Pitchfork

Yesterday morning, like a tide of panic and dismemberment, reports came flooding into the Pitchfork inbox that tireless Toronto collective Broken Social Scene had plans to release not one, not two, but three new albums by this time next year. The source of the infoleak, Canadian news site Chartattack, had gotten the crazy idea from peripheral BSS figure Jason Collett, who told them, "We're putting out three records at staggered times. So we're starting in the fall and there will be one in the new year and then there will be one within that same year as well."

The ambitious 2005-06 agenda that Collett-- a longtime friend of the band's, and now an official group member-- had laid out for Broken Social Scene came as something of a surprise to BSS co-founder Kevin Drew and the Arts & Crafts label. All that's known at this early juncture, they say, is that there's one album in the works, tentatively slated for a fall release, and a whole lot of other stuff that remains up in the air: "We accumulated over 200 minutes of music," Drew told Pitchfork yesterday, "and we're trying to figure out what to do with it all."

"They recorded a lot of songs they've been playing live for the last two years, and at the same time they went in and wrote a ton of new stuff," says Arts & Crafts co-owner Jeffrey Remedios during a phone conversation last night. "The idea now is to bring it out in a way that suits the music. [There are] probably around 25 or 30 songs that could technically be three albums' worth of material, but there are no plans to put out three records. It might be a double album, maybe. It might be two albums slightly spaced apart, but the band is still a long way off from deciding anything."

At present, it's been more than three years since Broken Social Scene issued You Forgot It in People, the fall 2002 triumph that won them a Juno Award in their homeland for "Alternative Album of the Year" and made them one of the underground's most beloved bands virtually overnight. It will be very close to four years between records by the time this release hits stores. What's the hold-up?

"We got lost," Drew explains. "We kept writing the whole time. [You Forgot It in People producer] Dave Newfeld has been working for three years straight now. All he does is work. He got addicted to the idea of trying to top YFIP. His massage therapist says he might die in 10 years unless he changes his lifestyle. We don't have much time. Can't imagine making records without Newf. [We] owe him more than most could know."

We're not sure why massage therapists are in any position to make these kinds of diagnoses, but sources close to the band have compared Newfeld's work ethic and perfectionist streak to those of shut-ins Kevin Shields and Brian Wilson, who, at their creative peaks, were notoriously incapable of accepting a track or album as being finished. Remedios puts it gentler: "He's a wonderful genius, and with that it gets really beautifully intense and insane. He gets things really far, and then he pulls them right away, and then he goes back again, and somewhere in there comes out this beautiful approach to a record."

Either way, Broken Social Scene haven't been recording exclusively with Newfeld. "We actually had two studios running at the same time," Collett revealed to Chartattack. "Charlie [Spearin, guitar/trumpet for BSS] and Ohad [Benchetrit, of Do Make Say Think] have been working out of Ohad's place. And then Dave Newfeld's been mixing and having people record."

Says Drew, "Charlie Spearin and Ohad saved us with their little baby girls and mother-in-law cooking. [We] started to come up with more songs." Remedios chalked the decision up to a matter of simple convenience: "They were working at Newfeld's, but as people were going in and out, Brendan [Canning, BSS co-founder] and Kevin started going over to Ohad's studio. It was a creative choice-- they were working at Newfeld's as fast as they could, and felt like there was more that could be done at the same time, so they opened up a whole new outlet."

Meanwhile, as several contributors to You Forgot It in People struggled to focus on their own projects-- which include (but are certainly not limited to) Stars, Metric, Feist, and Apostle of Hustle-- Broken Social's scene expanded, with Benchetrit, Collett, and Stars' Amy Milan taking more prominent roles within the group, and rapper K-Os even stopping by to guest on a track (the fate of which, naturally, is yet to be determined).

Still, as much as these added contributions have aided production of the new material, it's remained difficult for the splintered collective to make any definitive decisions without all members present. "We've never been home long enough until now to make it take shape in order to finish it," says Collett. "It's still bizarrely democratic."

So where does that leave us? Drew insists the as-yet-untitled album is "almost done," and that, barring any major catastrophes, it will be out in autumn, at which point the group will launch a worldwide tour. "All we've done is captured a time in our lives," he says. "Raw fucking puke and love. At the end of the day it's just music made by people who don't own a filtering system."