Using the Metric System Issue #39

How traveling the world keeps Emily Haines grounded

By Emily Becker
Published: March 1st, 2009 | 2:52pm

On break from rehearsal, Emily Haines kept steering our conversation back to geography, and the significance a world map holds for the Metric frontwoman. Our discussion touched on Buenos Aires, New Delhi, even a post-show tour of a Buffalo, NY art gallery. It was clear that while Toronto will always have the right to claim her as a favorite daughter, it’s more accurate to consider Haines a citizen of the world.

Even before she was old enough to fill out her own passport application, Haines was crossing the international dateline. Born in New Delhi, India, her family relocated to Canada when the singer was just three. Though she currently spends most of her time in New York City or South America, when Haines is back in Toronto she admits that she can be a “real homebody.” It’s her time in New York City — particularly her experience sharing a loft with Karen O — that she credits with helping Metric grow from what Haines modestly calls “a really boring and shy band” into the high-energy stage sensation fans see today.

A video on Metric’s web site shows Haines wandering around Buenos Aires, looking resplendent in a T-Rex t-shirt, and singing a nascent version of “Help, I’m Alive,” which she calls “the heart” of her band’s new record, Fantasies. Haines returned refreshed from her trip to South America and ready to make a very different record from 2005’s Live it Out. “We all felt that we needed to have some experiences that connect us more to just real life. I didn’t feel like writing another song about being lonely in a hotel room. I know I have more to offer than that.” Metric’s 2007 tour featured mostly un-released material, but Haines says only a few of those songs made it onto the new record because “a lot of songs, they live with us like friends. If a song isn’t really moving us at a time, we don’t scrap it and forget it forever. We just give it a chance to breathe and move onto something else that feels more immediate.”

Haines went to Buenos Aires on her own to get inspired, saying, “It was just great to go there and write and not feel any obligation to any identity that anyone else had created for me.” But Haines happily admits that her songs wouldn’t be complete without the rest of the band. When speaking of the track “Help, I’m Alive,” she says that the song’s evolution from “the simplest melody, the simplest progression” to a fully-fleshed out final product is “indicative of the way that Metric works. When I brought it to the band, that’s when it really came to life. In fact, the whole section of the song, ‘If I’m still alive / My regrets are few,’ where I sing really high, I actually wrote once I was back together with the band. That’s the way that things always work with us, and I’m so happy that’s the case.”

Unlike the proverbial rolling stone, Haines gathers moss. She returns from her travels with new ideas still clinging to her, ready to share them with her band mates. Whether she finds herself on stage or falling in love with a new city, Haines knows that she can come home to Metric — wherever home may be at the moment.