There’s a point in every long music career where survival becomes more interesting than success. Not survival in the purely commercial sense. Not chart positions, algorithmic reach or streaming milestones. But survival of identity. Survival of friendship. Survival of purpose. The good stuff that can easily get buried away in the cut & thrust of a fickle business like music. That’s where Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene finds himself now, nearly 25 years after the collective first emerged from Toronto’s indie underground and quietly became one of the defining musical communities of the 2000s.Drew is thoughtful, funny, open & revealing; and utterly uninterested in rock mythology. There are no grand narratives about being an artist in the world of “rock & roll”. In fact, he actively rejects them.“I can’t handle any more Daisy Jones & The Six bullshit. It’s all drugs, drugs, drugs. The road’s about constipation, man. It’s not about partying. It’s about how my metabolism works on the road but nobody wants to make that movie.”The refusal to romanticise the cliché is central to Broken Social Scene’s longevity. And that’s just what we love about The Art of Longevity. In fact I’m going to call it “getting beyond the cliches of being an artist in the modern music business”. While many bands implode under the pressure of ego, success or repetition, Drew talks about music instead as community: messy, imperfect, emotional community.“Our success is not of an individual. It's a group of people. We’re in this together. We’re still going. Some of us have more success than others. Some people have swimming pools, some of us are renting. We have great lives, we have great kids, we have success, because success is honesty”. That philosophy runs through Remember the Humans, the band’s first album in nine years. It’s a record shaped not by urgency or any loud “comeback” ambition, but by reflection. The album opens with a trio of mid-tempo songs, thereby breaking every rule there is in the modern biz. Except the three songs are just great, and set the listener up for a journey that ebbs & flows like all good albums do. A collective is a very different beast from a band. For the various rotating members of Broken Social Scene (some 20 I could count), life and careers intersect in a spaghetti junction of a band dynamic. Parents have died. Relationships have changed. Careers have diverged. Some members of the collective found “mainstream” success through projects like Feist, Metric and Stars. Others remained closer to the margins. “We’re not owed anything,” Drew says. “We already did the best we could. Our career peaked. We never made it into the mainstream. We never sold our catalog. We never signed the “big deal”. We never took the money, man. We stayed with the people.”As social scene indeed, and one very much not literally broken, but working just as it should. The Art of Longevity Season 13 is powered by Bang & Olufsen. The book of the podcast, Riding the Rollercoaster, is now available. Support the showGet more related content at: https://www.songsommelier.com/