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Episode 2 covers a lot of ground. We bounce from New York to the Pacific Northwest, Albuquerque, Toronto, Omaha, the UK, and Chapel Hill, and every city had a story we wanted to tell. Toronto's story belonged to the Arts & Crafts bands, including Broken Social Scene and Kevin Drew, and to Jeffrey Remedios, co-founder of the label and the band’s one time manager who started out as a Virgin Records radio guy.
That argument turned into a friendship, and the friendship turned into a business. Jeffrey and Kevin ended up as roommates for six months, and Jeffrey got a front-row seat to the making of You Forgot It in People. Broken Social Scene was throwing shows billed as release parties for Feel Good Lost and then playing almost none of it, instead debuting songs they'd written live or the night before with whichever friends showed up. Jeffrey was a major-label guy in the middle of a Napster-sized crisis of faith, and what he heard in that studio floored him. He pitched Kevin and Brendan Canning on what he called "a 2.0 music company," part label, part management, part publisher, and then quit his job to build it. That's Arts & Crafts.
When you listen to to Episode 4, you will find out that licensing a song to be used in a Hummer commercial was the line nobody wanted to cross. Jeffrey says Broken Social Scene faced that choice early. An ad agency in Europe loved You Forgot It in People and wanted a song for a campaign. The money was staggering. "I forget the actual amount, but it was something like 250 or $300,000," he says. "More money than any of us were going to make all year combined." The band said no. Jeffrey says the conversation clarified what they were willing to do and what they weren't. "We did want those sorts of opportunities, but there had to be on some level aligned with the ethos and values." That's the sellout debate in miniature, and it was a debate a lot of bands were having in this era.
Before there was a Hummer offer to turn down, there was a trip to CMJ in New York with no hotel. They crashed on the floor of Metric's apartment, where Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw were living and that they shared with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in the heyday of New York’s music scene, and Jeffrey remembers the place as "all artists." The marketing plan was simple. "Kevin and I were armed with two boxes of You Forgot It," he says. "And we just try to meet people and give them out." The guerrilla marketing was indie as fuck, and this was exactly what festivals like CMJ were for.
Kevin told you about the Pitchfork review that changed everything. That spring, not long after, BSS drove down to South by Southwest for a single show at a small club called Momo's, right before the Stills, who had just signed to Vice and had every industry person in town curious. The way SXSW works, you get there early to get in because clubs can’t let people in past capacity, so a lot of those folks caught BSS while they were waiting. Jeffrey says that one set led to their U.S. agent, press, a UK major-label deal he calls "quite failed," and festival bookings across Europe and Asia. "All out of that one show," he says. "It was quite a special time."
Jeffrey, by the way, is now the CEO of Universal Music Canada, a job he never saw himself taking after swearing off majors in the early 2000s. He told us the culture he found was unrecognizable from the one he left, which feels like exactly the kind of plot twist this story keeps handing us.
If you want the Toronto story from the artist's side, don't miss our bonus interview with Kevin Drew. Put the two conversations together and you get a friendship, an argument, and a pile of burned CDs that somehow turned into a movement.
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