Haines does it her way
Metric frontwoman drops personal collection of solo tunes
John Kendle

Emily Haines is in a departure lounge at Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix, doing interviews on her cell phone. She wants to get one thing straight in case she runs of out of time.

“This is for Winnipeg, right?” she says. “Your city gave me Guy Maddin, and I just have to say I am so thankful for that.”

Could this be real? Is this indie darling — the photogenic frontwoman for dance-punk favourites Metric — actually invoking the name of one of Canada’s most avant-garde, art-house auteurs? Indeed she is.

It would seem that Haines’ tour in support of her debut solo album, Knives Don’t Have Your Back, is set to a series of montages by Maddin.

While Emily plays piano and sings, accompanied by bassist Paul Dillon and drummer Scott Minor, Toronto artist Todor Kobakov will ‘deejay’ the films that will be projected behind her. The footage is a collection of montages from previous work that Maddin put together for each of the songs on Knives Don’t Have Your Back.

Although Knives was written and recorded in bits and pieces over four years — before, during and after Metric’s rise to prominence — Haines explains that the cinematic, downtempo mood of the album really began to take shape in 2004 and 2005, right around the time she saw Maddin’s feature The Saddest Music in the World.

“I became pretty obsessed with his films, so I contacted him,” Haines explains. “He was really, really accessible and he was just like, ‘Yeah, sure.’”

The Maddin connection also excites Haines because it adds to the spiderweb of links that have had her thinking this solo project was somehow meant to be.

For example, Soft Skeleton drummer Minor frequently collaborates with Mark Linkous, the man who is essentially Sparklehorse. It turns out the only ‘official’ music video Maddin has done was for a Sparklehorse tune called It’s a Wonderful Life, in 2001.

It also just so happens that Sparklehorse is one of the favourite bands of Robert Wyatt, the co-founder of Soft Machine, one of the earliest of the British art-rock bands of the ’60s. Wyatt, it turns out, was a friend and collaborator of Paul Haines, Emily’s late father. A poet and lyricist who also worked with the likes of jazz composer Carla Bley, the elder Haines was, naturally enough, quite an influence on his daughter’s artistic nature and interests.

So it shouldn’t really be all that disarming to learn that Haines is working with the likes of Maddin. Quite apart from growing up in a fairly bohemian household, she has done her fair share of artistic searching in her own right. She’s studied electro-acoustic composition. She’s done the starving-musician bit in New York City, waiting tables while living in Brooklyn and trying to get a version of Metric together. And she’s been a part of Broken Social Scene, an act that will stand for the ages as a model of reative collectivity.

If anything, the fact that Metric is becoming a big pop band should be the one thing in Haines’ CV that is not like the others. The group has been around in one form or another since 2001, but it’s the band’s last two albums, Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (2003) and Live it Out (2005) that have seen it gather momentum. In the past three years in Winnipeg alone, Metric has moved from the Pyramid to the Garrick to the Burton Cummings Theatre in successive sold-out performances.

At this time last year, Haines and co. opened a pair of shows for the Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden. In the summer, they played for tens of thousands of people at the massive Reading and Leeds festivals in the U.K.

So what is Emily Haines doing playing piano music in small venues in the midst of a Canadian winter?

The truth, simply told, is that Metric is but one form of expression for Haines. Her solo material is far more introspective and subdued — but it all comes from the same person.

“I write a lot, and these weren’t songs that were meant for Metric,” she explains. “Metric is a band, not a vehicle for me, and I’ve been working on these songs for years.”

Recorded in sessions that date back to 2002 and which took place in seven studios, Knives Don’t Have Your Back was always going to come out, Haines says. It was just a matter of when.

“I was touring and working with Metric, and the way (the album) was recorded was a function of that. It didn’t all happen at once, and a lot more songs were recorded than the ones that appear on the album.”

The end result is a highly personal collection. Haines would rather let the songs be than analyze them, but it’s not too hard to see that some of them are reflections on her father’s death, while others may be musings on her busy musician’s life.

Regardless of meaning, she wants the songs — and Maddin’s images — to be the focus of her live performances.

“For me, the images very much inform the songs and vice versa, but what’s interesting to me is that I’m up there performing and not watching the films,” Haines says. “At the same time, it’s like they’re taking the focus off of me.”