Coming Full Circle (Accidentally): An Interview with Kevin Drew & Charles Spearin

There are a lot of people in Broken Social Scene — anywhere from two to 20 depending on the day or album, so there’s certainly no shortage of BSS-related material. From the 2001 debut Feel Good Lost, which was largely written and recorded by principal members Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, to their most recent, critically-acclaimed, collaborative opus, Forgiveness Rock Record, BSS never skimp on a good layer of electric guitars, barrage of sound effects, or post-rock groove. And their trademark, indie-rock defining sounds are scattered across various solo projects and collaborations. This is the closest thing our generation has to a supergroup, featuring talented artists who are huge all on their own merits (Feist, Jimmy Shaw and Emily Haines of Metric, and Amy Millan of Stars, just to scratch the surface).

Basically, even though Broken Social Scene only has four official full-lengths to their name, it feels like they’ve put out about 40.

On October 26th of this year, Arts & Crafts reissued two extremely-difficult-or-near-impossible-to-find LPs from … well … another Broken Social Scene-related project. This one, however, is seminal. K.C. Accidental is where it all started — BSS Mach One — basically a joint collaboration between Kevin Drew and Charles Spearin, who, along with Canning, basically form the Broken Social nucleus. Captured Anthems for an Empty Bathtub and Anthems for the Could’ve Bin Pills are, for many fans, the Holy Grail of indie, a pair of releases nearly mystical in their invisibility (they have been long out-of-print and have never been released outside of their native Canada). For all the hype, the releases are actually worth the wait, proving themselves arguably as potent and magical as early Broken Social Scene material.

Drew and Spearin took some time out of their busy Broken Social Scene touring schedule to talk with PopMatters about their excitement for the new K.C. Accidental reissues, the surprising influence of early rave music, recording music over the phone, and what it’s like going from such humble, intimate beginnings to playing in one of the most gigantic (and … well … numerically gigantic) bands in rock music.

PopMatters: Where are you guys right now, and what’s going on?

Kevin Drew: We’re on tour; we’re in Ithaca. New York right now.

How’s the tour been going?

It’s been good! It’s been joyous, fun — the crowds have been great! Can’t ask for anything more, really!

Why did you wait so long to re-release these K.C. Accidental records? If you ask me, they are of as high quality as Feel Good Lost [Broken Social Scene’s debut album].

What happened was when we first put it out, we just kind of burned 100 CDs and put them in our local record shop, I think in 1998. And that was Captured Anthems for an Empty Bathtub. And then we hooked up with a label called Noise Factory that was a label I knew beforehand, and he really wanted to put the stuff out. So we put out a couple records with him, and they just didn’t really go everywhere, and it sort of happened before Social Scene. So they were always sort of available, but they were never really available as they will be now, so we thought this would be just a good time to re-issue them.

These albums are definitely “ambient” in the general sense, but there is definitely a different vibe happening here than even on Feel Good Lost, which is still a textural, “ambient” album in its own right. What do you think separates the KC albums from Feel Good Lost, musically speaking?

Well, it’s Charles and Brendan that separates it, and that’s basically it. Both were made the same way, except Feel Good was actually all eight-track, whereas KC was hooked up with a D-88, so we had 15 tracks to work with. So Feel Good was an eight-track record, except that, at the end, we went and mixed it at a studio – Ohad [Benchitrit] and Charlie mixed it at a studio that Ohad was a part of back in the day, so we were able to “supe it up”, stack other tracks, have a good time while mixing. But the key point is the music Brendan has inside of him and the music Charlie has inside of him and the way they went about approaching melodies and songs. You have to understand that with Feel Good Lost, I started off thinking I was going to make a solo record for Brendan Canning, but then I just kept playing more and more, and then after awhile, it was just inevitable. There was a bunch of us, so I went and grabbed all the people I knew from playing on the K.C. records, and Canning brought in Feist, and it was kind of the first time I ever really met her. I met her a couple times before, but it was the first time I ever worked with her. For “Passport Radio”, we just kind of sat around and chose some words to the beat, so you can see how the cross-collaboration exists, and there is a real truth to the idea of while we were making You Forgot it in People, we weren’t too sure what it was going to be called even, whether it was K.C. or Broken at one point because, musically, we felt like it lent more toward the K.C. Accidental records than Feel Good Lost.

Musically, these K.C. Accidental songs are very drum-oriented, very rhythmic and repetitive. Was this something that you were aiming for, or was it something that just happened?

The great thing about this is that with most of the tracks, I’m drumming on them. Justin Peroff is on “Silverfish Eyelashes” and “The Instrumental Died in the Bathtub”, the first one of the second record. I was pretty obsessed with sped-up drums and triple drum tracks, and so was Charlie because, at that time, we were listening to a lot of what was going on in the day, which was DJ Shadow and Tortoise and rhythmic stuff — drums were [the] go-to instrument at the time. We had a lot of fun with the drums on this album, just trying to figure out tones, speeds, just trying to experiment as much as we possibly could.

A lot of the tracks do have multi-layered percussion, which creates this nice rhythmic atmosphere. That’s something that’s toned down a lot on Feel Good Lost. Were you trying to purposely go in a different direction, or is it really, like you said, just the difference between working with Charlie and working with Brendan?

I think with Feel Good Lost, we just kind of came at it rhythmically at a place where, we were making this record at night, so we could never really “PLAY LOUD DRUMS”, and the constant them of what we were doing kept coming up very mellow. Obviously, there’s a song like “Love and Mathematics” where Justin’s on there doing a couple drum beats as well as “Cranley’s Gonna Make It”, but besides that, we enjoyed just using drum machines and cymbals and snares, and we kind of looped and played some toms, taking a boomerang and playing it through an amp. We really treated the drums, because we were also working in eight-track, we treated them just as much as atmosphere as the other instruments were making.

Legend has it you guys formed your first song from a keyboard track recorded on an answering machine message. Tell me more …

Well, I had a job where I’d be up at 9AM, and I’d always call Charlie pretty much by 10:30, pretty much to the dislike of his roommates, the Do Make (Say Think) boys, and we had a band before that we were in together, and we played a couple shows — Jimmy Shaw from Metric was in that band, and we had a friend Stephen Crowhurst, and Derek Stephens was also in it. We only did a couple gigs, but we played a lot together, and one day, one of the members — Charlie wasn’t playing with us because he was away, and I said, “Oh, I just wish Charlie was here; I don’t know why we’re doing a show without him.” One of the guys said, “If you love Charlie so much, why don’t you just go make a record with him.” That stayed in my mind, and one day, I called him. We all did this back in the day — answering machines were your own personal four-tracks for people, so you leave messages for people, play them keyboard tunes, acoustic songs, leave other songs on there, hold the phone up to the speaker … it was just something we did! So I did that one day, and then I got a cassette in my hallway a few days later, and I put it on. No one had ever really done anything like that where they sent back — I just thought it was one of the sweetest things I’ve ever been involved in. It was at that moment that I said to Charlie, “Let’s go make a record. Let’s just do stuff like this — let’s do instrumental jams”, and he was into it.

What was the first song you completed where you guys just knew you were onto something special, or at least, something that had the potential to be special?

I think it was with our band the Jula, that was from before. When we were playing together, we thought that we had something good. I was on drums, Charlie was on keys, Jimmy was on horn, our friend Derek was on bass, and Stephen was on guitar. There were some times where we really connected. And then, when we went into the studio, the first track we laid down was “Nancy and the Girdle Boy”, and it was so fun and so joyous. I had sort of mastered the four-track by this time, and Charlie had this eight-track that he had mastered, so I kinda came in with this four-track mentality, and he sort of brought it into the eight-track world, and that was our first day of recording. We only had five days for the first record, and then we mixed for two, so we did it in a week in my parents’ basement. And the first one was “Nancy and the Girdle Boy”. I loved it, and I thought, “This is going to be great.”

We know that the seeds of BSS were already being planted, especially when you consider how many future members contributed to the recordings. Despite the already growing line-up, who was playing what instruments on these songs? Was it a case of “Pick up something and start playing?” or did you guys iron out the instrumental boundaries early on?

What we did was — we basically did everything, and then we had guests. You can see, in every song, we lay it out, do everything we need to do — Justin Peroff would come in and lay down a drum track, and we’d write a song over it. We’d jam a song out with Justin, and he’d play the drums. We were recording inside a house where Charlie was at, where some of the Do Make guys played. So then it was like, “Let’s do a simple drum track.” It was very casual, very easy. Emily and Jimmy came in because they were living in New York and England. So they came in one day, and we just said, “You do your thing over it.” It’s the same sort of thing as Feel Good Lost — basically just Charlie and I playing everything together. It was just tons of fun, tons of fun.

What were some of the early influences for you guys?

You touched on influences a little earlier, but what were some of the early influences for you guys around this time?

In our camp, it’s historically known that Charlie and I met because we went to music school together, and I was a Tortoise fan, an early Tortoise fan, and I heard that he was a Tortoise fan, so I went up to him and chatted him because I wanted to know everything there was to know about music. So I started playing him four-track recordings, and he started playing me some early Do Make Say Think recordings, and we really connected on the idea of instrumental music, and we really connected on the love of recording, so that’s kind of how we found ourselves sort of with similar influences to go on and do this.

You have to understand, we were doing it for fun, and we were doing it to sort of get into some soundtrack worlds, and then when Feel Good Lost was being made, the second record came out, and I remember talking to Charlie and saying, “You gotta meet this guy, Brendan!” I told everybody, “You gotta meet this guy, Brendan; we’ve gotta bring him into the mix! I’m having the time of my life over here!” Charlie took Feel Good Lost and went and mixed it with Ohad, and it stayed really much “in the family”. That’s how we started Social Scene beyond Feel Good Lost because I would bring everyone to meet Brendan, and Brendan brought in Feist, and Andrew Whiteman kind of slid in through friends I was supposed to meet that Canning knew, so we brought him in. I sought out this gentleman named John Crossingham to play some drums because I didn’t know whether Justin was going to stick around. So we suddenly found ourselves having this crew, and whoever was in town would just start playing shows where we’d make stuff up every time we did it, and we started cataloging what we had done, and “Causes” started to appear, and the original “K.C. Accidental” started to appear. “Anthems” came through in a show that we did. It kind of just happened naturally, and it was all around the albums of K.C. and Feel Good Lost that this started to evolve.

So you have to understand, we never really played K.C. live — we played this one show at a bar called The Mockingbird — Emily Haines opened for us, and it was the only time we ever did a K.C. Accidental show. Since then, I think that was 1998 or 1999 we did that — we’ve never done anything else since. The funny thing is that since Feel Good Lost, only now are we starting to play at least one song from it — we’ve never really included it in our repertoire, never really played it. It’s just interesting how these records have gotten left behind.

What was originally behind the decision to keep the project as a mainly instrumental one, and what, in particular, made you decide to do vocals on “Them”? Also, according to the press release, the duet with Emily on “Them” was her first recorded vocal. Did you realize you had a star on your hands?

Well, I met Emily when I was 14 years old. I used to sit in her bedroom when I was 17, and she’d play piano songs for me at 18. I very much understood the relationship with her and her father, Paul Haines. She came from such a musical, lyrical background that I knew when I was a teenager that this woman was going to go somewhere because she had a lot of drive and passion. When she met Jimmy Shaw, they connected on their drive and their goal. I have recordings and stuff of theirs that a lot of people haven’t heard. For Charlie and I, this is the first time we are saying, “OK, let’s re-issue our recordings”, but I know there’s a lot of tracks for a lot of people who have kind of their first records out there, and they’re hard to find.

In preparation for this interview, Kevin, I re-read an interview you did for us back in 2007 where you said, “You know, I made those two K.C. Accidental records with Charles, I made that Feel Good Lost record with Brendan, and there’s something about just making a record with one other person that allows you to have so much freedom and so much … there’s not 18 opinions flying around and you don’t have to always say, ‘Oh wait wait wait I won’t play that because I gotta get somebody else to come in and play that or they won’t be on the song.'” With Forgiveness Rock Record, you guys were back to … well, 18 opinions flying around. How would you guys compare the isolation of K.C. to the madness of today’s Broken Social Scene?

Well, to answer that question entirely, that quote would be taken from where I made Spirit If… with Ohad, so I did it again where I just made a record with one other person, so I had guests come in, but it was the same thing where you spend all your time with one guy. I just adore it and love it, but the one thing about it that’s great is that does re-fuel you to go back into what is Broken Social Scene, but on this Forgiveness Rock Record, it was like making a record with a band, so it was almost as if it were one person, and it wasn’t that different at all because the discussions I would get into with Charles and Brendan, I would have those same discussions while we were recording. And also, everyone came into it satisfied — Charles had just made Happiness Project; obviously I had made Sprit If…; Brendan had just made Something For All of Us…, so we were all coming into it really looking forward to being a band again and kind of having this idea of sitting around, and that’s what spearheads this whole “solo project” or “side project” thing is that it really makes it easier for us to work together when we have other outlets, and there was really absolutely no chaos — zero chaos — making Forgiveness Rock Record. It was actually the kindest process we’ve had yet making a record, and also a very inspiring one, so it was good, and I think, as you get older, you’re happy for the projects that you did, and you’re happy that everyone knows that you can easily go back and sit in the room with one person again.

At this point, Drew graciously thanks me for doing the interview, telling me he really wants people to “HEAR THESE RECORDS”, and passes the phone to Spearin, who eventually settles into his portion of the interview after escaping the street noise on the band’s bus.

You guys didn’t waste any time before you got all anthemic on us. “Instrumental Died in the Bathtub” has violins, synths, layers of guitars, etc. There is already a certain “hugeness” to these tracks. Did you guys always envision creating sounds this huge and overdubbed, or did it just happen organically?

I think we just kind of wanted to be playful, I guess, when we were doing recordings. We wanted to use everything we could — every person, everything we had at our disposal — just have as much fun and make it as experimental and playful as possible.

Awesome. I touched on this a little already with Kevin, but a lot of these K.C. songs are very percussive, really built around the drum parts instead of the other way around, which I find interesting because, technically, neither of you two are really known for being “drummers”. This is most apparent on a track like “Silverfish Eyelashes”, which is almost startling with these drum parts or loops …

You have to think about the time, too — that was 1995. I think we were kind of sick of a lot of the rock music that was around then, so we sort of searched for anything we could that was original and new and had sort of a true culture to it, and one of the cultures was “rave culture”, and neither of us were particular ravers, so to speak, but we did go to raves every once in awhile and had an appreciation for the culture of it and certainly an appreciation for the rhythms of it — the jungle beats, drum and bass. I suppose that was a part of our influence; a lot of the electronic music of the early 90s was really progressive and experimental, and we were really inspired by that. But we didn’t come at it from the same way; we didn’t use computers to make our music. We didn’t use sequencers and that sort of thing, so we kind of mimicked some of the stuff that we heard through electronic music, playing on real drums …

So there are no loops here?

No, there’s no loops. Some of it’s Justin playing drums; some of it’s Kevin playing drums. There is one song where we had our friend Rich play drums. But no, there’s no looping or sequencing involved in any of those songs.

Wow, that’s crazy! Here’s one thing I’ve never understood: you guys originally had a bunch of silent tracks bookending the albums. What was that about — just filling tracks to justify full-length releases?

In a way, the second album got released first, so we left seven silent tracks at the beginning to represent the first album that never got released. But in a way, it kind of caught you off-guard because you have to look at your CD player and watch the numbers go by every four seconds and go, “What the hell is going on here?”, so it was something to kind of wake you up before you listen to the music. Anything to try and be playful to what we were doing. And when we finally released Captured Anthems for an Empty Bathtub, we did the same thing — we put some blank tracks at the end of it to sort of represent the other album.

Definitely another sort of 90s throwback — hidden tracks and false endings and all that stuff …

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah …

Ahh, the glory days …

Yeah, good times. It’s like that album … ahh, what is that album … this Mercury Rev album where it goes all the way to 100 tracks to get to the last song, just going over and over and over …

Once again, Kevin and I touched on this subject, but I’d also like your point of view. How does working with one person on a project compare to other projects you’ve been in, like Do Make Say Think and Broken Social Scene, where you have a lot of other people? How does that affect the music?

I enjoy it tremendously. It’s a very intimate experience. You just keep bouncing ideas off of each other, and you just put your trust into one another. It’s a real sort of team effort. It goes back and forth. It’s sort of the same thing as with Feel Good Lost, where Kevin and Brendan are working together. They locked themselves in a basement for four months or something like that, and I can really appreciate that sense of intimacy and focus, and it’s different working in a big band where there’s a lot more ideas and a lot more voices. You have to have a lot more patience and allow a lot more space for other ideas. But I really enjoyed working with Kevin on those two records a lot, and there’s also a lot of naivety to it. There’s kind of this sense of “Fuck the world!” We were just going to do what we liked the sound of and not worry about it being released or anything like that. We basically made the records for our friends.

How does it feel now listening to these songs? You’re older now — you’ve done a lot of touring, a lot of writing. Is it sort of like looking through an old yearbook? Obviously, you have to think they still hold up; otherwise, why release them? How do you feel you’ve changed, as both musicians and people, since K.C. Accidental?

It is a bit like looking through an old yearbook — I like that analogy! I’ve forgotten how we got a lot of those sounds, how we did a lot of the things we did, so it’s nice to hear it fresh because I hadn’t heard it in years and years and years. So we put it on, and I was like, “Wow! This is really good!” [Laughs] I’m really proud of it now! And there’s a sense of kind of coming full-circle now. We’re working with John McIntyre [of Tortoise] for Forgiveness Rock Record, and that’s kind of our roots if you look at the song titles on Bathtubs, there’s one song called “Something for Chicago”, and that’s kind of our tribute to the stuff we were listening to from Chicago, a lot of which was spearheaded by John McEntire. So it kind of feels like we’ve come full-circle on this whole thing, and I’m really feeling good about the way it’s all … connecting.