So you bring this all in - all these great people - and you make it become part of your songs and it was something. They were all in a speed metal band, for Christ’s sake. They’ve been playing together since they were 16. They’re not out there pouring wine all over their testicles and acting crazy. I went to mountains, I went to lakes, and I just had people beside. Dave Hamelin, who produced it and mixed it, along with a gentleman named Graham Lessard who also recorded and produced it. I think that’s the only way you can do anything, so going into this thing it was the cliff jumping, sky diving moment that really makes it fun. Of course when you’re 20 years old you have yet to accumulate baggage and you’re just feeling like everything could be yours. Accidental - he’s a Buddhist who said to me, “Let’s make honest music.” I was 20 years old. I remember Charles Spearin - who I’ve made every record with since I started, with K.C. I’m a pretty strong and intentioned person, but I had a lot of great support behind me in making this record, helping it to just be something honest and something real. I do look around and see people and watch them go through the world, especially the ones that are lost, and I always try to see who’s in their periphery, who they have in their surroundings. I’m fortunate with the people I have in my life, I’m very fortunate. It’s just so tiring and a waste of heartbeats, as my man Andy Kim would say, we only have so many heartbeats. I was stopping the band and finding myself sulking in a very tired manner and just felt disappointed with being disappointed.
This seems to be what this record is all about.ĭREW: Yeah, you’re right. STEREOGUM: In the press materials you mention that rather than employ a bunch of different studio tricks and experiments, sometimes it is just about letting the things come out of you that are naturally supposed to come out of you. As you get older you become more and more like yourself, and as you become more like yourself it becomes easier express what you’re feeling. I don’t put these records out a lot, so I always feel like you have to make it count. The most loving, if that makes sense.ĭREW: Well you know, that’s the goal. STEREOGUM: I think it’s one of the most beautiful things you’ve made, actually. STEREOGUM: I’ve been spending some time with your new record… We talked for over an hour, mostly about - surprise! - sex, love, and making music. I called up Kevin Drew at his home in Canada, where he was simultaneously nursing a beer and taking a bath.
Though Drew says that the record is about “the rise and fall of love and sex,” the album feels less like a hook-up or a make-out session and more like a nice hug - a warm embrace and a pat on the back from someone who loves you… and may or may not try to sleep with you later. While so much of the energy in Broken Social Scene often felt decidedly fraught - the resulting collision of so many personalities and points of view - Drew’s solo work on Darlings sounds remarkably relaxed.
The unfussy, sanguine nature of many of Darlings’ best tracks (“It’s Cool,” “You Gotta Feel It”) signals a quiet shift in perspective. Much of the record was written at the same time Drew was also working on songs with famed Canadian songwriter Andy Kim (the man responsible for classic megahits like “Sugar Sugar” and “Rock Me Slowly”), and that experience seems to have provided a much-needed shot in the arm. That being said, Darlings is also arguably the most swooningly romantic and perhaps the most wonderfully humane thing Drew has ever dreamt up. Given that the first single from his forthcoming solo album, Darlings, is called “Good Sex” - the sorta-NSFW video for which we are premiering below - it would stand to reason that the album might easily be the most forcefully lascivious thing Drew has ever created.
At a time when so many dudes in indie rock seem to conflate sensitivity and sexlessness, Drew stands out for having never shied away from digging into the nuts-and-bolts and bodily fluids of human intimacy. A self-described “failed romantic,” Drew’s songwriting oeuvre - both as a member of Broken Social Scene and as a solo artist - is filled with tunes that explore the various ways, both physical and emotional, that people attempt to connect with each other. Anyone who has ever listened closely to Kevin Drew’s songs - or logged any interview time with him - will tell you that Drew is quite unabashedly a lover, not a fighter.
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