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Kevin Drew Collaborations Revealed On Spirit If…
http://www.filter-mag.com| 08.02.2007For the upcoming Kevin Drew album, not only will you get a plethora of the usual Broken Social Scene suspects, but you’ll also get a little hint of dinosaur, a piece of pavement and a cochrane, for good measure of course. Spirit If… out September 18, courtesy of Arts&Crafts, boasts a long list of contributors and collaborations. Most notable and surprising are J Macasis of Dinosaur Jr, Scott Kannberg of Pavement and Tom Cochrane of…well none other than the 1991 classic, "Life Is A Highway". Yes, that song.
Lead single, "Backed Out on the…", has no current release date, but Drew and his rotating list of friends/bandmates will be showing off the new material at the McCarren Park Pool in Brooklyn on August 29th.
Wonder if Mr. Macasis plays guitar or drums…
http://www.drownedinsound.com/articles/2386640″>http://www.drownedinsound.com/articles/2386640
Excerpt:
And you’ve got J Mascis on there, too, playing on ‘Backed Out On The…’ How did you find working with him, and it’s quite clear that you’re a fan?
You can’t glorify these things, but it was great. We went to his house and hung out for a few hours, and I think he did two takes. That was it. He did two solos, and he asked if we wanted anything else. I was like, “What are we asking you for?â€Yet when I go to sleep at night, I still want this to somehow lead back into Pavement getting together again. Come on Spiral!
~Jeremy~
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/45640-spirit-if”>http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/r … -spirit-if
"Broken Social Scene Presents: Kevin Drew". The phrasing is clunky and opportunistic, with BSS co-founder and leader Drew cashing in on a beloved brand while also putting his name on the album cover in big letters. But, as exhaustive as it may seem, it’s accurate. With its shaggy grace, love-is-life proclamations, and lengthy guest list (23 people, mostly BSS regulars, play or sing on the record), Spirit If… could pass for a relatively low-key follow-up to 2005’s blown-out Broken Social Scene. But with Drew taking sole songwriting credit for half of the album’s toned-down tracks and covering lead vocal duties on nearly every song, there’s also a strong solo vibe. So, in essence, we get Kevin Drew’s break-up record, as played by Broken Social Scene; it’s a savvy compromise only a collective as familial as BSS could pull off.
While the popularity of Broken Social Scene skyrocketed over the past four years, Drew remained something of an unknown thanks to the group’s all-for-one nature and its more magazine-friendly female talents, Leslie Feist and Metric’s Emily Haines. But to know Spirit If… is to know Kevin Drew: One-time teenage burn-out, current 31-year-old master of scruff, and lifelong romantic. He hugs audience members during shows, and once described his band’s objective to the New York Times Magazine with all the quixotic wonder of a wide-eyed Bono: "We want to affect audiences’ hearts and minds with honesty." He’s not afraid to include "the kiss in Winnipeg" and "the man who taught me love is free" in his album’s laundry list of thank you’s. He’s a modern hippie, though instead of growing up listening to the Grateful Dead and the Doors, Drew worshiped idols that fall squarely within the classic-rock-subverting indie canon: Sonic Youth, Pavement, and Dinosaur Jr. Consequently, Spirit If… offers jams that don’t really jam, acoustic ballads about fights and lies, and lushly orchestrated songs that come together effortlessly while cracking up hopelessly.Toying with the idea of stops and starts, the record begins with a send-off and ends with a beginning. Alarm-clock opener "Farewell to the Pressure Kids" is a red herring: At first, its blasting intro (stuffed with vibes, avalanche drum fills, stacked guitars, and unintelligible vocals), seems to pick up right where Broken Social Scene’s epic closer "It’s All Gonna Break" left off. But, after two minutes of organized chaos, the song– a cryptic exorcism decrying those who "love to hate"– settles into a homely, quiet groove more indicative of the record’s unplugged amibiance. It’s the sound of Drew deflating his own bombast in favor of a style that’s more personal and direct.
The singer once said 2002’s You Forgot It In People "was made with hope" while Broken Social Scene "was made with fear." Spirit If… was seemingly made with pained desperation. On the album, when Drew isn’t pining over a "fucked up kid" amidst images of violence and death, he’s confessing his sins while lamenting someone who’s "too beautiful to fuck." His words can be frustratingly obtuse: "Cats and Christ put you in a tiny box that’s filled with all victims," goes one especially head-scratching line. But Drew’s random imagery is often translated through straightforward hooks that wisely cut through the dense murk. So while the enlightenment-themed stand-out "Bodhi Sappy Weekend" includes boggling lyrics like, "With our clothes on fire/ I guess we both can wait/ I built an ark for sure," the pleading refrain ("please don’t scratch me out") is crushing in its bluntness as it ties the tune together.
The lucidity of Drew’s musical influences also lend Spirit If… an understood universality (within indie rock circles, at least): Much of the album could double as an early 90s our-band-could-be-your-life cassette mix. But there’s a key difference to, say, Spirit If…’s Dinosaur Jr. tribute "Backed Out on the…" compared to every other Dino-aping rip-off out there: Drew actually recruited J Mascis to spew scalding distortion all over the track. The same first-hand method is employed on the album’s only other out-and-out rocker, "Lucky Ones", which boasts some twisting Spiral Stairs-style guitar work from (yep) Spiral Stairs. The indie-star guests are just another example of Drew making the anything-goes BSS collective philosophy work for him– and a great way to beat name-that-influence critics at their own game.
"The whole idea of starting or finishing something is one of the scariest things in the world to me," Drew told Pitchfork in 2005. Recorded in a hotel room in Norway, the country-style ditty "When It Begins" is a fitting, clear-headed capper to the album that finds Drew facing his fears head-on. "It’s gonna be really hard when we get to the end/ Well, you love the start but really it’s just to begin," he sings, accompanied by a little strumming and just a few singing Scene-sters. The song’s circlular logic is an apt summation of it all– the album, relationships, bands, tours, etc.– at once almost naively common and, within the context of the record, disarmingly personal. Then there’s the tattooed-heart kicker: "But don’t forget what you felt." Confounding yet emotionally bare, derivative yet singular, profane yet child-like, solo yet not so solo, Kevin Drew doesn’t shy away from his contradictions on Spirit If…. He revels in them.
-Ryan Dombal, September 17, 2007
Kevin Drew
The co-founder of Broken Social Scene branches out on his own — sort of.
By Cory CasciatoKevin Drew is pacing the streets of Birmingham, England, a little on edge and distinctly agitated. Two days ago, Bill Priddle, a guitarist he calls "the driving force in terms of the guitar playing in the band," broke his collarbone, putting the future of Drew’s tour in jeopardy.
"We’re kind of scrambling with our heads cut off to figure out how to keep the show together," explains the Broken Social Scene co-founder. "And this is the first time we’ve ever been in a position like this, where we’ve worked really hard to put together a good, tight, six-person live show. We know we’ve got a lot going against us because of our reputation as a 32-person band and stuff like that. My head is kind of caught up in the idea of trying to figure out what to do next here.
"Right now it’s really up in the air in terms of…I don’t even know if we’ll be on the road right now," he goes on. "I’m not trying to be dramatic. In my headspace right now, we have two more shows to go through, and then we’ve gotta figure out in four days how we’re going to do this North American tour."
Drew’s tension is understandable. His latest record, Broken Social Scene Presents: Kevin Drew Spirit If…, is receiving warm critical reception, the hard work he’s put into taking the show on the road is in danger of unraveling, and he’s on the spot doing an interview with someone who’s a continent away.
"You know, when your guitar player breaks his collarbone and you’re stuck in this crazy English town with shit monitors and the fate of your North American tour is up in the air, it’s kind of difficult to bust into ‘Well, when we made the album…’ you know?" he says with a laugh. "Because you have to go back to that place of what you were doing and how it went down. It’s strange; it’s a strange thing. It’s like me calling you up when you’re right in the middle of arguing with your wife and trying to figure out where your in-laws are going to sleep, and I’m calling to ask you about ‘Is your carpet really possessed’ or…’" he trails off. "I don’t know what I’m talking about anymore."
Despite his protestations, Drew has no problem expounding at length about his motivations and mood while making the record once he gets going. The unwieldy name and confusing is-it-or-isn’t-it-a-solo album evolved out of the genuinely collective nature of Broken Social Scene, the band/musical commune he co-founded with Brendan Canning, who has his own BSS Presents album coming out sometime soon.
"When we were doing these recordings," Drew recounts, "and I was off recording and Canning started recording, we sort of decided that we should start this series so that it keeps us within our fans and our family, and obviously, everybody is all over the album at one point. Rather than try to figure out a way of either taking the name and making it our own or starting some sort of solo side project, we thought we’d do this series so that we could have another filter that gives us another way to put out more music.
"That gives us a way to put out more recordings," he goes on, "and to figure out what’s going on in terms of — we have so many B-sides and so many soundtrack works now. We just have stacks and stacks of things that, within Broken Social Scene, we were never able to put out. So this series gives us another option of a way to put things out into the world."
The album, Drew says, also served as an important return to the natural, unforced methods of working and recording that marked the early Broken Social Scene records, methods that were forced to change in the face of the success of You Forgot It in People, the group’s breakout 2003 album. That disc launched the group to widespread acclaim and helped spark the success of several of members’ individual bands, including Feist and Metric. It also helped put Canada on the indie-rock map and contributed toward the success of fellow Canucks such as the Arcade Fire. The pressure to produce another hit to follow People was substantial and didn’t sit well with Drew.
"I actually like that record [Broken Social Scene’s self-titled album] more than You Forgot It in People," he points out. "I was happy with it. I just think the process, and the position we were in…. There’s a lot of people who can handle being in bands and going for it and wanting it. We were not like that, and we were sort of put in this position where I think we were listening to everyone in the press and all the people working around us. I feel like that affected the record.
"I’m a real music person," he adds. "I adore it. I love it. I love all kinds of it, and I love making it. I love writing lots of songs very quickly, and I love getting to the point really quickly with music, and that one took a long time. This one, Spirit If…, was recorded over a period of two years, but it didn’t take a long time. It was just that we were recording tons and tons, and there was a lot more freedom to it in terms of being able to realign myself with everything I just said."
Spirit If… certainly sounds like a Broken Social Scene record, with a few differences. It has the same kind of intricate, quirky arrangements and big, sprawling songs spilling over with hooks, but with one man taking point throughout, it has more focus and a more personally idiosyncratic sound. On the other hand, it could have more easily been marketed as a straight-up Broken Social Scene release than as a strictly Kevin Drew solo record. Drew explains all this in a charmingly candid way.
"It could be my slacker mentality or my lack of a work ethic," he offers, "but I never enjoy really, really working hard for things that I feel should just sort of come naturally, you know? I don’t really have a story, either. I do these interviews, I try to filter myself, I try to sort of be smart about things and say things, and at the end of the day — I mean, fucking, I can’t. I’m not a rock star. It’s not my living, it’s not my destiny. Music is just something I love to do. The moment I don’t, it just cancels itself out.
"I love my friends," he continues. "I love making music with people. It’s an addiction of mine. I had no desire to sit in a kitchen and play every single instrument and strum a guitar and turn on a reverb pedal and talk about my mother. What I wanted to do, you know, was bring in the army, as always, and play with people and feed off people’s energy and be a vampire-with-a-conscience kind of thing. And that’s how this record kind of got made."
Given a final opportunity to speak about whatever’s on his mind, Drew opts not to talk about his record, his muse or his own greatness. Instead he wants to know where the results of the interview will eventually appear and to reassure fans that the show will indeed go on.
"Denver — I like it there," he enthuses. "I like that town. It’s really relaxing. When we get there — which we will, because we will find a way, like we always do — I’m just excited to go up to the top of that mountain. I always go up there every time, the one that’s kind of in the heart of Boulder.
"I’ve spent some good times up there, some kind of teenage times, even when I wasn’t a teenager," he recalls. "And to breathe that kind of air, that’s the kind of air that makes you able to keep going. I should do all my interviews there. That would be good."
"It also helped put Canada on the indie-rock map and contributed toward the success of fellow Canucks such as the Arcade Fire."
Yeah, I almost beg to differ. I think it was the other way around.
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