Tom Lynch

The scene just gets larger and larger.

Canada's Broken Social Scene adds more than three new members to its roster on its latest, self-titled record, the band's third and most ambitious on Arts & Crafts, the label founded by band member Kevin Drew. The album's fourteen tracks, each meticulously crafted into grand, indie-rock orchestrations, differ from each other in wildly charismatic ways. If you didn't know better, they could've all been written and performed by separate bands.

Broken Social Scene takes eleven members on tour this fall, a hearty group of musicians that will, for sure, stuff the stage and be a visual smorgasbord. "It's lends a certain sort of excitement that way," says band multi-instrumentalist and co-founder Charles Spearin, over the phone, as the band sets up the stage for the first show of its tour. "You don't know what's going to go wrong until after the first few shows. This setup's a little different than on past tours--we have a double drum kit."

Given the vast number of players involved, the songwriting process for the band could easily turn into a logistical disaster. "We've tried all kinds of songwriting styles," says Spearin. "Sometimes somebody has an acoustic guitar and teaches the rest of us the song, sometimes songs are created spontaneously with us jamming, and it happens all together. More often than not we write in the studio, we have an idea and we put it down. Songs are carved out that way, somebody puts something on top. It's a bit like painting. We kind of live in the studio a lot of the time. We're not a write-song-then-record band, we go into the studio and sort of hang out and record whatever comes to mind. We just spend a lot of time there--not all together, because that would be a nightmare--but somebody's always in the studio."

With that process of writing and recording, it may be difficult to set a syllabus while creating a new record, especially with so many members and so many different ideas. "We had a lot of different mapped plans," says Spearin. "We would have one plan, then another. The album's titled changed a million times. At first it was gonna be a double record. But, it did end up forging its own course after several attempts at different ideas."

Broken Social Scene broke through the threshold with 2003's "You Forgot It in People," a genre-defying heartbreaker that found a core audience in the indie circuit, a change-your-life sort of escapade in themes not unlike Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea." The success of "You Forgot It in People," along with the growing anticipation of its follow-up, could easily dictate the content of the new record, and does.

"When we did `You Forgot It in People,' it was fun and we didn't think anybody would hear it," Spearin says. "This time we knew that if the record was bad, people would hear it anyway, they would be interested. The pressure was helpful and annoying at the same time. There were a lot of ideas, a lot of emotional rustling went into the record. Wrangling some of the ideas together wasn't that easy, and that was partly due to outside pressure, but partly due to inside pressure as well. But, that was the condition in which we had to work. For a second or third record, it's normal for people in bands to feel that way."

Ultimately, the band decided on simply titling the album "Broken Social Scene," seemingly believing that the content correctly represents the band as a whole. "It just seemed like the thing to do," says Spearin. "A lot of times people think self-titling is really representative of the band, though I'm not sure that's true. But, I guess it is to a certain degree. The names we had for the record kept fitting into old ideas, so we couldn't [use them]. `Windsurfing Nation' was one with a political bent, then we had `It's All Gonna Break.' Somehow none of it seemed to roll off the tongue. They just never felt right."

Broken Social Scene's live catalogue--consisting of several as-of-yet unreleased songs--range from straight-up rock anthems to elaborate, electronic mayhem, a tough feat to mingle live, let alone perform. "We can play almost everything," says Spearin. "But, it would take us three hours at least to play all of our stuff."

Broken Social Scene plays October 28 at Metro.

(2005-10-25)

Also by Tom Lynch

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(2005-09-27)

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