Emily Haines of Metric, Broken Social Scene and Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton

[the_future_modernes]

One of my favourite bands, Canadian band Metric is fronted by synthesizer-using, keyboarding contralto vocalist Emily Haines. Their music is classed as indie rock and New Wave, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia. They have won at least 2 Juno's (Canadian Music Award) for their work so far, and have shown up on soundtracks to movies like Scott Pilgrim:

Metric: Black Sheep

and Twilight:

Eclipse "All Yours" [Official Music Video] - METRIC

Personally, my favourite song is Gimme Sympathy though Help I'm Alive is pretty darn epic as well. New stuff include: Gold Guns and Girls and Stadium Love

BTW, they are kinda great acoustically:
Twilight Galaxies

She's done some work with

Broken Social Scene – "Looks Just Like the Sun", "Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl", "Backyards", "Her Disappearing Theme", "Swimmers", "Bandwitch", "Superconnected", "Windsurfing Nation", "Sentimental X's"

and released a couple of piano heavy albums under the Emily Haines and the Soft Skeletons name:

Albums

• Cut in Half and Also Double (1996)
• Knives Don't Have Your Back (2006, #28 in Canada)

EPs

• What Is Free to a Good Home? (2007)

Emily Haines from Metric - Interview from Virgin Festival 2009, Vancouver, BC

2008 Interview Emily Haines from Metric - The case of the missing keyboard and on fashion and femininity in music

Quiet Colour Interview

QC: Your father was a poet; do you think that at a young age that had some affect on you? I know people who are writers often don’t want to be writers, but they can’t escape it, it’s just something burning inside them that they have to give into. Do you feel that way at all?

Emily: I remember saying to my parents, “you know I got a really good plan! I got it all planned out. If being a musician doesn’t work out, I’ll be a writer.” And they’re like, “oh great, nice safety net!” I don’t know, It’s funny because I remember both my brother and sister would write short stories and stuff but they never went as seriously with it as I did. I was really close to my dad; we had a whole thing going on.

QC: Is it true your dad made you mix tapes? I think that’s incredible.

Emily: Oh my God! He made mix tapes for everybody! In fact, when I have time I really want to do some art installation or something. I mean Quincy Jones has a mix tape from my dad. He was the original DJ for sure. He made the most incredible tapes and sent thousands of them out for the duration of his life,,, Really amazing.

QC: What was it like studying at the Etobicoke School of the Arts? Did you study music there? And that’s where you met Amy Millan and Kevin Drew right?

Emily: It’s a public school that you audition to get in, you do academics and arts. I took music, but I was kind of a brat about it. I was supposed to learn other people’s songs and perform them, but I only would write my own. They were pretty indulgent though and they let me do my thing. And I did a lot of theatre stuff tooMORE

Mended Social Scene (2007 Interview with Emily and Leslie Feist on their previous friendship)

They were Best Friends Forever when they sang together in Broken Social Scene, but Leslie Feist and Emily Haines grew apart. Feist relocated to Paris and became a solo star. Haines moved to New York and made it with her band Metric. Indie-rock’s leading ladies have hardly talked in recent years, never mind hung out. When we found out that Feist and Haines were both in London, we took them to a pub and listened to them chat about being B.F.F....

Emily Haines: We first met when I had no fucking money and was waiting tables and decided to quit because it was killing me.

Leslie Feist: I was living in the basement of my dad's house, working at a Levi's store, and in a similar position of having no fucking money. But I was putting on a cabaret night and shit…

Haines: Yah. It was the first time I ever saw Peaches, which is still one of my favourite memories of her…

Feist: We exchanged numbers because for me it was really, really, really, really, really rare to meet another girl in this insane boy-world-music-thing that I was doing. I remember we were both saying how we'd both never had the chance to play with other girls and we were both like "Yeah! You get it!" MORE

Interview: 6 April 2009

Where did that pair of amazing solo records, Knives Don’t Have Your Back and What is Free to a Good Home, come from? Was it just a set of songs that didn’t fit with Metric? Was it the product of a particular emotional period you were going through? Was it just a form of time-off from the rock-band?

“I found myself with a body of work that was dealing with a whole whack of themes that really weren’t suited to Metric. It would’ve been very strange to bring those songs to a band. The way Metric songs usually develop is that I write something on the piano that sounds a lot like those songs. I bring it to Jimmy, he speeds it up about 15 BPM and adds instrumentation and gives it energy. I love that contrast we have, so often, between the melancholy lyrics and this upbeat, melodic arrangements. It gives you the sense of having your friends try and cheer you up. Metric is, in many ways, my friends ‘cheering up’ my songs. To me, that makes them interesting; takes them away from this clichéd self-reflective-girl-with-a-piano genre, which is something I’ve resisted my whole life. Because it seemed, to me, that was what a girl was supposed to do in music: sit quietly with a piano and be sad.”

But this time you didn’t want cheering up?

“Well, people tried. But it was hopeless. So, Knives was born [laughs]. But, in all seriousness, sometimes you just need to be sad. And it’s kind of gross to mask those feelings, to put on a brave face. Some things just have to be as they are.”

...

Has there been a real sense of change in Canadian music, recently?

“There’s been a lot of conversations, recently, where people have said: ‘Why is there this moment in Canada where there’s a whole generation of kids that’ve changed the identity of music here?’ No one ever associated Canada with being this inspiring, progressive place for music, and now there’s Broken Social Scene, Feist, Stars, Wolf Parade, Arcade Fire. What we’ve been able to retrace back is that we all came from parents who moved here from the States in the ’70s, in the Trudeau years, to send their kids to school here. And we all ended up with these amazing musical educations, and went on to go to these top music schools here and in other countries from a public school education. It’s like we were all part of some experiment.”

But, these days, it seems like music funding is always the first thing cut.

“Less so in Canada, I think. If that happened here, it’d be a tragedy. It’s such a source of national pride. And just good business. Sure, with this generation, we were all able to receive these tax-funded grants, when we were starting out, of a few thousand dollars. Very little money, basically start-up capital to make a record, take some photos, and tour overseas. I’d be interested to know how much money was spent on this minimal initial investment, and how much money Metric, Broken Social Scene, The Constantines, Feist and everyone else have brought back into Canada.”
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