Feist, Broken Social Scene and Alessia Cara at Nathan Phillips Square, reviewed
A remarkable lack of nostalgia at the TOgether Festival
It’s 4:30 p.m. on June 6, and a few dozen people stand squinting in the late-afternoon sun as the wind whips construction dust across Nathan Phillips Square, plastered in FIFA signage. They’re here for TOgether for Toronto Healthcare, a one-day “music and wellness” festival and fundraiser for University Health Network. (This is much to the confusion of a small delegation of people draped in Albanian flags and carrying placards opposing Jared Kushner’s plans for a luxury resort in the Balkan state, who appear to be searching for the planned protest on the other side of the stage.)
By the time the first show begins, there are enough fans in Cat Power, Arkells and Tragically Hip shirts to outnumber the lost Albanian protesters and bemused World Cup tourists. Sponsored by multibillion-dollar real estate company Fitzrovia, TOgether boasts an impressive lineup. Leslie Feist, the headliner, hasn’t played a hometown show in two years; Mississauga-born pop musician Alessia Cara is a radio mainstay; and seminal indie collective Broken Social Scene have just unexpectedly released one of the most interesting albums of their long careers. The square is filled with the inevitable brand activations—including a curiously long line for a giveaway by a well-known condiment giant—and pop-ups offering extra-low-calorie non-alcoholic beer, hot coffee and something called a “quencher,” all for the low price of a suggested donation.
Conservative radio host and all-around awkward presence Ben Mulroney, the day’s MC, performs an a cappella “O Canada” to kick off the proceedings. Eventually, mercifully, he gives way to the opener, Tragically Hip guitarist Paul Langlois—a musician who has earned the right to read the back of a shampoo bottle on stage to deserving applause. Instead, he and his sunglasses-wearing band head-nod through half a dozen tracks from his solo records, peppering in a few Hip songs as well. Langlois’s intonation changes a little on the latter, as if he’s trying to find a compromise between his own voice and Gord Downie’s inimitable phrasing and sense of drama. Here, it’s subtle enough to feel like a quiet tribute to an old friend.
Broken Social Scene takes the stage as the sun recedes behind city hall, throwing long shadows onto the concrete. The eleven members that make up this incarnation of the band drop into “Not Around Anymore,” the bittersweet groove that opens their new album, Remember the Humans.
Kevin Drew, who would be recognizable from half a mile away with his cropped white beard and trucker hat, sounds like he’s singing about a lost Toronto: “There’s no need to fight here anymore / To live your life here anymore / To be alive here anymore.” But what’s remarkable is how little Broken Social Scene seems like a nostalgic act. Some of that is down to two new vocalists—Hannah Georgas, a ruminative singer-songwriter in her own right, and Jill Harris of revered local cover band Dwayne Gretzky—both of whom sound pristine and potent. When they play “7/4 (Shoreline)” from their 2005 self-titled LP, the constant bleeps and syncopations feel like rush hour in utopia. It’s as though the frequency carrying the song has been beaming out for the past quarter-century, and they’ve just tuned into it again.
Related: What Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning loves about his King West neighbourhood
Original BSS member Leslie Feist joins the band midway through “Fire Eye’d Boy” (she was supposed to arrive a few minutes earlier, for “Almost Crimes,” but was officiating a wedding), and she stays for a piano ballad version of “Lover’s Spit,” sharing verses with Georgas. It shouldn’t work, something so quiet in the middle of a clamorous city square, but Feist and Georgas find a way to amp up the intimacy. They close with “Meet Me in the Basement,” a song that actually is about Toronto—a cacophonous, rumbling jam around a four-note riff. It feels like a neat metaphor for Broken Social Scene 25 years in, more alive than ever and sustained by a communal spirit.
Alessia Cara’s first two songs are so breezy that they seem to disappear as soon as they arrive. “Slow Motion” is the highlight of the first half of her set—when its chorus opens up into some crunchy ’90s alt-rock, she lets her voice go. But it quickly fizzles out. “Fire” sounds completely incombustible—the kind of song that could actually deter small fires if deployed properly. She finishes with two radio hits: “Scars to Your Beautiful” and “Here.” Kids dance with their parents, teenagers wield anachronistic digital cameras and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.
The sun is down by the time Feist bounds back onstage, and she’s lit up by the flicker of phone lights. This is her first show in Toronto since a set at Massey Hall in 2024, shortly after Multitudes. Without a new album to promote or the pressure of a long tour, she seems relaxed. Her voice is impeccable, and it’s particularly striking on the slow groove of “How Come You Never Go There” and the whisper-quiet “A Man Is Not His Song.”
Between songs, she pledges to match the audience’s donations to UHN, up to $10,000, during the next track—then bumps it up to $50,000 and finally to $75,000—an enormous amount of real money. By the end of the night, the event will have raised over $1 million through a combination of small QR-code-driven donations, sweepstakes for a Dodge Charger and Feist’s contribution. The deal also elicits even better vibes from an audience already interrupting Feist’s banter to scream, “I love you!” When she plays “Mushaboom”—her twinkling, whimsical breakthrough single—two teenage girls beside me, surely born long after the song was released, hold each other and try not to weep too loudly.
Between songs, Feist reminisces about writing “Mushaboom” in the early aughts. She was living on Queen Street West, making her living at a bar, coming home at night with a pocketful of toonies, desperate to keep working on the song and drown out the after-hours drinkers. “Mushaboom” became the soundtrack to a million manic pixie daydreams, and Feist became a de facto leader of indie rock’s Torontopia era.
Among the many between-set speeches and promotional materials for TOgether, there is much talk of Canadian pride; an “elbows up” mentality; even a recasting of the day, by Fitzrovia CEO Adrian Rocca, as a “pep rally” for the country. In that context, Langlois, Broken Social Scene, Cara and Feist are mascots for the nation. Canadians like these are talented and hard-working, and therefore they have become famous and respected. It’s neat and tidy.
But, for a long time, the city that produced Feist fostered a community of musicians, artists and weirdos who could work bar jobs and write songs like “Mushaboom” in the small hours of the morning. It allowed for places like Ted’s Collision to survive through ingenuity and stubbornness, without enormous financial investment—and that in turn allowed a band as unwieldy and experimental as Broken Social Scene to flourish.
Nobody can pretend that’s the case anymore. The practice spaces have been sold to megachurches, the small venues razed to make room for more condos. The independent music scene that persists in Toronto increasingly does so in spite of the city around it. If we’re going to meaningfully celebrate this place and its art, we’re going to have to do more than raise a can of low-calorie non-alcoholic beer to its past.
Feist invites Drew out to close her set with “I Feel It All,” then emerges moments later with the entirety of Broken Social Scene for a brilliantly dramatic “1234” full of horns and harmonies. It sounds joyful, like a fond memory come to life. Then a few thousand sunburned people begin to drift back out into the city.
