Like a lot of musicians, Brendan Canning of Broken Social Scene prefers moving forward to looking back. But also like a lot of musicians, he and his bandmates have had their career put in park by the pandemic. So this week, the long-running, ever-evolving Toronto indie-rock collective are taking a glance in the rear-view mirror with the rarities retrospective Old Dead Young.
The album collects more than a dozen B-sides, outtakes, demos and other recordings pulled from 20 years of singles, compilations, soundtracks, unreleased music and hard-to-find releases. But it’s no cobbled-together collection of random junk and half-finished experiments: Many if not most of the cuts are every bit as good as anything the band have released on their five official albums. A few days before Old Dead Young was released, Canning — who co-founded BSS with Kevin Drew in 1999 — got on the Zoom to talk about the new /album, songwriting, the band’s future, bad movies he’s scored, the proper temperature for a cheese platter and a lot more. Enjoy. Then listen to Old Dead Young below and get more BSS at their website, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
