Broken Social Scene is celebrating their 20th anniversary with two shows at Massey Hall

It’s been nearly two decades since the release of “You Forgot It in People,” a bona fide indie rock classic that transformed Broken Social Scene from a two-man basement project into a sprawling and amorphous music collective.

Written by Brendan Canning and Kevin Drew but featuring contributions from dozens of local musicians, the album managed to harness the freewheeling energy of Toronto’s burgeoning indie scene — a winning formula that makes Broken Social Scene one of the most influential alternative groups of the 21st century.

Today, one could easily spend a couple of hours on Wikipedia trying to trace the tangled web of Canadian artists and acts associated with the band, whose ever-changing lineup has ranged between six and 19 members — including heavy hitters like Leslie Feist, Emily Haines (Metric), Amy Millan (Stars), Jason Collett, Ohad Benchetrit (Do Make Say Think) and Lisa Lobsinger (Reverie Sound Revue), to name a few.

“We’re kind of like a Wu-Tang Clan or something,” Canning — a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and one of the band’s core members — dryly remarked during a video call with the Star this month.

“I mean, every city has a scene,” he added. “We just decided to hang a banner up and put a name on it.”

On April 20 and 21, Broken Social Scene will celebrate their 20th anniversary with two performances at the historic Massey Hall. The shows will mark the end of a two-and-a-half year hiatus forced by the pandemic.

Speaking from his home in Toronto, Canning’s desire to return to the stage felt palpable.

“We’ve just really got to get to Massey Hall,” he said. “The last time we played a proper gig was in Mexico City in 2019, the Corona Festival of all things. That’s a long ass time. So yeah, I won’t say there’s a lot riding on the shows, but we all just want it to be a 10 out of 10. That’s the only goal we have in mind: to make sure that it’s special.”

Canning co-founded Broken Scene Social with Drew in 1999. Their debut album, “Feel Good Lost” (2001), was a subdued, mostly instrumental project, filled with the reverb-drenched guitars that would come to characterize the band’s later works.

The duo initially invited their friends and other artists to join the band in order to flesh out their live performances. Over time, a core group of musicians — consisting of Canning, Drew, Andrew Whiteman, Charles Spearin and drummer Justin Peroff — emerged, around which a revolving door of musicians would orbit.

It was 2002’s “You Forgot It in People” that introduced the band’s uniquely democratic approach to songwriting and recording, perhaps best exemplified by the song “Almost Crimes.”

An angsty duet between Drew and Feist, the track is packed with sounds and ideas to the point of nearly rupturing — there are countless layers of guitar, distorted bass, a saxophone solo, a midsong noise freakout. In the video, the backlit band swells in size, as faceless and silhouetted figures dance through the musical chaos. One gets the sense that the particulars — who wrote the song or who is playing what instrument — matter less than the simple experience of creating music as a collective.

Since then, Broken Social Scene has released four more studio albums and amassed a long set list of festival-ready jams: the rousing, road-trip standard “7/4 (Shoreline)” from the 2005 self-titled album, to the anti-oil industry protest track “Texico Bitches” from 2010s “Forgiveness Rock Record,” to “Halfway Home,” a rousing singalong from 2017’s “Hug of Thunder” and nostalgia-inducing cult classics like “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old-Girl” and “Sweetest Kill.”

The music — buzzworthy enough for late-night appearances but a bit too weird for the radio — generated legions of fans around the world.

Along the way, members of Broken Social Scene dabbled in film scores, movie soundtracks or started their own projects — Canning himself has released three solo albums.

“We’re just a band with so many different tentacles popping out,” Canning said. “It’s just a natural evolution for people wanting to stretch their legs a bit and expand their wing capacity.”

“We had a heck of a run from 2002 to 2010,” Canning said, when asked about the band’s golden era. “In 2010 we sold 5,000 tickets in Central Park in New York. But you can’t cap it there because, in 2017, we were playing Brixton Academy in London for the first time. And that’s our biggest London gig.”

That momentum was stopped in its tracks with the arrival of the pandemic in 2020.

“There was no band at that point,” Canning explained. “No one wants to see anyone … So yeah, it was in a lot of ways, like really debilitating.”

While many artists and bands continued to work during the pandemic, the idea of writing or recording new music remotely seemed hostile to the Broken Social Scene ethos.

“We tried a couple remote Zoom sessions and they’re just so unfun,” Canning said.

That collaborative spirit can be heard all over “Old Dead Young,” a career-spanning collection of B-sides and rarities the band released in January. Canning says the project came about as the band was preparing to reissue their early albums.

“When we started going through all the archives together, we came across all songs we like: songs that easily could have made it on an album.”

The 14-track collection contains plenty of gems, including “Canada vs America,” a raucous jam from 2004, and “This House Is on Fire,” a gentle but melancholy outtake from 2009.

“Curse Your Fail,” another 2009 rarity that appeared on a seven-inch split with the American indie band the Sea and the Cake, is about as close as you’ll get to a Broken Social Scene posse cut — the track includes vocals from Canning, Whiteman, Lobsinger and Death from Above’s Sebastien Grainger.

Canning says the album’s title makes reference to the “cycle of life.”

“I’m old, I’m dead, I’m young,” he said, cryptically. “It just seemed like the most fitting title for a band that’s been around for 20 some odd years, right?”

Writing in 2017, music critic Craig Jenkins compared Broken Social Scene to a comic-book crossover event, describing them as heroes who “only seem to convene at a time when Earth’s prospects for survival seem the most dire, offering a message of hope and friendship to help us shake off the jitters.”

Canning scoffs at the suggestion, saying the return of the band is as much for themselves as anyone coming to the show.

“Music is basically what (we) were put on this earth to do,” he said. “And if we can convey that positivity to 2,500 other humans under one roof? That’s a job well done and we can go to bed happy that night.”

Looking forward, Canning says he is optimistic about the emerging music scene in Toronto — a scene that he believes is flourishing, despite the challenges of the last couple of years.

As an example, he cites Mustafa, the poet, singer-songwriter and member of the Halal Gang collective whose debut album, “When Smoke Rises,” garnered international acclaim. In December, Mustafa headlined a show at Massey Hall, backed by the Toronto jazz group BadBadNotGood.

Members of Broken Social Scene worked with Mustafa at the Regent Park School of Music when he was in high school. Canning was impressed and ended up recording a song with the young artist in 2016. The song, “Sleeping Birds Like Lasers,” appeared on Canning’s 2016 solo album “Home Wrecking Years.”

“He was such a sweet guy,” Canning said. “I was like, who the f— is this guy, Mustafa? Now he’s playing Massey Hall with BadBadNotGood? Out of control.”

“A kid out of Regent Park, who has the odds stacked against him,” he continued. “That’s the Toronto story of today, as far as a collective goes.

“People will complain about Toronto and how it’s changed. And yeah, of course, younger people are getting priced out … but there’s enough here to live and be happy. And there’s some great people who live in the city. You just gotta make sure you find the good ones.”

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