Brendan Canning 'Something For All Of Us' album

Arts & Crafts is set to release the debut solo album from Brendan Canning, co-founder of the internationally acclaimed, Toronto-based rock collective, Broken Social Scene. The album, titled Something For All Of Us... is the second offering from the ”Broken Social Scene Presents” series, to be released throughout North America, July 22, 2008. Recorded and produced in Toronto by Canning along with Ryan Kondrat and John La Magna, the album features an assortment of guest musicians. Naturally, fellow BSS band-mates make up a large portion of the accompaniment, as well, contributions from Lisa Lobsinger (who was part of the 2005/2006 BSS touring lineup), Kevin Hearn (BNL, Lou Reed), Liz Powell (Land Of Talk) and Liam O’Neil (The Stills).

Something For All Of Us... showcases the many dimensions of Canning’s years of experience as a songwriter and proves his influence on the Broken Social Scene sound. " This record, for me, is not a huge departure from what we do as BSS," says Canning. "Its a natural progression really, and these songs will certainly be a part of the live performances to come, as Broken Social Scene."

Canning began his professional musical career in early 1990 with the influential rock band hHead (I.R.S. Records). The band found much regional success and established Canning as a key fixture in the Toronto music scene. He has gone on to perform and record with numerous artists such as Spookey Reuben (TVT), LEN (SONY), By Divine Right (Nettwerk) to mention only a few, prior to collaborating with Kevin Drew to form what is now Broken Social Scene. Brendan has spent the past two years between and during BSS tours, contributing music and scoring feature films (The Tracey Fragments, starring Ellen Page, the Oscar nominated Half Nelson, as well as the upcoming, Time Travelers Wife) and is the subject of the forthcoming Bruce McDonald directed documentary about Canning's prolific life and career.

Brendan Canning will be touring with Broken Social Scene, throughout the coming months with scheduled dates in over a dozen countries including Turkey, Russia, Finland and stops in the US and Canada. The band will be performing songs from Something For All Of Us...(2008), Broken Social Scene Presents: Kevin Drew Spirit If...(2007), Broken Social Scene (2005), You Forgot It In People (2002).

biography
What would you do if your bandmate put out a solo record and made you look like a lazy sod?

Would you a): tour the world with him to support his record, and between European and American runs, score a little art-house film by Bruce McDonald and starring Ellen Page?

OR Maybe you’d opt for plan b): squirrel yourself away in a studio around the corner with your neighbour, get comfortable, and write your own record utilizing the bits and bobs you collect off good friends who pass through and lend a hand? And, all the while, you bust your ass to help keep your soccer team in the premier division and still make it home by 7 every night to cook your girlfriend dinner?

But Brendan Canning didn’t earn the nickname The Champ for nothing — he chose both options. And he still DJed the odd party when asked. And star in an upcoming Bruce McDonald documentary about his life and career.

In January 2007, Canning — one half of the creative partnership that blossomed into Broken Social Scene — decided to make the most of the new year and began writing what would become the second offering from the “Broken Social Scene Presents” series, following the September 2007 release of fellow BSS co-founder Kevin Drew’s Spirit If…

Anyone who’s seen Broken Social Scene live over the past seven years had an idea of what to expect from Drew’s album — after all, he voices the majority of BSS’ euphoric anthems and bruised ballads, and also tends to dominate the stage banter. But with Canning — the cornerstone of the band’s rhythmic foundation — there’s less empirical evidence with which to form expectations. To date, he’s only taken the lead on three BSS songs, each of them very drastically different from each other: the clap-happy cacophony of “Stars and Sons” (from 2002’s You Forgot It In People), the free ’n’ easy west-coast cruiser “Handjobs for the Holidays” (a respite from the simmering tension of 2005’s Broken Social Scene) and the understated psychedelic piano serenade “Market Fresh” (a 2003 B-side).

“Something for all of us…” thus presents Canning with an opportunity to both reintroduce and reinvent himself. Some songs provide an immediate sense of comfort and familiarity: “Chameleon,” with its slow-building, time-lapsed ecstatic release, sounds just like the sort of brass-blasted ambient bliss BSS were coming up with regularly on the Ted’s Wrecking Yard stage back in 2001; and after all these years of Drew and Canning working together, the insta-anthem “Churches Under the Stairs” provides the very first occasion for them to share a duet. But the music on “Something for all of us…” is as much of a reflection of Canning’s life outside BSS as within. Though the album features the expected assemblage of BSS buds (including Drew, drummer Justin Peroff, Jimmy Shaw on horns, and Lisa Lobsinger on vocals), the bulk of “Something for all of us…” was written and recorded with relative newcomers — and next-door neighbours — Ryan Kondrat and John la Magna. Its 11 tracks are informed equally by Canning’s time spent as a Sonic Youth/Dinosaur Jr.-worshipping indie-rocker in the early ’90s (see: the fuzz-covered opening title track, “Hit the Wall”), an active Toronto disco/house DJ (the spiky cowbell funk of “Love Is New”) and a bedroom electronic producer (the glitch-tronic instrumental “All the Best Wooden Toys Come From Germany”). But the album also exposes heretofore unheard Champ-ian sounds: “Snowballs & Icicles” is an uncharacteristically stark and vulnerable acoustic elegy that sounds like it slipped out of John Lennon’s White Album demo bag; “Antique Bull” is a rollicking, piano-rolled folk shanty with a winsome lead vocal from Lisa Lobsinger; “Possible Grenade” is a dark, menacing rumble of a track that yields to a suitably stormy finale.

Inhabiting that undefined space where rhythm, melody and noise coalesce, “Something for all of us...” offers 11 different perspectives on Brendan Canning without ever defining him by any one. If Canning was something of an enigma to Broken Social Scene fans before listening to this album, its greatest triumph is that, now, he seems like even more of one.

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Brendan Canning - Something For All Of Us