Broken Social Scene Mix Group and Solo Songs for Sprawling Set

Compensating for the absence of its most famous member (Feist), Broken Social Scene showed that brass high-school band instruments do belong in rock. With Amy Millan serving as the token female representative, the predominately dude version of the Canadian collective zipped through dark solo-album gems by defacto leader Kevin Drew ("Pressure Kids," "Frightening Lives") and breezy offerings from bearded weirdo Brendan Canning ("Hit the Wall," the disco-driven "Love Is New") as well as a handful of BSS favorites ("Fire Eyed Boy"). Visually, the group resembled a cross between Miami Vice chic and thrift-store special, but there was nothing ironic about its liberating tunes. And lest anyone think that our neighbors to the north aren't nervous about America's decline, Drew reminded everyone that, "you're not just voting for your country, you're voting for every country."

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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