It's All Gonna Break

I created an account for the sole purpose of responding to this song because there is a big piece of the puzzle that I think a lot of people are missing here.

To understand this song you need to know a little bit about the history of BSS, I highly recommend reading "This Book is Broken: A Broken Social Scene Story" by Stuart Berman. In short, at the time that the self-titled album was recorded, BSS was on the brink of imploding. Kevin Drew's marriage was failing (which brought us the song Superconnected), the band had been on tour for almost three years straight, and various romantic relationships in the collective were straining the very friendships the band revolved around (read: Feist was hooking up with Kevin despite her long on-again-off-again relationship with Andrew Whiteman). The recording process for this record was also significantly more stressful than it was for You Forgot it in People, due to heightened expectations and fragmentation as a result of the many subsidiary bands within BSS going on tour for themselves. The band was literally about to break.

In light of this, I feel confident asserting that It's All Gonna Break is most likely a collective expression of the myriad emotions that were straining the band at the time: perhaps frustration, betrayal, confusion, jealousy, anger, and fear. I can imagine the feeling of hopelessness, like watching your own family crumble around you and threatening to disappear at any moment. It's no wonder that, as tylerjb72 posted, Kevin found this song therapeutic. It's far more constructive to put those emotions into an epic work of art than it is to let them fester and turn into bitterness.

The lyrics are gritty, explicit, and evocative of many terrible feelings, but they need to be. This song would not be what it is without the disturbing imagery. It is a vivid snapshot into the mindset of BSS at their darkest moment.