Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew on Making a Band of Friends Last Forever
An all-encompassing interview about the Canadian collective’s first new album in nearly a decade—and why their music means so much to me.
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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