James Shaw and Emily Haines are part of the sprawling Toronto-based music collective Broken Social Scene, but as the core members of Metric, the guitarist and vocalist specialize in more electric, forceful dance-pop. After an itinerant period that included stints in New York, London, and Los Angeles, the two moved back to Canada to record last year's terrific Live It Out. Haines is also finishing a solo record with members of Virginia band Sparklehorse; she describes that album as "cinematic darkness music… Okay, it's just songs on the piano." The A.V Club recently caught up with Haines.
The A.V. Club: You recently opened at Madison Square Garden for the Rolling Stones. How did that come about?
Emily Haines: Well, they're very selective. Even though they're a huge organization, they still choose the bands that open for them, and somehow Live It Out got to the band. I guess it was Mick who really wanted us. They have a really strict schedule, but we got to hang out on the second night, just before they went on stage. We got to meet and take photos—you know, get kissed by Keith. They looked great, I thought, actually. For all the jokes people make about them being old, they just looked like four friends who have been playing music their whole lives, instead of watching golf on television.
AVC: Did opening those dates have an effect on the size of the crowds at your own shows?
EH: No. Those aren't the kind of shows where you're winning over new fans. It was just a great way to spend a couple days in New York. As far as this last tour is going, it's really such a positive time for us, because it feels like it's the same mix of people, just more of them. It seems like the growth is happening really naturally—we don't suddenly have a bunch of guys in Sticky Fingers T-shirts in the front row. [Laughs.]
AVC: Live It Out is more aggressive than your last album. Why did you move in that direction?
EH: I don't know that we decided where we were headed. It was more a matter of the circumstances and the concept behind the way we wanted to make the record that yielded those results. For example, Old World [Underground, Where Are You Now?, the band's previous disc], was recorded during the day in California—we would report to the studio at 10 in the morning—and this record was recorded only at night in Canada, in the dead of winter. [Laughs.] So that accounts for a lot. And then we wanted to bridge the divide between the recordings and what we really sound like live, because we had spent so much time touring. And we didn't work with a producer. It was just the four of us, oftentimes without an engineer or anything, just in this room that we called a studio above the bank.
AVC: You guys actually built the studio yourselves, didn't you?
EH: Yeah! It was really an amazing process. One of those lifelong dreams for Jimmy [Shaw] was being able to have a budget—limited, but a budget nonetheless—to pick up vintage instruments along the road and build our own studio, our own space to just put it on tape and see who we were.
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