Hot off his third solo album, Brendan Canning lit up The Grad Club last Friday night with an eclectic set of cool rhythms and smooth vocals.   

Performing with his seven-piece band, Canning played new releases like, ‘Book it to Fresno’, ‘Hey Marika’, and ‘Vibration Walls’ from his fresh studio album, Home Wrecking Years. 

Canning is the co-founder of the Toronto indie music collective, Broken Social Scene. After parting ways in 2011, Broken Social Scene is staging a comeback with the release of a new album expected next year.  

Canning sat down before his performance, clad in a beanie and signature large-framed glasses, to discuss the Broken Social Scene reunion and his song writing process for his new solo album. 

“A couple of tunes started out acoustic, but generally for example, ‘Book it to Fresno’— that’s written with the band. ‘Hey Marika’, I think I was playing those chords with Social Scene,” Canning said. 

With widespread anticipation over the upcoming Broken Social Scene album, Canning discussed the origins of the band that he founded with his friend and fellow musician Kevin Drew in 1999.

“Kevin and I got together, he had a crew of people, I had a crew of people, some of that crew knew each other, it was just good timing. I was finished with the other musical stuff I was doing,” Canning said. 

Drew had put together a group of musicians including Charles Spearin, Emily Haines and James Shaw from Metric and Evan Cranley and Amy Millan from Stars, Canning said. 

“He had this whole thing going on and I wanted to be a part of it.”

Canning released his first solo album, Something for All of Us with Broken Social Scene in 2008. Being part of such a large band, Canning felt that it was something he had to do.   

“I guess it was kind of a necessary thing when you are in a band like Broken Social Scene. You don’t get your way all the time because you’ve got a lot of cooks in the kitchen,” Canning said reminiscing. “Kevin was working on his solo record at the time and it just seemed that I needed to do something on my own.”

This fall marks the 15-year anniversary of Broken Social Scene’s debut album Feel Good Lost. The album was re-mastered and released again under Canning’s record label Arts & Crafts.   

“It points some direction at the band’s re-launching and sheds some light on some older works that maybe lots of new people have missed,” Canning said. 

“We’re most known for one record essentially. The average music fan might know, ‘Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’; ‘Lover’s Spit’, ‘Cause=Time’,  or ‘Shoreline 7/4’, because we had these big indie songs from one record. But not too many people know Feel Good Lost, and its a different trip.”