It goes everywhere now.

Where do you stand on the whole debate about artists taking their music off Spotify?

As a band, we had the convo and decided to stay on Spotify because we want to have our music be heard, because we narcissistically believe that we’ll make a tiny little ripple in helping people get through these hard times. That’s our decision to make, and we have to live with it. Morals are so important, yet you have to understand your own personal mission. This is the jukebox that was given to us, we didn’t choose it. I might be called out for my own hypocrisy and wrongdoing, and people might say, “Oh, you’re such a community person, but yet you do this.” But you make a decision and then you balance it out in a way where you can believe in your heart that you’re doing good by working within a system that’s broken. 

I have friends of mine that are so independent, who are pulling their music. I understand why Godspeed pulled their music, because their whole fucking brand was not to be a part of that in the first place. But then I look up and see if Fugazi is on Spotify, and they are. It’s a moral conundrum. A lot of what we protest is to what end? But if you stop the protest, then what do you actually stand for? I will tell you that this next project I’m doing with Rachel, I don’t think you’re going to see us anywhere except in that Bandcamp zone. We’re going to make it very organic and analog, and that will be our protest.

There’s a loop that’s going to happen. It’s going to come around. Things are going to break. We know that. It’s historically been proven time and time again, and we’re just in that period where it’s not broken yet. But it will. How far are we going to go before, with all that we’re consuming, with all the ways that we communicate, with social media, with all these things, it will implode? It has to. I want to be involved in the balance of someone’s pain, and I’m going to use the tools that are given to me—even if there’s blood on the hands of those tools—to try to help with that pain.