Maybe It's Unbearable

Broken Social Scene: 'Superconnected'

Was my go-to happy song actually about crushing despair? An inconclusive investigation, conducted back and forth across the sea of time.

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In my third year of college I played this song first thing most mornings. The opening is sleepy and anticipatory at the same time, the guitar rock equivalent of a runner yawning and stretching in the last minutes before a race. Then everything kicks in: drums and bass and layers upon layers of guitar and singing (and, eventually, whispering and yelling and screeching), all the pieces smushed together into a muddy wave of noise that, every morning, picked me up and pushed me forward.

I listened to Broken Social Scene a lot that year, and might have identified them as my favorite contemporary band, despite finding their name almost too embarrassing to say out loud. I liked their music, but I was equally taken with their mythology – with the idea of a large, semi-improvised, constantly shapeshifting collective of friends and lovers, channeling their lives into song, taking indie rock (whatever that was) by storm.

Superconnected: the word seemed to describe the band itself, but also something about my own life (especially the way it felt when I was listening to “Superconnected”!). My first year of college I hadn’t made many friends. But then I transferred. Things got better. By my third year, to my relief, I had what felt to me like lots of friends, in a few overlapping groups. Some of them liked Broken Social Scene, and one night we drove into Philadelphia to see them play. So many people on stage together! So chaotic but so coordinated! We talked about it for months afterward, almost like a supernatural event we’d witnessed together, one that contained some kind of truth about the correct way to exist in the world.

When I played “Superconnected” in my room I danced around, banging on air drums, strumming my air guitar, giving silent thanks for my good fortune.

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I rarely have Broken Social Scene in heavy rotation anymore, but now and then I’ll spend a day replaying all of my old favorites, or clicking through the offerings on streaming, looking for odds and ends – bonus tracks, alternate versions, live recordings – I’ve missed on previous hunts.

This was what brought me, a few years ago, to a version of “Superconnected” recorded live in 2018 at Nashville’s Third Man Records.¹ It’s a stripped back, subdued performance; I doubt it would have grabbed my attention if not for the the spoken introduction by Kevin Drew, the band’s de facto frontman.

“There are a lot of people struggling, a lot of people leaving,” Drew says. “And, um, some of them chose their own exits, and we’re gonna sing this song for them.”

I’ve never been especially invested in what songs I love are “really” about. But the possibility that my old getting-pumped-in-the-morning, ecstatic-to-have-friends song might possibly be about suicide was disorienting. I actually got a little dizzy. The lyrics – which I’d mostly written off as evocative nonsense – suddenly sounded different. I don’t want to think about those things anymore sounded different. It’s time to leave – that sounded different too.

At the end of this live version, Drew adds some new lyrics:

I know I’ve said it a thousand times
Baby please don’t die, baby please don’t die
I know I’ve said it a thousand times
Baby please don’t die, baby please don’t die

Maybe, for the song’s narrator, being superconnected isn’t a good thing. Maybe it’s unbearable.

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I’m still in touch with a bunch of the friends I saw Broken Social Scene with in college. We text a lot, call sometimes, see each other when we can, wish we saw each other more. On my 38th birthday, some of us went to see Broken Social Scene play at a vineyard in California. The lineup had a fair number of the old familiar faces, but they no longer seemed to us like rock gods; just aging grownups doing their best to hold on to the old magic. I drank one beer, got a little teary about how quickly the years had gone, and had an excellent time.

A few months ago I put my kids to bed and walked alone to a nearby club to see Kevin Drew play without the rest of the band, accompanied by just one guitarist. Two or three times the two musicians fell out of sync, failing to hit transitions or stopping points together. Drew confessed that when playing with “Social Scene” (perhaps, he too, finds the full name vaguely embarrassing to say aloud) he had lots of room to mess up: there were always so many other people playing that his mistakes were hard to hear.

He closed with “Superconnected.” I don’t want to think about those things anymore. On the album, that’s the part where the background yelping and shrieking comes in; ever since hearing the Third Man Records version, I’ve heard the noises as attempts by the narrator’s friends to scare away those things, whatever they are. Now Drew was belting out the line on his own, his voice more clear and alone than I’d ever heard it. I felt the song drilling fast through time – through different versions of itself – and pulling me along for the ride. The full-band version; this acoustic version; the Philadelphia concert version; the Third Man Records version; the Napa vineyard version; the life-is-good interpretation; the crushing despair interpretation; 2005; 2018; 2024; being younger; being older; being with my friends; being by myself.

This is superconnected, it’s time to leave
This is superconnected, it’s time to leave

I walked home in the quiet dark, trying to let it all hang together as long as I could.✹

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Also:

• This is the third week of Tracks on Tracks, and I’m having a great time.

• I’ve been moved to see people using the comments to share thoughts and recollections!

• I have this memory that, sometime during the Bush administration, The Onion ran a (pretty lame) joke about “Superconnected” being found on the iPod of the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. However, I can find no proof of this online. Can anyone back me up???

• This isn’t the first time a Tracks has been about “finally actually listening to lyrics,” and I doubt it will be the last! Here’s Tracks #1, about the evolution over the years of my relationship to Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying”:
  

  
  

  That Isn't What I Meant To Say At All

On deck:

• On Thursday: Johannes Lichtman revisits his time on the suburban LA screamo circuit.

• Next week: the one song that always made my firstborn stop crying.

• Down the road: some new Tracks subsections/features? Maybe!

1. You can hear it on YouTube.