Broken Social Scene’s new album, Remember the Humans, urges you to think of music in organic terms. The title of the Canadian collective’s first album in nearly a decade came from Charles Spearin, who initially framed it as a joke: it sounds like the AI version of their seminal 2002 LP You Forgot It in People. The multi-instrumentalist, who helped bring the record’s magnetic swell of ideas into their final form alongside Kevin Drew and David Newfeld (the producer behind that album and its self-titled 2005 follow-up), discusses some of the inspirations behind it with a similarly self-aware cheekiness: they are scientific metaphors for the amorphous fluidity of Broken Social Scene’s internal structure, but they’re also just a way of saying their return is nothing but a natural process, a result of old friends reorienting themselves around the present moment. The songs get lost in the haze of personal memory, eulogize individual people, and put relationships under the microscope, but the group still has a unique way of reveling in abstraction: finding relief from the burden of identity and emotional truth in every cliche. It’s a joyously universal kind of homecoming.
We caught up with Broken Social Scene’s Charles Spearin to talk about compromise, mycorrhizal networks, photosynthesis, and other inspirations behind their new album, Remember the Humans.
Migration patterns and critical mass
It’s been almost 10 years since our last real album, and the common question is, “Why now? What has happened?” My feeling is it’s not really so much a decision, but kind of a tipping point. There was a threshold that got crossed. Everybody was wanting to do it, and there’s this time in a migration, like a bird migration, where all the birds reach a critical mass before they cross a big body of water, whether it’s geese or warblers or whatever. There’s this park in Ohio called McGee Marsh, and all the birds congregate there in the early spring. They’re there right now, I’m sure. And then something happens where they all move together, and it’s not one decision. It’s this collective unconscious that pushes them all together, and they fly across to Point Pelee National Park in Ontario, and they all arrive en masse over a few weeks. It’s a spectacular moment.
I feel like with Broken Social Scene, to use this metaphor, there was just some kind of percolating energy. In the music business, when you’ve been in it for a long time, there’s a tour cycle where you write music, record music, release the music, tour and tour, and then you take a break to regroup. There’s a seasonal cycle, and for us, it’s a little bit longer, but I feel like the daylight has gotten to be just the right length, and we’re all ready to move. All of this is just to say that it’s hard to put your finger on why we made an album now; there was just something collective that pulled us together. If you watch a starling murmuration, all the birds in the sky, they make these. You don’t know if there’s a leader or what’s going on up there, but there’s this collective dance that appears as a single unit. I like to think of us like that. I don’t know if it’s true, but that’s what I like to think about.
You said it’s hard to pinpoint why, but what would you point to as the moment where you felt that collective energy rising back up?
For me, personally, there was a sense of vision. We got together to write a bunch of music, just to see what happens. We all got together at Kevin’s house out in the country, and I rented a bunch of recording equipment and brought my recording equipment. The idea was just to jam and record all of it and see what’s going on, so we spent days just coming up with ideas. Listening back through it all, I would go back and highlight some of the moments that I thought were interesting and put them all into a folder. And then there was this excitement that came from that. It’s like, “Oh, that part’s really good right there. That’s really good, and maybe it could connect with that.” So it was like all these kinds of birds or fish, whatever migratory thing coming together, like, “I feel like we’ve actually got something here. I think it’s time to move.” All these individual decisions came together to turn into motion.
Compromise
That’s always an overarching theme with a band like Broken Social Scene. What was it like navigating it this time around? Was it especially important, or something to avoid?
Compromise has always been one of the defining characteristics of the band. I have to be careful saying that, because compromise has two different meanings. You don’t have enough money, or you don’t have enough time, so the project gets compromised, and it becomes worse than it should be. Or if you’re building a ship, and then it smashes into an iceberg, then the integrity of the ship is compromised. There’s that meaning of the word, and that’s more like there’s some concession being given. But with Broken Social Scene, I almost picture it like a Venn diagram with all the different people in the band and all their different tastes. They all overlap in some way, but we don’t all like the same thing exactly. So there’s this constant sense of pushing and pulling and almost campaigning with other members of the band, saying, “I really like this idea, but this person doesn’t like it so much, can you help me pull this one forward?” Artistic compromise is valid and real and can create something that I think is bigger than any individual idea.
That’s what I love about Broken Social Scene: we tend to create things that nobody in the band really likes entirely, but everybody understands that it’s a bigger picture, so our tastes get pulled and stretched into shapes. We end up with something that’s wholly unique and not a product of any one of us. It’s very different from a singer-songwriter who has a vision for their song. When we write music together, we always leave space for other musicians to come in, as in, we’ll just leave an X there, and we don’t know what that X is gonna be. Evan Cranley’s gonna come in, and he’ll write some trombone parts, but we’re gonna leave that space for that to happen. We’re continually, intentionally leaving space for each other, even though all of us have lots of ideas all the time. That kind of compromise I think is extremely healthy, but difficult. It’s why we take long breaks, because all of us have artistic vision, so all of us go out and release albums on our own. But I think we’re better as a group than we are as individuals.
Is there an example that comes to mind of either you ceding space to someone else’s understanding of a vision of a song, or maybe someone else leaving space for your idea to flourish at any point on the record?
Nothing jumps to mind, because there was so much of it. All of the stages for us are quite blurry – the writing and the recording and the mixing, they all blur from one to the next. It’s not like we can close one chapter and then open the next chapter. But Dave Newfeld and Kevin Drew and I were the three who saw this album to the finish line. And three is a good number to work things out. If it was all of us in the room together, it would be really, really challenging. But Kevin definitely had his vision of the record, and I had – maybe not a vision of the whole record, but I had strong attachments to certain ideas that weren’t maybe fitting into his vision. And then Dave Newefeld also loved certain aspects and didn’t want to let go of these, so we had a ton of discussions about how the record should be as a whole, how we want to make sure that everybody is represented. And we argued quite a bit, but I feel like that strengthens you and makes you a better person in a way. But all of us definitely had to let go of some attachments. There were musical motifs and things that I loved that didn’t make it onto this record, and the same is true for everybody else in this band.
Collectively, do you feel like there was less of an impulse to pull back with this record, in terms of layers of ideas and instrumentation?
Yeah. There were several surprises for us in the making of this record. There were so many people involved. For example, Lisa Lobsinger and Leslie Feist, they came to us with songs that were half-written or three-quarters written out of the blue, and said, “Hey, this is a song that I’ve been trying to make into a thing for a long time.” Maybe this could be a Broken Social Scene song, maybe we could work with this. Those were wonderful opportunities, because we’re in our own little world for a while, and then all of a sudden, this semi-formed idea land, and we all get excited about it and talk about how we can reshape it, or play with it, or honor the core of it, but still allow it to represent a collective rather than an individual. In that sense, these gifts from other musicians really broaden the spectrum of sort of color on the record. I think if you listen to Lisa sing her song, ‘Relief’, and Leslie’s song, ‘What Happens Next’, they don’t quite match the rest of the album so perfectly, and I think that’s terrific. It’s more like a spectrum of music rather than an identity in music, and I love that. We had to be constantly pushing and pulling with this notion of identity versus spectrum.
Care Bears
It was funny, Kevin and I were working together at Kevin’s house out in the country. I had my computer and my little studio set up there. It wasn’t a complete studio like Dave Neufeld’s studio, which was half an hour drive away. So Kevin and I would work a little bit at his place, and then we would send files back and forth to Dave Neufeld at his studio. One time we were working in the afternoon, and Kevin excitedly comes up the stairs, to where the computer is set up, and I’m working away on something, and he puts down this giant cardboard box on the floor, and he’s just like, “It’s here!” [laughs] And then he opened the box, and he pulled out all these Care Bear stuffies, a whole row. He said, “I think this is it, I think I got the complete collection.” And then he lined them up along the back of the couch, so that they’re all staring at us, so to speak, the whole time. Kevin is just a strange, wonderful person. He just is full of surprises. For the rest of the whole mixing session, we’d look over and there would be this row of Care Bears looking at us.
Care Bears is not my generation of television. I was born in 1972, so I was pre-Care Bears. My kids were born in the early 2000s, so they’re post-Care Bears. I’ve seen the Care Bears show a couple times, and I get the gist of it. It’s a bunch of different animals with different personalities, and then they come together and do the Care Bear stare and solve all the problems of the world. I just can picture them there: some of them are grumpy, some of them are shy, some of them are goofy, but they’re all valid in their own way. Each bear is distinct, but their differences don’t create tension, they cover a whole wide range of emotions. Combined, they have a broader spectrum of caring, and maybe I’m going too far with this metaphor, but I do feel like all the people in the band are caring people, and when we all get together, the spectrum of – our love, maybe, to be a little cheesy – is broader and more intense.
If you listen to the lyrics of the songs, and you listen to the moods of the songs, they touch on real problems. They touch on addiction, suicide, loss, doubt, aging, the fear of irrelevance. There’s all these really complicated, heavy subjects in these songs. The emotion is real, and if you think of emotions as a kind of a projectable force, then all of us coming together, it’s like we’re trying to give rays of giving a fuck. Like, “We give a fuck, so hear us out.”
Photosynthesis
All of us, as band members, have been playing music for a long time, we’ve played a lot of shows. A lot of the people in the band, even in high school, were in theater programs and things like this, and we all have this kind of applause addiction where we need to be validated through an audience. I wish it wasn’t true. I feel like we should be altruistic in our music and make the music live its own complete life, but the fact is that we want people to like it, and we want people to tell us that they like it. So the photosynthesis analogy in this is the sunlight of an audience – to play for an audience, is such a nourishing force. It turns into energy, just like photosynthesis turns sunlight into energy for the plant. I feel like playing for an audience – or not even live situations, but having people listen to your music and respond to it, is energizing. It makes us feel relevant and useful, and that’s a big reason why we do things. Unheard music is like a flower in a dark closet. It dies. There’s no music there if nobody hears it. I feel so much gratitude for the attention that we get for this band.
Maybe this idea ties back to compromise, in terms of being one of the reasons you really wouldn’t want to make concessions when it comes to the live show.
As we’re preparing for this tour coming up and learning how to play these songs live, because a lot of this music that we recorded had overdubs and was done over long periods of time, we’re having to reinvent all these songs, which is not unusual for us. We’ve been getting together at the rehearsal space, and it’s really exciting when it works because these songs are really feeling good. The compromise doesn’t feel like compromise at this point. It feels like we all want the same thing, and it feels more like true collaboration. Everybody’s adding their part to this giant piece of music. We’re all getting the feeling in our chest, and we’re excited to play it live, so that other people might feel it in their chest as well. It’s a good feeling right now. Of course, when we’re rehearsing and it doesn’t sound so good and some parts are wrong or missing, then it’s deflating. That’s part of the job, too; there is a lot of getting through the frustration of moments that don’t work. But we all know where we’re headed, and we know that these songs are gonna sound good live.
Mycorrhizal networks
I’m sure we can get pretty abstract with it, but it also more directly made me think of the song ‘Life Within the Ground’.
There is a link there, yeah. Mycorrhizal networks are basically how trees communicate with each other, through systems of fungus. There is a book called The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, and it’s a very compelling book about how trees communicate with each other. I was trying to think of a metaphor for all of the underground help that we get as a band. People who don’t get appreciated so much, but are so essential to the health and nutrients of us. At this point, Broken Social Scene is like an old-growth forest. We’ve been around for a long time, and we’ve made so many connections over the years of people who support us, like our families, my wife, all our partners, our parents, the local community. We talk about our record label, our management, our agents, all the writers like yourself, all the people who helped support us over the years. It’s such a profound and vast network of support at this stage in our lives that it’s hard not to think of the band without thinking of all the supporters as well. Maybe being compared to fungus isn’t flattering, but it’s my sort of cheeky way of saying that there’s a lot of unseen support for this whole project.
This includes some of the little sapling bands and artists that are around in Toronto. I go to see bands all the time. There’s Dorothea Paas, Eliza Niemi, Shirley Hurt. There’s a band called Bernice. Charlotte Cornfield, of course. Louie Short, Luca Kaplowski. Felicity Williams has a project called You Can Can, which is super glitchy and arty and weird. There’s just so much music happening around Toronto that I feel it keeps everybody alive, and it makes you feel like you’re in a hopeful situation, like the next generation of music is good. There’s no problem here when it comes to the creation of new music. All that feels supportive – not like they’re all supporting us, but we are supported by them through inspiration.
When you’re deep into the process of writing and recording, is there a part of you that’s maybe tuning out some of that inspiration, and it starts to feel a little more isolated and above ground?
It does, and that’s why I have to constantly sort of remember to look underground and see where it’s all coming from. When we get together and write songs and play music on stage, we feel like, “It’s us, we’re Broken Social Scene. Look at us.” But if you look at the bigger picture, there’s so much more to any artist. Any band, any person has all of their influences and all their support systems. You have to actually, intentionally stop looking at the forest and look at the nutrients. It’s just good to appreciate all the efforts that go into making your life what it is when you’re being successful in some way.
Memes
The word “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, who’s a famous geneticist and mostly known for being an outspoken atheist. When he coined the word meme, he wasn’t talking about the internet jokes and things like that that it means today, which is kind of perfect, because that’s the way memes work – they grow and change and they adapt. But his idea of a meme is kind of like an animal that has to adapt genetically to survive, it has to be able to reproduce, it has to adapt to new surroundings. I think a lot about memetic fitness. His example might be religions like Catholicism or Buddhism or any religion; they have such strong memetic fitness in the sense that they have churches, and they have all these defense mechanisms. These are what he would say would be memes that are 2,000 years old and have survived by adapting and changing to the world around them.
This idea of memetic fitness can be applied into so many different situations. Earlier, I was talking about how we got together and just spent days and days writing and writing and writing and writing, coming up with all these different ideas. Well, the way that these ideas survived – some of them survived and some of them did not, and it’s not necessarily that the best ideas survived and the worst ideas died. It’s more like, whichever one was most suited to the environment survived. So, if somebody were to write something that was more free jazz or blues rock, something that was just not in our environment, it would get weeded out. All these ideas naturally evolve through a process of natural selection, through these filters of all of our different minds, all of our different attentions. I wrote it down as kind of as a joke, but also because it’s something I like to spend a lot of time thinking about, how ideas need to proliferate and adapt to the world. And Broken Social Scene itself is a meme, we’re an idea. We’re a bunch of people, but everybody has their own kind of story around what we are, and that takes on a life of its own. We try our best to try and keep our identity as a band somewhat on brand with what we want and somewhat aligned with the truth of who we are. It’s beyond us at this point, and it’s constantly changing.
How do you remember the environment of the record shifting over time?
It was definitely something to watch, rather than something to control. We all had our intentions to pull the record this way or push the record this way, and had this tug of war between us. But given that there were so many influences, so many factors in terms of self-imposed deadlines, sound quality, sound sources – there’s an infinite number of possibilities now when you’re mixing. A record can go in any kind of direction if you grab the reins, but in this sense, we were all trying to hold onto the steering wheel at the same time and pulling it in different directions. If you look at a sunflower, everything about it is designed to make more sunflowers – it’s prickly stem, it’s bright yellow colors to attract bees, it’s got the sunflower seeds that animals will eat and spread around – everything about a sunflower is designed to make more sunflowers, and it’s a product of a billion years of various filters and natural selection and evolution. In a very microcosmic kind of way, I feel like that’s what the album ended up as. It’s its own sunflower, and we were just the filters that prevented it from becoming something else.
Coming to your senses
When you’re hoping your friend will come to their senses, obviously, they’re kind of being an idiot, and you hope that they’ll snap out of it. There’s some truth to that; as a band, we tend to get absorbed in all kinds of different issues and minor grievances and things like that, and you hope that the whole band will sort of come to our senses and be a band again. But in this case, I mean it more literally than metaphorically. When you’re first writing and recording, you’re listening to the sounds, and I just love this idea of coming to your senses, like being a little monkey in the world, and you really taste your food, you listen to the sounds around you, and you feel the textures of Earth, and you’re not living so much in your head and concept all the time, but you’re actually physically experiencing the world as directly as possible. Music is so great for that, because when you’re absorbed in music, it turns off your internal dialogue, and you’re not nattering away to yourself and chattering all the time. You can get really close to the present moment when you’re listening to music, and the closer you are to the present moment, the more joy there is to find.
In terms of the band, it’s how we start: We will listen and listen and listen, and then we’ll stop and we’ll talk about it. And then when it’s done, we’re still listening again, and this idea of just coming back to your ears, it’s like coming back to reality in a way. Every time you listen to it, it’s a little bit different. I feel like it’s convalescent to be in the moment and to come to your senses. The process of being a band is often all in your head – you think about touring, you think about your fans, you think about wanting to be successful, you think about all the logistics that have to happen, but all the time, we’re breaking that pattern and coming to our senses and listening to the sounds that we’re making. And that’s where the art really is, that’s where the art lives. It’s in the perception of the moment.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Broken Social Scene’s Remember the Humans is out now via Arts & Crafts.
