Emily Haines, Metric's firecracker of a frontwoman, knows that people find her new solo record to be, well, really sad.
Wendy Lynch
Emily Haines gets personal.
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"It makes me think that no one's been listening to my lyrics in Metric," she says via cell from her Toronto apartment. Haines concedes that the ultraquiet strains of muted piano and sweeping string arrangements on 2006's Knives Don't Have Your Back — not to mention lyrics like Rather give the world away/ than wake up lonely —lend themselves more easily to despondency than the up-tempo synth-pop of Metric's last few records. But Haines says it's an uplifting album, for her anyway.
"I really like melancholy music that acknowledges that there is a place you can feel like shit. Just by virtue of putting energy into the darker corners of our minds, it's a way of freeing ourselves from it. The fuckin' Jackson 5 doesn't make me feel better when I'm down," she says with a laugh. "I've never found that the state of ecstasy requires many notes."
Inspired in part by the 2002 death of her father, poet Paul Haines, Knives sounds a little like Cat Power minus the crazy, with added swaths of achingly romantic violins and the occasional spooky, underwater vocal effect that makes Haines' gorgeously fragile voice pack an extra punch of lonely. The album was written over four years, a period that begins in Metric's days of relative obscurity and flashes forward to find the band opening for the Stones at Madison Square Garden. The steady rise has kept Haines & Co. on the road for the better part of three years, the emotional fallout of which is evident in the album's lyrical yen for permanence.
"[Sometimes I think], 'This is ridiculous,'" Haines says of touring. "'All I'm doing is traveling; I'm losing my home. I have no fucking home!' It's the same themes, I think, with a lot of people: How much of an adventure do you want? My dad always used to say — and I think about this all the time — 'Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.'"
The quote, borrowed from Kierkegaard, fits, considering the album's existentialist malaise and images of absurdist futility: Coloring in the black hole/ Can't we stop? ("Our Hell"). But for every gloomy lyric and minor chord, Haines throws in a cheeky joke: Bros before hos is a rule/ Read the guidelines, she sings on "The Maid Needs a Maid," a kind of feminist answer to Neil Young's "A Man Needs a Maid" that demonstrates Haines' gift for mixing the personal with the political.
"Coming off the road, back to my apartment, I could really relate to the sentiment," Haines says of Young's wish for Someone/ To keep my house clean/ Fix my meals and go away. "It turned into a whole musing on the nature of domestic love, what people really need from each other, marriage."
"Maid" and other songs off Knivesgrapple with traditional notions of settling down. "There's a real value in creating a home," Haines says. "It's a huge part of happiness — that feeling that you don't just live in an empty box. [And yet] everyone I know shares the same fear of suburban domesticity, or a relationship that's more of a crutch than a love affair."
"A lot of us — including the Democratic Party — have identified ourselves by what we don't want," she adds. "I think that the most challenging thing is finding what you do want." When pressed on what exactly that entails, Haines reverts to defining it in negative: "I know it has something to do with not, like, eating dinner by myself," she says after pausing a beat. "But it's time to find our definition of happiness and go for that, instead of just feeling like you sold your soul to this shitty world."
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