Metric leaves the light on
Canadian indie outfit hits Columbus
By Abigail Hartung |
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Metric's radiant vibe and perspicacity have been dazzling New Wave and indie fans for more than ten years. Now, with the release of their fourth album, the band is once again taking to the road, and the Fantasies tour is coming through Columbus for a $5 CD101 "low-dough show." The Toronto-based band's four members possess a diverse enough back story to fill a novel. Singer Emily Haines was born in India and grew up in Canada, guitarist Jimmy Shaw was born in London and also grew up in Canada, rhythm section Joules Scott-Key and Josh Winstead hail from Texas, and the four have also lived in New York and Los Angeles.
Yet, despite their varying backgrounds, they all maintain one constant: their unswerving dedication to creating music that is all their own. Since Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw first began the endeavor in 1998, the band has continued to gain international attention, including recent nomination for the 2009 Polaris Music Prize.
Shaw was able to take a few minutes out of his busy itinerary to speak with 614.
We recently saw Metric on the Late Show with David Letterman. How was that? Did he seem to dig your music?
We were told that after you play, he comes over and shakes the singer's hand, and we were told that he lingered by us longer than usual, but that's about the extent of what I think you get from David Letterman. He doesn't really talk to people, and from what I understand the hallway is cleared when he enters the building, and he kinda keeps to himself.
So, the band made a random stop at Stonehenge after playing at Glastonbury Festival, and ran into (fictional hair-metal band) Spinal Tap.
That was probably one of the most hilarious and serendipitous events in my career. It was so funny, and we're such huge fans of theirs. We totally quote their humor all the time. It was just too much that it happened. And our drummer, Joules - it was his birthday. So, for that to happen on his birthday was kind of incredible.
It seems like the band is traveling non-stop again these days.
It's definitely starting to feel that way.
Has traveling become a chore for you?
Being in a place and doing something cool in that place is always amazing and always interesting. But every airplane feels the same, airports feel the same, and taxis feel the same. There's a bit of frustration that might come from the idea that you're really trying to be in this new place, but really all you experience is a taxi cab and a backstage, but I try not to focus on those things. I try my best to get outside and at least take in a little bit of wherever we are.
I know the open road can get pretty boring, too. Have there been any memorable shenanigans or pranks while you were touring with other bands?
Well, we were sort of in the habit of touring with The Unicorns, or as they became later, Islands, and there's a guy in that band named Nick Diamonds who is definitely one for pranks: a lot of them involve water fights, or snow balls, or smoke bombs. Literally, with him, there's too many to name. I think him lighting off a smoke bomb underneath a bed and lighting the bed on fire in a hotel room in Iceland, that one was pretty bizarre.
Metric's album Fantasies
In comparison to your previous records, the new album has been called darker, more intimate, more of a stand-alone album. How would you say it compares?
That's what's kind of interesting about it ... Everybody has a really different take on it. I mean really from one interview to the next: sometimes it's like, 'This record is so much darker,' and the next person's like, 'This record is so much lighter.' Literally exact opposite words are used. In that regard, it seems like it's more open to interpretation than our past records, because when we made Live it Out or Old World, people had their take on the record and it was pretty consistent. This one - people's takes seem to be all over the place. I really love the fact that it's so interpretative.
People hear what they want to hear; people hear what they feel like they should be hearing. To me, I feel that, for the most part, it's just a natural development of where the band wanted to go. It's more expressive in a sense, because we wanted to make it more about how we were actually feeling and a little less confrontational, and more honest. We also wanted to make it really sonically expansive: more of an embrace and less of a punch. I feel like those are things that embody it.
You've previously described the sound of the record as "based on the idea of soaring pterodactyls."
We definitely adopted that mentality in the studio. The producer had this amazing way of flying across the control room and cawing like a weird pterodactyl.
At the beginning of the song writing process, you went into the woods outside Seattle, Washington. Was that trip planned to catalyze the album, or did that happen once you got out there?
We had been on the road, touring for so long, and it had become such a routine. And when you tour, you generally don't spend a lot of time in the woods. You spend time in buses, backstages and venues and clubs and restaurants and cities. Before we took a break, we wanted to go and experience something really different and have that be the taste left in our mouths for when we took time off. We essentially wanted to plant the new seed so when we took time off and started developing other things, and paid attention to solo projects and other stuff, that that's the feeling we were left with and where we wanted to go with our sound in the future, instead of what we had been doing for the last two or three years.
Your song lyrics have been described in the past as having political undertones. Would you say that's a valid statement, and does it still apply to the new album?
The four of us are relatively politically inclined people. I'm not sure that any of us see life as though there's life and what you do in life: you hang out with your friends and you have dinner and then you go to sleep and you wake up and you watch television, and then on the other side - then there's politics. Politics is involved in everything. It's the people that are ruling and controlling the way that everything works and the way that our whole planet goes down. All we're doing is acknowledging that it's a large part of the world and we don't feel like ignoring it. The fact that it shows up in our songs the same way as how you feel about personal politics and love relationships, we try to make sure that there's no distinction between that and the rest of life, because I don't think that any of us feel that there is a distinction.
Do you have any idea what's next for the band?
Yeah, we're gonna make a heavy metal record. I've been trying to listen to as much Sabbath as possible, and learning how to do really heavy riffs.
Did your encounter with Spinal Tap influence you in that direction?
Totally. I'm trying to grow a big hairy, fuzzy handlebar mustache. It's not going all that well though.
All four of you have diverse backgrounds, from where you grew up, to the many cities you've inhabited. How has that influenced your music?
For us, music is not the thing that influences music. Experience is what influences music, and places and movies inspire us a lot, and travel and the different energy of different places, and the way that different cities operate in a social way, and what feels natural in some places may feel totally unnatural in other places - all of that has a place in the way that we attempt to see the world. I think ultimately for us, what we're writing about is the way that we perceive the world. We try our best not to have that be from a small point of view, which would be like we're just going to be four members of a band that all went to the same high school in Toronto and still live in Toronto and have never really experienced anything else. What we are naturally, in the way that the four of us came together, is so diverse. We are diverse in our backgrounds and our beliefs and our family histories - everything that would weigh in is so diverse within the four of us that it's become the reason that Metric is what we are. It's definitely the thing that we're trying to express to the world. It's seeing that the whole thing is just one giant experience, and that it can all be funneled back into the music.
Is the band's current success anything like what you imagined for the future when starting out?
No, it's not, (laughs) but only because I don't think I imagined anything when we started out. I remember before the release of Old World, I was standing in Andy Factor's kitchen, who was the guy that owned Everloving Records, and he said, 'Okay, now that we're done with the record, we have the hard part of trying to sell the first five thousand records. And we have to figure out how the hell we're going to do that.'
And that concept blew my mind. I was like, 'Five thousand? How the hell are we going to sell five thousand records?'
It's been one exponential step at a time since. I've definitely never been able to see more than a step or two ahead. I may have had ideas of grandeur, but none of them have ever really applied to us because we don't live life the same as a lot of people, I don't think. The idea of what success is, in an American Idol kind of way, which is really the way that's promoted, is really not who we are. We definitely had to forge our own path to a little clearing in the forest that we call our success, which is the one that makes the most sense to us.
All of you are involved in side projects - would you say these projects have aided or hindered your development as Metric?
It's definitely aided . . . if at any moment we felt it was hindering Metric, we would have stopped doing any of those things. It's a bit like any sort of family type relationship: the more you're allowed to experience other things, the more you come back free-hearted and the more you come back with other experiences and other influences to refer back and feed the giant machine that is this band.
The time that we spent between touring Live It Out and making Fantasies, Emily made a solo record and EP, Josh and Joules made a record, I worked a lot with other bands, Broken Social Scene, and built the studio. That whole time was really necessary, so we could come back to Metric with a hugely renewed sense of musical freedom.
I find that most people, as soon as they feel locked somewhere, tend to stop enjoying it. The idea is that everywhere you are as a human being, you make a daily decision to be there - or else it starts to feel like someone else's decision that you're there, and that doesn't feel as good.
Not to be too cliche, but I can't resist quoting the song "Gimme Sympathy" from the new album: "Who'd you rather be: The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?"
I think I'd honestly have to just say, Metric.
Originally Published: August 1, 2009
