It's been a couple of weeks since I posted, mostly due to a crazy hectic writing schedule and housesitting for a couple of friends. The fruits of all the hard work have started to be printed for public consumption, with three articles in today's Night&Day, an article in the OC Register, a blurb in the Phoenix New Times and numerous profiles for SignOnSanDiego.com. You'll be able to check out everything here, with some comments from me on each story.
Today, I'm cranking out a story on Metric for the Union-Tribune. I wanted to give you a glimpse of the conversation I recently had with lead singer Emily Haines. She was in New York getting ready for a North American tour, and she had a lot to say about the crazy year or two Metric and its members have experienced since the last time I talked with her (in the wake of 2005's "Live It Out).
Here's part of the conversation:
Nixon: Since it was recorded so long ago, what goes through your head when you think about “Grow Up and Blow Away’?
Haines: Everything that work symbolizes for us is the innocent and naïve period of beginning to try to be musicians for a living and all of the obstacles that we’ve encountered on the way. When I listen to that music I think of how pure and sweet our vision was of how it could be. Since then we’ve really taken matters into our own hands. We realized it’s probably a blessing that we weren’t handed (a contract) and then became recording artists in 1998.
It takes me back to the early days of how everything’s changed with the distribution of music and how people get the music they want. We had no real reason to release the record. But we finally got it back. We bought it back from the company that owned it. It was owned by Rykodisc. We just constantly got requests from fans, even though you can get everything free online. I’ve personally mailed out maybe a 1,000 CD-Rs in manila envelopes to pretty much anyone who wrote in to us and requested it. If they requested it, I would send it to them.
When I listen to (‘Grow Up and Blow Away’), it’s like listening to my little sister that I don’t have.
Nixon: A more innocent version of you…
Haines: Yeah. I have no regrets. Those are the days that we thought we could just sit in our house and make music and other people would do the legwork for us. We quickly realized that was never going to be a life that we could handle. Instead of listening to people who said that we’d had to look for someone to help us realize our potential, we just did it ourselves. I’m really glad we made that decision.
Nixon: Do you feel like you’ve songwriting has developed – in terms of lyrics, melodies and song structure -- since the first album?
Haines: I don’t really think about it. You do the best with the place that you’re in at the time. Some of the stuff on the album kind of cracks me up: the kind of R’n’B vocal stylings I was doing at the time. At some point down the road, I may look back at some of the stuff that I’m doing now and it may crack me up. But I’m O.K. with that.
Nixon: I know it’s been quite a ride for the band since the last time we spoke, in terms of selling albums and being generally embraced by fans with open arms at all the shows I’ve been to. How has that ride been for you from the inside looking out?
Haines: We often joke about the fact that we’ve been on a 20-percent incline since we’ve started. We’ve never dipped from that. And we’ve never gone vertical (in terms of popularity). We just do what we do. The four of us are music fans ourselves. Right now it seems like such an obsessive time about celebrity. I feel like people are constantly trying to complicate what we do for us, and that’s just made us clearer on what we do. It’s really not that complex at all. The four of us really love making music together and we have a lot of respect for people who can let loose and have a good time at a rock ‘n’ roll show. I go to other concerts and I’m like ‘We’re lucky, our fans are the best.’ It’s definitely a two-way thing. It’s a night of your life, let’s create a feeling.
Nixon: How important was it in terms of moving forward for the band to go and do a few music projects away from Metric?
Haines: It’s part of the concept of the band, I guess. I see it all the time with musicians: you get stuck in a rut. It’s like playing a role in a sitcom. You become a one-dimensional character if the only way you function is in a particular role. The reason why this clicked when we met was because everybody was really big music fans. I’d say Metric is probably the most pop thing in any of our record collections. Our tastes are more experimental and we’re all really open-minded about music. Everyone in the band has multiple skills. Jimmy went to Juilliard for trumpet and Joules is a great bass player and Josh is is a great singer and songwriter in his own right. It’s part of the concept that everyone should be able to develop. It just really worked out well this year. It gave everyone a chance to breathe and do some other things. And so coming back to start writing the new Metric record has benefited enormously from that.
Nixon: Were the songs for The Soft Skeleton kicking around a while for you?
Haines: It’s more like the sound of those songs was kicking around. I had established a relationship with Guy Maddin, the filmmaker, and I was inspired by his movie ‘The Saddest Music in the World.’ The imagery of the film informed how I wanted my record to sound. As a songwriter, piano has always been my first instrument and I’ve always been interested in doing more ambient soundtrack kind of stuff. It’s just a natural progression. Some of the songs have been around for a while. Most of them were written while everything was happening with Metric.
Nixon: And this current tour?
Haines: We haven’t toured the States in over a year. So we just wanted to come back and say hello and develop some of the new songs. We’ve written about 10 or 15 new songs and we’re going to play a bunch of them on this tour. It’s a really nice way to work. You write a song, and then before you get too committed to anything, you let it live and breathe as a song.
