Just as the ’60s saw the major labels scrambling to find the “Next Beatles,” and in the ’70s every new singer-songwriter was heralded as the “New Dylan,” Canadian rock quartet Sloan were headhunted by Geffen Records at the height of the grunge wars of 1992 when every label was looking for the “Next Nirvana.” Never mind that they were from Halifax, Nova Scotia, about as far from Seattle as a North American band could get. Never mind that, as a band, they had played little more than 12 shows. And never mind that, musically, the band had more in common with the Beatles, KISS, and Fleetwood Mac than their flannel-shirted contemporaries over on Puget Sound. Never mind, indeed.

The Geffen deal has long since left the building, along with Kurt Cobain and most of Sloan’s contemporaries from the original Halifax Pop Explosion festival. Meanwhile, KISS and Fleetwood Mac have had successful reunion tours; and even the Beatles reunited, albeit briefly, and Sloan, with all four original members—Patrick Pentland, Andrew Scott, Chris Murphy, and Jay Ferguson—has just turned 17 years old.

If Sloan was a person, it would be old enough to drive and almost old enough to vote. [And if it were an American person, admits Murphy, it would probably vote for Obama.]

Not only has Sloan remained intact during the intervening years, they appear to have retained a healthy sense of arrested adolescence that belies their increasingly philosophical worldview as they’ve matured and started to raise families of their own. On their newest album, Parallel Play, their ninth, the four singular songwriters of Sloan frequently ruminate about what it means to hold on to one’s youthful exuberance while fighting the good fight as the music business crumbles around them, amid the rise of the internet and the not so coincidental decline of the major label system.

If “Cold Gin” was in fact “the only thing” that kept their heroes KISS together, just what is it that keeps Sloan’s four-lane highway heading in a parallel direction? Catching up with lifelong pals Ferguson and Murphy, it becomes clear that their every-man-for-himself approach—they rarely write or even play on each other’s tracks anymore in the studio—along with a patently Canadian sense of humor about it all, has helped keep the band healthy, happy, and whole.

According to Murphy, Sloan’s predominant bass player and sometime drummer, their survival derives as much from the fact that everyone in the band gets to record their own songs—acting as the producer, leader, and often sole performer on their respective sessions—as from their profit-sharing arrangement, in which all writing credits and royalties from those songs are shared equally by the collective.

“That,” he adds, “and our increasing inability to do anything else for a living.”

Kidding aside, Murphy posits that a firm commitment to the individuality of each band member has been essential to the health of Sloan as a shared entity.

“I came up with the title Parallel Play,” Murphy declares. “It is a term to describe the lack of interaction between children aged one to three when they are playing side by side. It is apt because some of us have young kids that age, but I thought it was an apt term for the way we often, but not always, work. We are all capable of writing songs and playing most instruments relatively well. We have encouraged this from day one. Andrew and I play all of the drums, but other than that it’s a free-for-all as to who does what.”

Guitarist Ferguson is, likewise, adamant about the creative freedom each member of Sloan feels within the confines of their unit.

“Our band has always been a bit weird,” admits Ferguson, reflecting on nearly two decades together. “When we started out, we all lived in Halifax. We made our first album in a house with no aspiration to anything other than making our CD or our own cassette. We mailed it off to a couple of people and then it got passed along to Geffen, then Geffen got interested. So then we were in this place where we’d played like 12 or 15 shows and we were basically signed to Geffen, which was insane really.”

According to Ferguson, that first Geffen release, Smeared, was recorded a little more collectively than most of their subsequent works.

“We played on each other’s songs more in those days,” Ferguson recalls, “although we were never a band that really got together and jammed a lot. Then Andrew moved to Toronto, before the rest of us. At that point, we basically turned into a songwriting band, and everybody wrote their own songs separately. Left to our own devices, we always kind of work like the late period Beatles would, in that they would work sometimes in collaborations but often on their own. I think if anybody in this band did a solo album, it wouldn’t sound very much different than they do in Sloan; it’s a bit of four-headed monster that way.”

That four-headed monster can get pretty prolific, often heroically so, as on their previous, tellingly named, 30-song collection from 2006, Never Hear the End of It. On Parallel Play, however, Sloan has scaled back to a modest 13 original songs, many of which celebrate the mere fact of their continued existence. Sloan often share a sense of collective glee at just being in a band, and no one enjoys playing the rock star more than Chris Murphy, as detailed here in his autobiographical “I’m Not a Kid Anymore”:

Once upon a time I was on the scene
An attitude and a jacket o’ jean
These days I’m up to my ass in routine
Another day, another dollar

I relied heavily on Styx and Stones
Not so much Styx once I heard the Ramones
I got a job, an anagram of loans
We worked the other nine to five 

I’m not a kid anymore