Myer, Candace
Emily Haines
Issue #29
Metric’s vocalist-keyboardist discusses going solo, personal struggles, her love affair with the piano, and playing blindfolded
By Amber Drea
Published: September 1st, 2006 | 12:00am
Solo albums can be tricky, and Emily Haines’ debut is no exception. On Knives Don’t Have Your Back, the Metric front woman known for rockin’ out spunky dance numbers strips the emotionally intense songwriting perfected with the band down to the basics: Haines and her piano.
A collection of compositions written over the past 10 years (most within the last two), Knives exhibits Haines’ softer side while maintaining the complexity, inventiveness, and clever word play found on Metric records. But it’s not just a bunch of Metric throw-outs. Though Haines had tried a couple of the songs with the band, she eventually decided to develop them for a separate project. “I think it really helped me to write this stuff, to process what the hell has been happening for the last couple of years,” she says.
In addition to Metric opening for the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden, gaining attention in the U.K., and attracting a dedicated fan base, Haines’ personal experiences played a major role in the writing of the album. The 2002 death of her father, poet and musician Paul Haines, completely changed her life and outlook on the world, along with the explosion of success among her circle of friends, which includes members of Broken Social Scene and Stars. “It’s kind of like musical chairs,” she says. “Everyone’s frantically running around hoping that they’ll know where to land when the music stops, but I always end up sitting on someone’s lap because I haven’t made a plan. I think a lot of my friends have had that experience from being on the road and then just being spit back out into some kind of civilian thing. You can’t really relate.”
Many of the songs address this desire for stability. “The Maid Needs a Maid,” which alludes to Neil Young’s “A Man Needs a Maid,” is about earning legitimacy as a female musician while preserving private relationships. “[My friends and I] all live deep lives, but we definitely live for something other than a home,” Haines explains. Not that Knives is a purely confessional work. “The hard thing about stuff that’s personal to you [is] just realizing the line between where that’s interesting to other people and where that’s just for your photo album,” she says. “I don’t want to publish my diary, and I don’t think I did that with this record.”
Its dark, haunting quality reflects the loneliness that follows the loss of a loved one and that lies at the core of the rocknroll lifestyle. On “Crowd Surf Off a Cliff,” one of the album’s most achingly gorgeous tracks, she sings, “I’d rather give the world away than wake up lonely / Everywhere in every way I see you with me,” but Haines also finds solace in solitude. “It’s definitely a lonely album. People are lonely. I don’t think I’m the exception,” she explains. “I think it’s important to put a lot of energy into distracting yourself from that or finding ways to feel good, but sometimes you just feel like leveling with yourself.”
Haines squeezed in these moments alone whenever she could. At a friend’s house in Los Angeles, she holed up in a hot, petri dish of a glass room called “the Ecosystem” where she wrote “Our Hell” and “Detective Daughter,” and she composed “The Last Page” on an abandoned piano in Brooklyn. For a while, her Toronto apartment contained nothing but a Danish handmade baby grand, on which she wrote “Crowd Surf Off a Cliff” and “The Maid Needs a Maid.” Haines sees playing the piano as having a conversation with the instrument. “I always felt [that] it’s kind of like putting my hands on a Ouija board when I put my fingers on the keys, seeing what it would bring to me,” she says. “There are a lot of different ways that songs get written. Sometimes it’s everything at once, sometimes it’s just fragments. It’s a pretty magical process.”
The recording of Knives wasn’t so solitary. Haines recruited John O’Mahoney, who produced both of Metric’s full-length albums, and Metric guitarist James Shaw on production, Sparklehorse drummer Scott Minor on additional instrumentation, Todor Kobakov on string arrangements, and Stars and Broken Social Scene friends on horns. “People were sending in ideas without hearing each other’s stuff, and they ended up really working together,” Haines says. “It’s kind of a like a modern-day collaboration in that way.”
The difficult part was making her own decisions, such as which tracks to include on the record and how the songs should sound. “Metric is a very democratic band and I really like that, but it’s all based on consensus,” she says. “I think that’s the most important thing that I needed to do out of this process was just to get a sense of my own instinct without being influenced by a band. Just finding out what are my musical choices, like who am I?”
Despite being pieced together between touring and consisting of songs written over many years, Knives is surprisingly cohesive. “I tried to just play the songs as they were written, and if they didn’t fit, then accept that they were gonna have another life,” Haines explains. “It’s kind of like taking pictures of a period of time, and you have to honor what pictures you took. You can’t really doctor them up after the fact.”
While auxiliary touches like drums, guitar, strings, and horns add layers, it’s Haines’ unpredictable vocal and piano melodies that carry the compositions. Elements of classical music, classic rock, and jazz combine with her unique songwriting style to create a timeless masterpiece. Two of Haines’ biggest inspirations are jazz composer Carla Bley and ex--–Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt, both friends of her father. He wrote the libretto for Bley’s “jazz opera” Escalator Over the Hill, which Haines says is “the most important record to me in the world” and pays homage to it in the cover art for Knives. Though her father’s abstract surrealist poetry made an impression, his appreciation of art and music influenced her more. “He was such a pal to me throughout my life and just gave me such a sense [that] I should do whatever is right for me and surrounded me with examples of people who had done the same thing,” Haines says. “I think that’s what drove me, actually — the fact that that music was so weird my whole childhood and his writing is so strange, but I have a great love for a three-minute pop song as a result.”
Haines’ rebellious nature often takes unusual forms. In college, she refused to play anything but her own music, and at a recent solo gig in San Francisco, she performed blindfolded. “Oh man, that night was ridiculous,” Haines recalls, laughing. “I didn’t sleep at all and I flew in and I just got this feeling [that] I didn’t want to see anybody. It’s a really cool feeling — maybe I’ll do that again.” Rather than touring for Knives, she’ll be playing a few dates this fall in Toronto and Montreal with Minor as well as string and horn sections, followed by sporadic shows minus the full production.
Performing alone is quite a contrast to Metric’s high-energy live sets. “It’s just nice to not have to try to convince anybody or feel like you’re life depends on it. It’s just a fucking song,” Haines explains. “And it’s nice to sit down.” She also finds that having two complementary outlets for expression creates a balance. “It’s not just about being in music or whatever,” she says. “Everybody struggles with that inner and outer life.”
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