Broken Social Scene's Brendan Canning on Geese, Working with Paul Schrader, and Navigating Creative Tension

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it. Subscriptions currently run $3/month or $30/year, hit one of those little pink buttons on the right side of your screen to tap in, you won't regret it.

And the spring subscription sale is set to go through Memorial Day weekend—that means only a few more weeks to get a great deal in supporting this largely very free publication. 26% off monthly and annual subscriptions, that's $2.22 a month for the first six months, or $22.20 for an entire year. All in all, it's cheap and it's nourishing. You can grab the monthly sale here, and the annual sale here.

Here's what's going on today: Broken Social Scene just extended one of the 21st century's strongest track records in indie rock with their very excellent new album Remember the Humans (how could I forget?), which just saw release last Friday. A month or so ago, I hopped on the phone with BSS'er Brendan Canning to talk about this latest gargantuan achievement as well as a host of other topics inside and out of his career with the band, and he was a very gregarious and insightful chatting partner that made the whole conversation more than worthwhile. Check it out:

How are you doing, man?
Good. Just pouring my second coffee here.

Nice. What's your coffee setup?
I got a little Bialetti, some 2% milk, and a little bit of extra hot water. Occasionally I'll get a flat white if I want to bougie it up. But you know what? This is a very tasty coffee.

Let's talk about how you guys made this great new record. You guys seem incapable of making a bad record at this point, which is honestly really impressive.
As a band, we all migrated up to Kevin's, who moved out of the city. I was going to Long and McQuade, renting a shitload of gear, and Charles was wiring the studio at Kevin's place. We were trying to be a band living under one roof again. That went on for a while, but you can't obviously spend two months together like that. It would be insane. But it was a lot of coming in and coming out. Then we started throwing in Dave Newfeld and sending him some of the mixes. It was a three-year affair. Charles also has his home studio in Toronto—a very humble studio set up in his garage area, which also doubles as a BSS jam space—and he was doing some edits and a lot of file-sharing back and forth, adding Hannah Georges and a couple new women to the fold. Leslie's song was a late addition that tried to make it on Hug of Thunder. As Broken Social Scene records go, they're a curvy road. There's nothing nothing linear about the process.

How was it getting Dave back in the BSS routine?
Dave's like no one else—his approach, his enthusiasm, his slight manic behavior at times, his ability to go hard like no one can. He puts everything he's got into it, and when you hear his mixes, it's very Dave Neufeld. It hearkens back to You Forgot It In People and the self-titled, but it's many years later. so the band isn't in the same emotional place that it once was. But Dave's still in the same sonic headspace, except that many more years have gone under the bridge.

Sometimes, when you have cases where a band reunites with a producer like this, the band maybe feels an impulse to really lean in on replicating the past. But that isn't what you guys did here. If anything, it feels like what one would naturally expect from you guys after Hug of Thunder. Talk to me about the evolution of the band's sound as you see it.
Well, I think it'd be disingenuous to come back with a record that's trying to mimic the past. That's just not fun for anyone. "Where's our 'Anthems For a 17-Year-Old Girl'?" That's just a dog chasing his tail. Ultimately, we're all smart enough as individuals and have enough creative juice left in the tank that we're able to hone in on a couple of new sounds.

Music is not that hard if you put your mind to it. But whether anyone's gonna jump on board with you and say, "I'm fully into this," that's a different story. If you're gonna talk about Hug of Thunder, that was a very long and storied process of a record, working with a new producer as well as with someone that we are familiar with, which was Nyles Spencer—who's kind of like a Dave Neufeld Jr. in some way. I mean, I don't know if he'd appreciate the "Dave Neufeld Jr.," he's very much his own person. But the Broken Social Scene records are very honest unto themselves. Hug of Thunder was very much like, "This is where we're at," and this record is like, "Well, this is where we're at." There was lots of debate. "It could've gone this way, it could've gone this way"—but it went the way it went, because you follow the elusive roadmap.

Given that it's always such a long process in terms of putting these records together, how would you describe the evolution of the creative dynamic in terms of working together?
It's about knowing when to step back a lot of the time. If you keep wanting to be the most correct person in the room, it's not going to serve you that well when you're trying to make what is essentially a collective effort. If someone has a clear enough vision, then they're gonna run with it, and if you want to be a contrarian the entire trip, you're just gonna give yourself a fucking headache, and everyone else too. It's gonna make it less enjoyable—and, I mean, it's already Broken Social Scene. It's not the easiest train to get on when it comes to anything. It's an unwieldy beast, and any band that's been going for this long comes with its own trials.

But, as you get older, you get to know everyone that much more and, everyone becomes a more definitive version of themselves, for better for worse. But you're still jamming and trying to find the sound. Your final idyllic version of it isn't going to be the same as your bandmates, and you just have to accept that.

Even though Broken Social Scene has been a beloved band for a while now, you guys have also never shied away from making music has a left-of-center sound. Even at its most streamlined, there's always really interesting things going on with what you guys are doing musically. Early on, the "post-rock" tag was applied quite a bit to you guys. I'm interested to hear you talk about perceptions of genre when it comes to what the band does at this point.
I remember doing a lot of Italian press in 2003 that was like, "Brendan, can you tell me about the post-rock sound?" I never really got the whole post-rock thing, or what even that was supposed to mean when it came to our band. I just felt like it's pop music, but it's leaning a little bit to the left or right. We're not going down the middle, like alternative rock radio. As far as trying to put any sort of label on it, I always find that counterintuitive to who we all are, because we all have different tastes in music. There's too many ideas floating around this camp. I mean, if you were to ask Leslie Feist about post-rock, she'd be like, "What's post-rock?" It's just a strange category, I always felt. But you gotta explain it to your friends. If someone's like, "What is the Broken Social Scene record like?" Give it whatever label you want. As long as people tune in, who cares at the end of the day?

I've read interviews with you in the past talking about studio spontaneity in terms of the music you guys make. Talk to me a little bit about that. What works and what doesn't?
If you have something in your mind that you think is the finished work, that will not serve you well in trying to get an idea raised up the flagpole, because it goes through the BSS algorithm and gets chewed up and spat out in such a way that every song is going to take a different journey. Then you throw someone like Dave Neufeld into the mix, who's going to take his own vision towards anything. Any idea that you might have. it's always best just to be open and listen to something as honestly and earnestly as you can, and then judge it when it's finished to see whether it's something that fits with something else and becomes a body of work.

This record for me, personally, I found it difficult to really hone in on the roadmap of it. When I thought I was getting close to it, it would be a little more elusive. Then my ideas don't get seen to the other side, but it's not for a lack of trying—and it's not that everyone doesn't put in an effort to try and see it that way. But you also don't want to get in the way of the process by being an adversary to your own band.
There have been certain times where I've gone to the wall for certain ideas. But with this record, was I willing to go to the wall with Neufeld as much as Charlie or Kevin was? Not as much. I just have to let some things go—which, at the end of the day, it's like, come on. We're fucking on the brink of World War III half the time.

I've had a very nice career with this band. I'm still getting to talk to guys like you and shoot the shit about my career. I'd be hard-pressed to complain about any of it. The record, if I was pushing the buttons and making the final decisions, of course you'd have a different record. But would it be that different? Would it be better? I don't know. At the end of the day, you have to stand behind the band you started. I can still hold my head high and be like, "Yeah, this is a good body of work." I'm perfectly proud to walk around town. If someone pats you on the back and says, "I love the album," it's like, "Thank you very much." It's still my record.

One thing I'm interested to hear you talk about is your work on the score for The Canyons.
Oh, God.

Obviously, it's a notorious creative situation for a lot of people that were working on it with Paul Schrader.
I mean, he stayed at my house.

Really?
Yeah.

Tell me all about that experience.
At first, I got a thumb drive in the mail of the movie, because he was so worried about it leaking. Then he ended up losing his laptop on the trip. He was calling me from the airport, which I still won't forget. "Brendan, I think I made a boo-boo. Is my laptop there?" We did a midnight screening in my kitchen.

It was a trip. The music supervisor, Aminé Ramer, she was like, "When you're talking to Paul, use the word 'tableau.' He really likes that word." He originally imagined the movie like Breaking the Waves, divided into chapters. That was my first call with him. After reading the script, I was like, "I don't see how you're going to break this up into chapters like that. It's just not that kind of movie." It was on the heels of Drive, so there was a bit of that influence, because the producers or whatever wanted to hear some of that. The guys I was working with on it, they were really good on that kind of tip.

It was a very interesting process. I got a few good John Belushi and Penny Marshall stories, a couple good Lindsay Lohan stories—all the tumult between her and her father. For a while, I didn't even think I was going to get paid. I even called the producer and was like, "Hey man, just let me know if I'm not going to get paid, and I'll just write it down as a really great experience and one for the books." But, a week later, I got paid. Randomly, I had someone reach out a year ago wanting to put out the soundtrack on vinyl, and I was like, "Uh, okay, good luck. I don't think this is going to be a huge seller unless this film becomes this weird cult classic"—which, I think it's a very low-key cult classic.

I think it's a particular film in his catalog where you can really see how fraught the creative process was. But it's an interesting one, and I'm sure it was very interesting to work on. I will say that I recently found out about someone who's working on the score for his latest film, and given what's out there about him at this point, I'm kind of like, "Why work with him at all?"
Well, because he can still live off Taxi Driver. Even the studio I worked at, everyone wanted to get a Taxi Driver poster signed from Paul. I was like, "Why are you fucking feeding into his ego?"

You've probably lived 18 lifetimes in the music industry at this point. Right now, it's obviously pretty rough. What are some of thef things you've perceived over the course of your career that have been significantly impactful?
Right now. I've got another project with a new album that just came out, but I don't have any kind of economy to go with that. My first band, there was HMV in Toronto and across the world, and they had an indie section where you could get front-racked. You could also get local support on radio here, and you could move product. My first band, we sold 15,000 CDs independently, and a lot of it was out of local music shops. It's a lot of bands now, and there's a lot of people all vying for a small piece of an ever-shrinking pie. People still go to gigs, but there's so many bands that tour every night of the week, and there didn't used to be that many shows, that's for sure. There's so much to sift through, and what's going to move the needle along?

It still boils down to, have you made a good batch of tunes? A group like Geese, that's such a classic example right now for indie rock. They make lively pop-rock music that sounds kind of classic, and they can deliver it live—and it just caught fire. How long did it take Khruangbin to catch fire? They were slogging it out for a while before, but when it caught fire for them, it sure did. The competition is fierce, and the opportunities have shrunk. That's about it.

The Geese thing is funny to me. There's been quite a lot of people trying to be like, "Why is this band popular?" And I'm like, "Are you kidding me?" The appeal is very obvious and straightforward. Also, no joke, most interviews I do for this newsletter, somebody brings up how much they love Geese right now, which is really fascinating to me. They've united everybody. But there is something to what you're getting at here, with the fierceness of the competition—because when something does break through, there is this questioning of, "Why is this the thing that breaks through?"
Also, it's like, "Why not?" I did not listen to their music—I just heard it in a record shop one day, and I was like, "Who's this?" The shopkeeper's like, "Oh, it's Geese," and I'm like, "Oh, I'll spend $38 on this record." Look at Angine de Poitrine. They. fuckin' book a 600-cap show in Toronto, it sells out instantly. They book another one, it sells out instantly. They book another one, it sells. Three sold-out nights! They're probably like, "Oh my God, why did we book summer shows for such a low offer when we could've quadrupled or quintupled our offer." Their records, you can't keep them in shop. You go on Facebook Marketplace and someone's selling their vinyl for $250. It's so crazy. That was not happening 10 years ago.