“You’ll have to excuse me!” Brendan Canning, the co-founder and co-leader of the expansive Canadian indie-rock collective known as Broken Social Scene, has a little trouble on his hands while trying to do a series of phone interviews.
“I’m sitting here on the front stoop of my house with my dog,” Canning explains. “He keeps insisting on crossing the street! He’s an old, retired chihuahua guard dog who’s prone to wandering.” Once he’s settled (the dog, that is), Canning is able to get back to the task at hand: speaking about Broken Social Scene in the present tense again.
After seven years, the band are set to release their fifth studio album, entitled Hug of Thunder. With so many years separating it from its predecessor (2010’s acclaimed Forgiveness Rock Record), one would assume that the writing process has been a gradual, incremental process over that period of time. Not so, says Canning: what you’re hearing is recent, vital and – importantly – new.
“It was important for us to be able to make something that was fresh,” he says. “To try and dredge up some idea from years ago… that’s just not really how our band operates. The songs that we write all reach a maturation point – if it doesn’t make it through to the album to be recorded, it just slips through the cracks. We have a lot of songs like that. Making this album, we knew it had to be brand-new material. We wanted this to be a reignition of the band.”
Working with this band is a very different experience to working with other bands. You’re not just in for a day – it’s probably not until about week three that it starts to settle in.
Hug of Thunder is a set of 12 new songs, a couple of which fans will have already heard in the lead-up to its release. In addition to wanting the songs to be fresh, the band also wanted the process to be treated the same way; enlisting people who they had never previously worked with on Broken Social Scene music to get the job done. “We kind of put together a bit of a dream team of people to work on this record,” says Canning.
“We worked with a guy named Joe Chiccarelli, and then we recorded in a village town called Bath in Ontario with an engineer named Niles Spencer. Sean Everett mixed the record, and he’d just come off a bit of success with that last Alabama Shakes record [2015’s Sound and Colour]. He’s now working with John Legend, The War on Drugs and Grizzly Bear – he’s a very sought-after guy. Working with this band is a very different experience to working with other bands. You’re not just in for a day – it’s probably not until about week three that it starts to settle in.”
That’s the key to being in a band: a bit of blind faith. I mean, God, you’re playing in a fucking band!
If you head over to Broken Social Scene’s Wikipedia page, you’ll probably notice that the list of people considered official members of the collective runs almost as long as the page itself. Having toured with as little as three members and as many as a dozen, the fluidity of the band has always lead to a revolving-door of collaborations and contributions. When it came to Hug of Thunder, however, it was time to get the band back together – yep, every single original member of the band features at least once within the track listing.
“We’d taken a significant time away from releasing anything, and it felt important to get those contributions on there,” Canning says. “Kevin [Drew, co-founder/leader] really felt the need to get every single person back on board. I was for it, but we were getting towards the end and we were still missing a few of those people. I was fine to call it there – ‘We’ve done pretty well,’ I said – but Kevin insisted on getting everyone. When all was said and done, it was really great. It really served as a reminder of what each member of this group brings to the party. If you haven’t worked with someone for a while, it tends to go away until it’s right back in your face – and then you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah!’”
We kind of put together a bit of a dream team of people to work on this record.
Hug of Thunder arrives almost exactly 15 years after the release of You Forgot It In People, the second Broken Social Scene album, which would go on to be acclaimed and regarded as one of the best albums of the 2000s by giants such as Pitchfork and Rolling Stone. Not that Canning or anyone involved in the group would have ever predicted that when they were making it, of course: “I don’t think anyone has that degree of clairvoyancy,” Canning quips. “When we were starting out, I liked to repeat a certain mantra: ‘We’ll all be travelling the world soon, doing our own thing.’ I don’t know whether I believed it or not, but I said it like I believed in it.
“I think that’s the key to being in a band: a bit of blind faith. I mean, God, you’re playing in a fucking band!” Canning laughs to himself, thinking aloud. “It’s anyone’s guess how it’s gonna go half the time. I’ve been part of a lot of different bands. With every other band that I’ve been in, I always ended up with this feeling where we’d get to a certain point and I couldn’t see how we were going to get past it. You just don’t think you have the talent. This band is the only band I’ve ever been in where I haven’t had that feeling.”
Hug Of Thunder drops Friday July 7 through Spunk Records.
