Stephen Becker is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter. His latest record, Middle Child Syndrome, is out October 25, 2024.
Stephen Becker is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter; Charles Spearin is a Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who performs in Broken Social Scene and solo under his own name. Stephen’s latest record, Middle Child Syndrome, is out this Friday, and he and Charles will be playing together at Owl Music Parlor in Brooklyn next week, on October 30. So to celebrate, the two got on a call to catch up about it all.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Stephen Becker: How are you doing?
Charles Spearin: I’m doing good. I just got back from kind of a whirlwind Broken Social Scene tour. We did 12 flights in the last 14 days — sometimes it just doesn’t work out the way you want it to, and you end up zigzagging across the continent. So I’m a little shaken up from all that, but the shows were fun. It was a good time.
Stephen: Do you prefer flying tours to driving tours?
Charles: I much prefer a bus tour. Usually there’s 12 of us, including band and crew, and we can jam ourselves into a bus. And I bring a bicycle on tour, so I can wake up at 11 in the morning and just ride around whatever city I’m in for a few hours before soundcheck. It changes everything. It’s just the best. Turns out every American city is on a river, and every river has a bike path beside it, so I just wake up and look at Google Maps and then ride around. Since I’ve been doing that, I got to know all these cities really well, and seen more of America than I think most people do.
Stephen: Yeah, I’m still trying to figure that out. I just got back from a tour in the Midwest with my friend’s band, Strawberry Runners, and we were all cooped up in the van. I never bring running shoes, or exercise enough, and it ends up kind of wearing me down. It’s funny because when we met, I was on tour with Rubblebucket in Toronto and I was having a little nervous breakdown before the show — I was just feeling really exhausted and tired and frustrated, and I really wanted to go home and have some personal space. I remember sitting at the ramen shop across the street from the venue and crying into my ramen, and the whole Rubblebucket band rallying around me and supporting me and showing me a lot of love. And then the show ended up being great, but it was an emotional evening. Then I ended up meeting you in the green room right after the show.
Charles: Oh, I never would have guessed. The show was really great and you were quite nice. But I’m familiar with the feeling. Van touring — it’s not natural. It’s weird, claustrophobic. You get into this half-awake, half-asleep, looking out the window [headspace], and I don’t think it’s really healthy for you. But it’s married to a whole lot of good times and fun as well, so you put up with it. The mental health roller coaster of touring is real.
Stephen: Yeah. Does Broken Social Scene have a stable routine and system for going on tour?
Charles: Well, yes and no, because nothing is ever exactly the same. We do have our routine; we know how to be together. And after all these years, it’s kind of good and kind of bad, because everybody’s got different personalities, and different sides to their personalities. So when you put 12 people in a bus together, it’s really more like a hundred people. And if you take into account all those hundred people, some of them are bound to not get along so well. Like, one of my personalities is not going to get along so well with one of somebody else’s personalities, and if they happen to show up at the same time, then it’s challenging. So in that sense, we’ve kind of relegated ourselves to certain personalities when we tour, which is a weird feeling. Whenever I get on tour with Broken Social Scene, I feel like I turn into one person, and it’s a functioning situation, but he’s not my favorite person, really. He’s not my least favorite. But it’s a funny thing to assume a certain personality just for the tour, just because you know that it’s going to jive with everybody else.
Stephen: It’s tricky to find the right way to be on tour. I’m somebody who needs a lot of personal space, and you don’t really have that on tour when you’re crammed in a van and sharing hotel rooms. It’s really important to find that time to go on a walk or be in your headphones or do some breathing exercises, or bring a bike like you were saying before.
Charles: Yeah. And you know, it works for us. We try to keep things as routine as possible. Although sometimes the shows — for example, the last shows we did, we played in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and then we flew to Victoria, BC, which is several thousand miles away. It’s the absolute coast-to-coast of Canada. You have to just go with the tumult of it.
Stephen: One thing I’m wondering about is, what do you think is different about being in an indie rock band now than 20 years ago, when Broken Social Scene was first starting?
Charles: It is very different now. In the early days when we were touring, nobody had phones even, so there was no real communication with back home. It really was kind of like getting into a submarine and disappearing for a while. And then you would get into the city and try and find the weekly paper to see what’s going on, because you would arrive and have no idea what’s going on or where to go and how to find a restaurant. You just kind of stumble around in the dark and look backwards so you can find your way back to the venue. It really was the dark ages. Now you can keep in touch with your family and friends at home, and you can read about what’s going to happen in the city you’re going to so you can explore different things, and you look into different parks or different restaurants. So it’s a lot easier in that sense now. But the essence of it is still the same. You’re stuck together.
Stephen: I wonder if, ironically, it was easier to bring people out to shows back then, because people had less technology at home keeping them entertained.
Charles: I don’t know. I mean, it was hard to get people to come to shows back then, too. It sort of ebbs and flows. Sometimes live bands are popular and sometimes electronic music or DJs are popular. It slides back-and-forth — at least a few times in my life. Like, I remember in the ‘90s when all the live clubs turned into DJs, and then it kind of swung backwards. If you look at the top 10 albums now, most of them aren’t bands. They’re singers or electronic artists. So it seems to go back-and-forth.
But yeah, getting people out to the show — I always feel lucky that people come to our shows. I feel it’s quite fortuitous that I’m still invited to play shows in Salt Lake City and people will show up. It’s just nice to know that after all these years, people still appreciate it and would like to hear us. For Broken Social Scene, we’ve reached a kind of nostalgia stage. I think a lot of our audience are people who our album was super important to back when they were younger, and it reconnects them with certain feelings of youth or whatever. I mean, we do have new fans as well, which is nice, but for the most part, I think we are a bit of a nostalgia band now.
Stephen: Yeah. I mean, I still am, but certainly in the early 2000s I was a die hard fan of your guys’s first two records. The first time I saw you guys was with a bunch of my best friends at Outside Lands in 2008 — I think it was the first year they did the festival. My friends and I got there early to get spots in the front row, and that afternoon the lineup was Broken Social Scene and then Andrew Bird and Wilco. It was a really inspiring day, and is probably the reason I wanted to be a musician.
Charles: Oh, nice. I remember that summer so well. That whole summer, I think we played festivals every weekend, so it was like we were working on the weekend and then I would go home — and I had little kids at the time, so for Monday to Thursday, I would be home with my family, and then I’d fly off somewhere to some festival. It was kind of a perfect balance of work and family, and then blasts of rock stardom, which was still kind of novel. [Laughs.]
Stephen: So, what kind of music do you write separately from the band, for your various side projects?
Charles: Well, maybe before we get to me, can I just say that I finally listened to your album? I just listened to it, so I have fresh impressions, and I have to say I am freshly impressed. It’s beautiful. The sense of melody, the instrumentation, the lyrics… It’s quite a compelling record. I know I like a record when the lyrics and the sounds and the melodies trigger a kind of disappearance for me, where I’m listening and all of a sudden I find I’m thinking about something else… I don’t know what the word is — it’s not “escapism,” it’s not “transcendence.” It’s more like this spaciousness, where I feel like I’m not myself for a while, and I’m just listening to it and thinking thoughts. And I thought a lot of thoughts when I was listening to your record. There’s one song — “I held an echo in my head.” I love that image. That’s something that I relate to. I was just so impressed with the record, and I just wanted to say that I’m looking forward to giving it a second listen, because there’s a lot in it.
Stephen: Wow. First of all, thank you for listening to it. It really means a lot coming from somebody like yourself. This is my third album — it’s my second sort of songwriting album under my name, and it’s called Middle Child Syndrome.
Charles: And you recorded it at Figure 8. Did you work with Shahzad [Ismaily]?
Stephen: Well, we did record the basics at Figure 8 back in 2021. I had brought a bunch of demos and scratch takes into the studio, and then Adam Hirsch — who’s one of my oldest and best friends, and a longtime collaborator — engineered the session. Then I actually finished the record at home, mostly by myself, but I had a couple friends and singers come over and record, and some other people did some recording remotely. Then the record was later mixed by Philip Weintraub at his studio, Sugar Mountain. I had first met Phil when I was an intern at Figure 8 back in 2016, 2017. He was a house engineer at the time, and I was assisting engineers like Sam Owens and Eli Crews, and I was learning about microphones and outboard gear and consoles. It was, and still is, a really special community to be part of. At the time, I got to meet a lot of heroes of mine — it’d be like, “Oh, Bill Frisell is coming in to record, and then Sufjan Stevens and then Nels Cline.” It housed a lot of artists who were trying to make cool and weird and beautiful art, and I definitely wanted to bring that ethos into my record.
Charles: Well, it’s perfect. The engineering is really great. I mean, I talked about the melody and the lyrics and all that stuff, but also I can appreciate a good use of compression. Some of those cymbals sound really sweet.
Stephen: Yeah. It’s funny, I was relistening to some Broken Social Scene in anticipation of this conversation, and I was reflecting on how I feel like you guys were one of the first bands, at least of that era, who were making these indie rock records where there were songs at the core of it, but the production was extremely expansive and nuanced and cinematic. I mean, really, those albums play out like movies to me, and it was dawning on me how much the sounds of your records are kind of always in the back of my head when I’m making stuff nowadays.
Charles: Well, that’s very nice to hear. I definitely felt when we were making You Forgot It In People and especially the earlier stuff — I didn’t feel like we were carving our own path, but we were definitely straying away from what was on the radio. There was a lot of consistency across the radio spectrum of how a kick drum was supposed to sound and how a snare drum was supposed to sound; there was kind of a mix template, which was really boring to us. So we really prioritized the joy of experimentation in recording. I think that was maybe what really carried us through with the albums, the joy of experimentation and playfulness in terms of sounds. And I do feel that in your music as well. Everything is a yes if you’re not trying to create some sound. Whatever feels good is good.
Stephen: Yeah. I think the way that you guys experimented at the time really resonated with me. Even just the fact that you guys would have all of these instrumental interludes throughout the album and lots of ambient sections and improvisation — that was really refreshing for me to hear at the time, especially as compared to all the music I was hearing on the radio. Some of which I really loved. I just think you guys were different.
Charles: I wanted to ask you about that, actually. Because there’s just so much music now — something like 100,000 songs are added to Spotify every day, or something insane — how do you feel about the glut of music out there? I think you referenced in one of your songs Trash Island — like, you don’t know where the trash goes, and somewhere in the ocean is this enormous island the size of Texas floating around that’s made of trash. I feel like when I release music, it’s like one little plastic bead that somehow floats its way to Trash Island, which is Spotify. I don’t know how to process that. I’m so much more of a community person. And there’s a great live community in Toronto, and I love going to shows. But when I release music on my own, when it’s not Broken Social Scene, which has an audience, I just feel like this little plastic bead of my heart is floating out to Trash Island, and I don’t know how to relate to that.
Stephen: I’ve never heard it put that way. I definitely suffer from choice paralysis. I can get really overwhelmed in trying to keep up with new music. And yet, it’s part of my work and my life. But I struggle to keep up. I’ll also just have days where I’m working on music all day, and then for the remainder of the day when I’m outside, when I’m commuting, I prefer to not listen to music. I’d rather read or think about stuff or write notes in my phone or listen to birds or whatever. But then weeks of that will go by and I’ll feel really behind on new music. So when I’m in that position, what I usually do is turn to my friends and think about, OK, who in my community has been releasing music, and then I’ll use that as a way to find what to listen to.
Charles: That’s what I do.
Stephen: I also just wanted to say, it’s funny that you bring up the quote about the Trash Island, because a lot of people seem struck by that lyric. In that lyric, I’m referencing a movie called Sex, Lies, and Videotape by Steven Soderbergh. Have you seen that?
Charles: I think I saw it a long, long time ago, but I don’t remember the scene or the reference.
Stephen: The scene that I’m referencing is the opening scene of the movie. It’s the main character, this woman who’s in therapy and she’s talking about this anxiety that she has about what’s happening with all the trash in the world. Like, where is it going and how are we managing it? And she starts to imagine this trash monster that’s producing trash. I just thought it was a really striking monologue and speaks to the kind of eco-anxiety that a lot of us feel, certainly about plastic never degrading and forever chemicals and stuff. It definitely also relates to the state of the world of art, and overproduction, mass production, as well as overconsumption.
Charles: It can be overwhelming. I think my antidote is kind of the same as yours, which is to focus on your friends and their music and the local scene. Both of us are blessed to have brilliant musicians around us. Toronto is just alive with incredible musicians and experimental music and good people doing good music. And I feel the same kind of thing in New York when I go there.
Stephen: Tell me about the Toronto scene. What are some artists there that I probably don’t know about?
Charles: There are a lot. There’s a band called Bernice —they’re a trio, and the three of them, Phil Melanson and Robin Dann and Thom Gill, are involved in so many other projects, and then those projects are involved in other projects. I feel like Bernice is kind of the center of everything interesting in my world right now, and I love the three of them so much. Anytime I see a project where any one of them is going to be involved, I’ll go and check it out. And through that, I’ve discovered some of the best music I’ve ever heard. I’ve gone to the Tranzac, which is a little club down the street, on a Tuesday night and left in tears because it’s just so beautiful. The music is just so, so incredible. There really is this incredible community of musicians who never get heard, essentially, but support each other and enjoy their lives nonetheless, you know?
Stephen: Yeah. That reminds me of this place called The Owl in Brooklyn, which is my favorite venue in the city and is very much this hub of a lot of brilliant and creative and weird artists and songwriters making music for each other. It’s a lot of people who the world doesn’t know about, and should know about. We’re doing a show there together on October 30, and I’m so gracious that you’ll be on the bill, too.
Do you feel that with Broken Social Scene you already have this outlet for indie rock and songwriting stuff, and so then in your own music that you put out under your name, do you feel more interested in experimentation and sort of more left field, high concept compositional ideas?
Charles: Absolutely. I mean, the other itch has been scratched. [Laughs.] I’m not going to release a lot of Broken Social Scene sounding music, because I don’t need to. I have that outlet already. So I’m fortunate in my community and [that] I have enough name recognition that some people will come to my shows and I can try interesting-to-me concepts and feel like I’m understood or like I’m heard. You know, there’s plenty of brilliant musicians around who don’t have any audience at all, and that’s tough. I get the good fortune of having both worlds where I can go and play in front of a lot of people, or I can play in front of a few people doing some more experimental ideas.
Stephen: That’s really inspiring to hear. I went to Oberlin College where I was studying jazz and improv, and where there was a really exciting compositional department, and you had all these composers who were writing graphic scores and multimedia pieces and programmatic music. There was all this really interesting experimentation happening, and that energy just hasn’t really been as much part of my life recently. I mean, I’m always trying to channel it to some extent, but when I’m playing in bands and performing songs — my songs or other people’s songs — it’s a much different thing.
Charles: Well, it’s good. The songwriter thing is working. I’m glad you’re doing that right now, because I enjoy listening to it.
Stephen: Oh, thank you. This conversation is reminding me how much when I’m playing shows with my band, I want to just drop everything and improvise for 10 minutes.
Charles: I mean, improvising is one type of experimentation, but there’s also just following an interesting concept and seeing where it goes. I do both. I play an improvised session with Karen Ng — she’s a saxophone player who’s a dear friend of mine, and we play together occasionally as a duo, just all improv, and that’s really enjoyable. I love that that’s a kind of meditation in a way. But also, it’s good to find curious concepts and see where they lead. Years ago I did The Happiness Project — people do this all the time now, and I wasn’t the first, but it was something I wanted to explore, which was the cadence of people’s voices as they speak. I interviewed my neighbors about happiness, and their voices would go up and down as they talked about their thoughts on happiness. And then I played the cadence on different instruments and arranged them into songs. People do that all the time now — you see it on Instagram and stuff — and there are people much better at it than I was. But still, it was really fun to try that and see if I could pick little melodies out of people’s speech and then make that the chorus of the song or something like that. The one I’m doing now is about the Doppler effect and how that would feel as music. These are the things that get me excited outside of Broken Social Scene and the band stuff.
Stephen: Cool. Well, we maybe have hit our time, and I don’t want to keep you too long.
Charles: I really enjoyed this conversation, and I’m very much looking forward to our show together.
Stephen: Yeah, same here!
You can catch Stephen and Charles at Owl Music Parlor in Brooklyn next week, on October 30.
