Early last August, in front of a sold-out crowd at the Mod Club on College, the lanky singer-songwriter Jason Collett held a concert to celebrate the release of his new solo record, the country-folk-tinged Idols of Exile. Wearing his trademark fedora, Collett broke up his hour-and-a-half-long set with lighthearted stories of growing up in Bramalea, including one about his fear of skinny-dipping in the dark. Throughout the evening, he was joined by several other musicians, most of whom were well known to the crowd for their affiliation with the sprawling Toronto pop band Broken Social Scene. Collett himself became a member of the group three years ago. When the evening climaxed with a rendition of his winsome “I’ll Bring the Sun,” a dozen sweat-drenched musicians crowded the small stage, half of them bearded, all of them clapping in unison. Tambourines chimed, shoes were shed and the audience clapped along, beaming. The palpable adoration and pride, both onstage and off, made the concert feel almost like a cult gathering—albeit a stylish one.

For fans of Broken Social Scene, the concert as group love-in is a familiar experience. BSS shows, which typically include a dozen performers (the number can vary from eight to 20), are similarly infused with a touchy-feely vibe. Family members often appear onstage—everyone from kids to grandparents—and there is much talk of peace, love and understanding. In an age when many bands specialize in the art of indifference, BSS’s hippie-ish shows have been embraced with enthusiasm. And they have helped the group, whose melodic music is a densely layered blend of space rock, swoony surf anthems and atmospheric lullabies, become one of the hottest indie acts in the world.

If you had told me 10 years ago that such a band would soon come out of Toronto, I would have laughed and returned to my Nirvana records. I’m an average, 30-something music fan (an “indie yuppie,” to use Vice’s unkind appellation), and prior to, say, 2001, the only contemporary Canadian pop music I can remember buying and liking was Mary Margaret O’Hara’s 1988 Miss America. Now my iPod’s packed with cool Canadian music, acts both esoteric and established, such as the New Pornographers, K-OS, the Hidden Cameras, Martha Wainwright, Final Fantasy, The Weakerthans, Royal City, Caribou, Julie Doiron, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and, of course, BSS. It’s true that singers like Céline Dion and Avril Lavigne and bands like the Tragically Hip and Sum 41 have filled stadiums for years. But now there’s a homegrown music scene that’s thriving without the muscle of foreign record labels.

Its vibrancy has been touted regularly in publications from Spin to The New York Times to The New Zealand Herald. Novelist Dennis Cooper dubbed Canada “the new England” in the august pages of Artforum. The photogenic Calgary-born, now Paris-based chanteuse Leslie Feist has been featured in Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly and the Times’ Style section. The Montreal-by-way-of-Toronto band Stars received the ultimate entrée to popular culture: it has popped up on the past two seasons of The O.C. Last April, a Time magazine cover story branded Montrealers the Arcade Fire “Canada’s most intriguing rock band.” Go to any college campus—from Boston to Manchester to Melbourne—and ask the smartest, hippest kids around to list their favourite bands and they’ll likely name a bunch of Canadians. The sun around which much of this activity orbits is Broken Social Scene.

One of the Social Scenesters who joined Collett onstage at the Mod Club was 29-year-old Kevin Drew, BSS’s front man. Decked out in a pink polo shirt and flip-flops, his baby face half hidden by a shaggy beard, he was careful not to upstage the older Collett. He stood near the wings and, when he wasn’t needed onstage, climbed off to join the giddy crowd. Collett, for his part, introduced Drew as “that sweet young man singing backup,” and said that the tune he had just performed was about a time, in 1986, when his backup singer woke up naked on his parents’ hedge. Drew leaned into the microphone, grinning, and said, “Hi, Mom.” Pause. “I love you.”

The next day, when I met Drew for brunch on the patio of Il Gatto Nero on College, he looked as if he’d just woken up on somebody’s lawn again. Same torn jeans he was wearing the night before, same flip-flops, different rumpled polo. His hair was damp, unruly. He ordered a chicken salad and a big bottle of water with lots of lemon. The waitress recommended beer after the water as a hangover cure. “I’m not hungover,” he mumbled, almost to himself. “I’m just who I am.” In conversation, Drew can oscillate between a stoner’s affability and a control freak’s fussiness, lurching from the ruminative to the bombastic. He doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve—it adorns his lapel, his belt buckle, the tips of his shoes.

He started playing music at an early age: piano lessons foisted on him by his parents, Maggie and David Drew, British émigrés who started Canadian Manda Group, a book publishers’ agency that’s one of the few publishing success stories in this country. The youngest of two brothers, Kevin was raised upper-middle class and discovered, at the ripe age of nine, the rarefied joys of Brian Eno, New Order and the Jesus and Mary Chain. At the Etobicoke School of the Arts, he developed a gift for putting together soundtracks. He hooked up with classmates a few years his senior—most notably, as far as his future career was concerned, a trio of girls named Amy Millan, Emily Haines and Ibi Kaslik.

“Kevin is exactly the same now as he was when he was 15,” explains Kaslik, a writer whose second novel—currently in progress—is about the Canadian music scene. “He’s Mr. Charisma, so people like to be around him.” Drew formed his first band with Kaslik, a three-piece called Quicksand, but music was just a means to an end—hanging out. He wasn’t into hockey or practising piano or studying. He was into drugs (“I was burnt out at 17, but I had a lot of crazy times that I don’t regret”) and buying records.

After high school, Drew drifted toward the music industry. He learned to play guitar and attended the Harris Institute for the Arts, a music producing and recording school, where he was taught by roadies and techies. There he met Charles Spearin of Do Make Say Think, a musician and engineer with whom he would form his first real band, K.C. Accidental. Their debut record was a 100-copy release described by eye magazine as a “self-contained balancing act of spontaneity and mathematical precision.” Drew dropped out of Harris, but a couple of years later, he would ask Spearin to join him in his new band.