June 19th, 2009
Interview: Emily Haines Of Metric
Canada’s Metric comes to Philly tonight not only with a great new album, Fantasies, but with a whole new approach to the business of music-making as well. Following their last album, 2005’s breakthrough Live It Out, frontwoman Emily Haines and company formed their own label (Metric Music International), built their own recording studio, and have since handled every single aspect of the band themselves. During a recent phone conversation while on Metric’s current tour, the affable Haines spoke to us about stepping away from the standard music industry model once and for all, about their recent successes, about decamping to Buenos Aires to write Fantasies and just live life, and more:
So now that you’ve had some time to sit back — a long time removed from the making of it — and digest the new album, what’s your take on it?
Actually, there hasn’t been a lot of sitting back in Metric world [laughs]. I know people do it, and I’m looking forward to experiencing that maybe when I’m 100 years old. We had such a huge amount we had to do in starting up this label. Ironically it’s actually, like, easier, in a way, than dealing with people that you don’t want to deal with. You can take the time, build what you want, and that’s exactly what we did, so with the set-up, there wasn’t much of, “Oh the record’s done, I’m just gonna sit back and plan my outfits,” you know? [laughs] It’s a pretty full-on enterprise and definitely an adrenaline-fueled chance at the moment, because we took a serious gamble in the way that we did everything — self-financing and building our own studio and setting up this label, and plus there was not only every prediction of the worst economic crisis in 100 years, but also the nose-diving music industry, and everyone’s like, doomsday, right?
Seriously.
So hilarious, because our band never…we’re always on our own path, and we never seem to be correlated with the larger trends. But our record went gold in two weeks in Canada, and we shipped more copies of Fantasies to the U.S. in the first month than we did of Live It Out in four years.
Really?
Yeah! So we’re just laughing, because, you know, every single time that we’ve been frightened and people have told us that the way we wanna do things can’t be done, it’s just … it’s rewarding.
I imagine it takes a lot of courage to do that, to take that leap. Did you question yourselves and your decision the whole way through the process of doing everything yourselves, or did you just fully commit to it at the start and say, “No matter what happens, we’re seeing this through”?
You know what I think it is, I think it’s just a matter of momentum carrying us through it. From early days we’ve always been very open-minded and we would have loved to have some label that we could call home, like Sonic Youth’s relationship with Geffen or something. It seems now like a romantic thing of the past, where there once were those relationships between labels and bands where it’s not acrimonious and it’s actually, they have mutual interests and they help each other achieve similar goals. But for us, I dunno, nobody’s ever been able to figure out how to turn Metric into something you can sell and make a killing on, so it just never played out. And after Live It Out, we accomplished quite a bit with that record, we had meetings with everybody, like, we met the heads of all the major labels in the U.S., we met with Live Nation, and we met with the big indies and we had really interesting conversations with all of them and they all said the same thing, which is that they can offer you a chunk of money, which if you have even a basic understanding of math it just doesn’t work out what you get in exchange for it. And you get to have them meddle with your identity and your music and your life. It’s just like, I think it’s a very exciting time in history where the old model, which is based on such outright exploitation of musicians, is finally shifting, you know? So we’re very excited to be … I hope that things keep going as well as they’ve started with this record, because already I’ve had such inspired conversations with young bands who are just seeing the possibilities of how to do something original and not just find themselves trapped with people who don’t really understand what they’re trying to accomplish and don’t really belong in the music industry, I don’t think.
It’s amazing to read all these accounts of what really went on in the music industry over the last several decades, all the bad deals and shady business practices and how bands almost always got the short end of the stick.
Oh my God, I know. Without stretching the analogy too far, it is like this living-on-credit approach to success. I do have to hand it to the early architects of the music business. It’s such an amazingly unfair scam of like, the idea that you lend someone money — like, you see somebody that’s got potential, right, and all they need is a certain amount of money to be able to get started, and you lend them that money, but then you also decide how they spend that money, and that they spend the money on your company. It’s so smart! It’s completely unethical but… [laughs]. Anyway, just to be clear, the mood in the band has never been one of, like, “Oh, fuck the music industry.” It’s been of incredulous amazement and moments of unbelievable humor about the things we’ve had put in front of us as supposedly feasible offers that any sane person could never possibly consider.
Do you mean in terms of promotional and marketing things, or creative things, or just strictly business proposals?
Well, we never got into a position with a label where they could actually do it to us, but just the 150-page, like, “This is the sum of money you get and this is the 150-page deal, this is your end of the deal.” When the record’s done they can send you back into the studio because they don’t “hear it,” then they can shelve it indefinitely because they’ve gotta put out a Janet Jackson record [laughs]. It’s just antiquated, and it’s boring, and it’s tragic how many people have been stuck in that, and we’re so happy to be able to…if we can actually pull this off, I think it will be a great victory for independent musicians everywhere.
It obviously helps that you’ve built up a pretty nice sized fanbase through all the touring and word of mouth and favorable album reviews and so on, but is it still intimidating and stressful to put a new album out there to be judged creatively, on top of the way it’s received commercially and all these business concerns you’re now focused on?
Yeah, but that’s part of the deal. I’m sure every painter has a little anxiety when they unveil their latest work. I mean, there is anxiety, but it’s out there now, and I can’t really dedicate too much of my time or energy to worry about that stuff. If you feel your work is in the hands of somebody who’s gonna suddenly put, like, “Get a free Metric MP3 every time you buy a cheese sub at Subway!” or, like, a plastic banner with your name in front of a ribs joint at South by Southwest — I’ve seen reputable bands on a plastic banner as though it’s announcing brunch — that’s what gives me anxiety. The other stuff, nah. It’s fun — we’re getting to play in, for lack of a better term, the big league. We just bumped the Yeah Yeah Yeahs off the top spot of CMJ, we’re number-one at CMJ right now. It’s hilarious! It’s all like, Interscope, Warner Brothers, Capitol, and then it fucking says “self-released.” It’s awesome!
Do you find it difficult to balance the business and creative sides of being in the band? Some bands prefer other people handle all the business stuff so they can focus solely on the music, you know?
Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s kind of all the same thing though, in a way. There were definitely days — and it was more when we were setting the label up — that it was like, “I don’t think I should be doing this much e-mail…” But then, now that we’re getting back into what we do, the record’s out and it’s about playing concerts, it’s about planning tours and writing new music — the thing is up and running and all the international partners are in place — that’s really the difficult part, and we spent the better part of three years setting that up. But no, I don’t feel too preoccupied with that.
How much of those feelings — the ideas of freedom, liberation, independence, renewed optimism — that you’ve been going through in setting up the label and doing it all yourselves manifested themselves in the music, in the lyrics? Some of the songs do seem to carry that vibe…
I don’t think it was in relation to … the record’s not about being part of the mainstream record industry [laughs].
No, I know, but maybe those themes were more coded or found their way into the music in some other way, maybe even subconsciously, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I do. I would say that more than anything else I’ve written, this record is the most straightforward and direct, lyrically. If anything, if there is those feelings it’s because I fucked off to Argentina and just basically realized, it’s my life. You know? For whatever reason, I think that happens to all of us, it’s like, you have those epiphanies and you’re like, “Oh, I get it. Right. This is my life and it’s happening now, and let’s do this.” You can fall into those weird self-satisfied or dissatisfied places of complacency, feeling that nothing can move and everything is static and pre-ordained or something. Maybe you don’t feel that way, but I do, and you have to constantly remind yourself, you know, it’s on.
So how are you able to pull those ideas and feelings out of yourself and put it into a song?
God, I don’t even know. It’s the most amazing and magical process, but I don’t have any idea. It’s such a trip. Like, “Help I’m Alive,” it’s just some melody that I was singing to myself and recorded into a cell phone months before I went to Buenos Aires, and then when I got to Buenos Aires I came home really late one night and just sat at the piano, and then there’s that line again and I played it for some people there and it just developed. Music is such a wonderful thing and it’s so beyond any kind of plan [laughs].
Is that ultimately what keeps you interested in making it, and pushes you forward? That unknown?
I think it is, yeah. I think for me, and I know everybody works differently, but for me it’s just like, part of the reason we took the time that we did and I went away and stuff, I can’t sit down here like I’m writing a fucking essay for Professor Pitchfork [laughs]. I’m not gonna sit down and be Emily from Metric writing a record — I’m gonna live my life and I hope that things will keep happening to me, and I’ll be experiencing things that I haven’t experienced, and that will keep propelling the value of the music forward. I have too much respect for our fans to bore them with tales of backstage debauchery and tour bus malaise.
I guess it’s easy to get caught up in the cycle of record-and-tour, record-and-tour, especially when you’re on a big label, and your art becomes a reflection of that particular lifestyle.
Yeah, I guess for us the thing we saw is that either that is going to be the thorn in our side for the duration of our lives as musicians, or we could make a bold move, and it’s gonna be scary as hell and we’re gonna put every penny we’ve earned in our life as musicians, all four of us, into this start-up vibe, and just remove the thorn. And so that’s what we did. And it’s changed the energy around everything, and I feel like I can guarantee that I won’t be writing records about writing records, or what it’s like to be signed to a label that I don’t wanna be signed to, and that sort of angst. How about we don’t go down that same cliché path of, like, the miserable, misunderstood, talented but over-exploited rock star who claims they didn’t know what they were signing but secretly was pretty much down with having someone sell their ass around the world?! [laughs].
Metric plays the Troc tonight at 9pm, along with Sebastien Grainger and Smile Smile. Tickets are $19-$21.
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