Metric’s Optimistic Outlook

For the members of a Toronto-based indie band with several Juno nominations under their belt, Emily Haines and James “Jimmy” Shaw of Metric seem surprisingly, well, real. I sat down with them on the last night of their Canadian tour to talk about their new album, mainstream success and musical inspiration.

YT: So, first of all, how’s your tour going so far?
J: It’s going really good.

E: This is the last night so it’s like a celebration tonight.

YT: Your album that just came out got a lot of really positive reviews. And I was just wondering, what was the significance of the album title Fantasies?
J: I kind of felt like when we were making the record, a lot of the content, a lot of what we were trying to get across was the idea that we were trying to imagine the world without a lot of the problems that it has now. We were trying to imagine this sort of utopian place, so we spent a lot of time dreaming up what the world might look like without a lot of the sh** that was going on that we were talking about in other records.

For me, that was a lot of the reason why the title resonated when we came up with it, and why we put a light bulb on the cover. There’s an idea of a future, you know? I know that for Emily, it was a little bit different. It was just very open to interpretation and that fantasies could be positive things, they could be negative things, they could be anything that happens.

E: Yeah, like dreams or imaginary worlds. And also the sound of the record is really dreamy, so it’d make sense, like what Jimmy was going for, like a very open-sounding record.

YT: I understand that quite a few of the recordings were actually written in the woods, and that was different from your usual studio environment. So why’d you choose to do something like that?
J: Well, we were actually on tour for so long when we were touring Live it Out and we were in England, and we knew that it was going to be the last tour.

E: Yeah, I think we were just doing this tour with Bloc Party and we came straight from England and went into a cabin in the woods.

J: We knew we were going to split apart for a little while and do some other things, and we were actually going to pay attention to our own lives for a little bit. So we decided to go there and plant the seed for a record before we took a break. So the whole time we were apart, we would sort of have this thing, this sort of seed be growing and the idea of what the record might be in our minds. And at that point, we needed to get the f*** away from anything that resembled a backstage.

E: A tour bus, or a backstage, or anything.

J: Or an airport, anything like that. So we went to this place. We actually know the guy who owns that studio pretty well and we had planned to go there for a long time; we just never really had the opportunity.

YT: So, like you said, you guys spent a while away from each other doing solo projects. How did that help you grow stronger as a band?
E: I think it’s the sense that, for a lot of musicians, they don’t get to live their life the way they want to. It’s kind of this weird combination of factors. It’s like your lifestyle represents that kind of freedom – everyone wants to be a rock star. But in reality, very often, people have very little control over the financial matters in their life, their own schedule, the places that they’re going to go and under what circumstances. That in turn means that you have very little control over your own life.

For us, we’ve always done things in such a way where people have told us we can’t do things the way we want to; and we always say, “Well it’s the four of us living our lives.” So I don’t know how someone could purport to be an expert on what’s going to be right for us. When everyone else would be like, “Oh, Emily’s making a solo record, the band must be breaking up” or “What’s going on?” It’s like internally, everybody knew what was going on and it was that I was making a record that I needed to make, and Jimmy was building a studio, and Josh and Joules did their thing, Bang Lime, which is this really pretty rock-and-roll thing.

In that time, we were setting up our label and doing all these other things so for us. It strengthens the band to do things outside because it reinforces the fact that we are masters of our own destiny. It’s hard, because people are always telling you what you should do and shouldn’t do. But if you take responsibility for your own life, then you get to reap the benefits of that. You’ll be on your own course and not get confused as so many musicians are – anybody, really, it’s easy to get confused. We certainly get confused all the time, even though we try to live by that, but we definitely did come back stronger because it shows us that we are in control of our lives and we have the freedom to do whatever we want to do.

YT: Just going back to the album, it went through a lot of fine-tuning. How did the final product differ from your original acoustic recordings?
J: The acoustic stuff was actually something that we recorded later. It wasn’t like we wrote the whole thing on acoustic instruments and then went and recorded it. The process was more like just to try something, and if it doesn’t work, then you fix it. And if it’s still not working, then you keep fixing it, and keep fixing it. And if you fixed it five times and it’s still not happening, then you scrap all the recordings and start again.

There were some recordings on this album that took four hours, and others that took six months. We had this phrase in the studio that was like “chasing invisible butterflies in the dark” and that’s kind of what it’s like making music in a studio. Sometimes you’re like, “This is going to be amazing. I have this huge, incredible idea,” and then you do it and you’re like, “That’s so lame. I so don’t need to listen to that and neither does anyone else in the world.” And other times you do something, and you put it down, and you’re like, “Wow, there’s something really simple and genuine and awesome about that” and you don’t really know when those moments come. You just have to show up every day and keep going and fix what’s not working.

YT: The band was originally formed in 1998, so what do you feel as or define as your big break?
E: Jimmy and I started working together, writing songs. We moved to New York and then moved to England around that time, so it wasn’t until 2002 that we met Josh and Joules and it became this incarnation. And I would say that we’ve never had a [big] break, actually, and that’s not something that we have a problem with because it’s not the way that we’ve approached what we’re doing. It’s on the tip of what I was saying before. It’s like you set out on a path and we’ve never gone down. There’ve been times when it feels like it’s not the steepest incline in the world in terms of our progress as a band, but like the gross national product, you can’t always measure it by formula. Sometimes the formula of what appears to be success externally is not at all the formula for real success.

For us, we’re not looking for those symbolic splashy things and we’ve had some really amazing people in our lives to guide us away from that. Those are the things that you can brag about and frame, and put on your wall, but what does that really mean for your music or your career or the people that care about you and what you’re trying to accomplish? We’ve had hilarious, amazing things like we’ve played with the Rolling Stones two nights at Madison Square Gardens, we’ve played and accepted awards in Venezuela for Best Band, which was kind of weird. We’ve done tours across Europe... we’ve been to Japan and Australia. We’ve been all over the place and have had all kinds of highs and lows, but I still don’t think that there’s any one thing that happened to us that would be like a break. I think it’s a cumulative effect of all the love and positive energy we’ve put into it.

YT: And how do you think the band’s sound developed through everything? By travelling to other places, did other cultures affect your music at all?
J: I think it was just the natural development of a musician’s years, you know. It’s like you start out when you’re younger, and hearing this idea, and you do the idea, and then you get used to the idea, and your mind wants to wander and try something else. We try not to be too guided by other bands, we don’t find that the most interesting thing, where music becomes imitating music. I think we’re more inclined to be inspired by movies, and books, and thoughts and concepts. And there’s the idea of space, not just outer space, but inner space; the idea of all sorts of things that inspire us to make songs that sound certain ways and talk about certain things. We’re going to try to cover a lot of musical ground while we’re here.

E: It’s also hard to really quantify the impact of the experiences you have of travelling and stuff, but certainly for me with writing, I feel like I absorb things by osmosis. I’m as surprised as anybody else to discover what the record ended up being about. You go in with a bit of a guideline, just a sense of it, but that’s the process of making music; actually discovering what you’ve been absorbing for the past little while. For example, the contrast between Live It Out, our previous album, which is really quite aggressive sounding like raw rock-and-roll, with lots of songs about politics and lots of songs about being alienated, with an energy that’s really upfront; you cut to 2009, and it is a completely different time on the planet, things have changed and there’s a different feeling in the world.

It’s interesting to us to feel that without really thinking about it too much, we just naturally evolved toward a sound that I think makes sense for 2009. I have no idea what it’ll be for our next record, but I don’t have any desire to become something and just stay the same.

YT: Your music has been featured on shows such as CSI, Gossip Girl and Grey’s Anatomy and all of these shows are quite mainstream. Do you get critics who say that this is almost a form of selling out? And what would your response be to something like that?
E: No one’s ever said that; that’s so not a concern. It’s just not.

J: I mean I understand that there’s a whole culture in music that wants to run away from anything that touches mainstream culture and wants to have nothing to do with it. They find their identity by doing that, but I don’t think this group of people are like that. There are bands that I like that have sold a hundred million records, and there are bands that I like that have sold a thousand records. So, I don’t really care.

E: I think for me, it also depends on what the idea of selling out is. I mean, we have complete creative control over every composition that we write and the way that it’s released, and everything to do with the making of our music. It’s our own studio from beginning to end. So once that it’s a final thing we’ve created, we are totally open-minded about the places that the music can go.

Alternately, there’re people who from the beginning of the process say we can’t do this and we should change that, and you’re going to do this and you’re going to do that. That’s kind of a different scenario and I don’t think I could work that way or live that way. But once we’ve created something that’s ours, and if I like the show, like Gold Guns Girls has been on Entourage as well, and that’s great.

J: For me, it’s like Grey’s Anatomy is not my favourite show. I don’t really watch it. I don’t really care. But a lot of people do, and they’re really passionate about it and love watching doctors fall in love with other doctors. And that’s great. I mean, why would I not want a show like that to have a cool soundtrack?

E: And like, having your song in a film or something. I don’t watch the show either but I heard that for Grey’s Anatomy, the opening sequence played about three minutes from the song Blindness from our most recent record, which is like track nine on the album or something. It’s a really heavy song that I can’t ever imagine being on the radio, although I said that about Help I’m Alive and it reached No. 1, but it’s still a very unusual song. I think that it’s so cool that there would be a mainstream television show that would broadcast something like that.

J: The fact, to us, is that we’re not Nickelback. And so, we have subversive ideas, and we have left-field musical ideals. If the mainstream wants to adapt part of that and play it for the world, I mean that’s great. I’m not going to stop it.

E: Because we don’t have to give up anything in exchange.

YT: I just have one last thing for you guys. Who would you rather be: The Beatles or the Rolling Stones?
E: The Jonas Brothers… that’s kind of the idea.