I grew up on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, as many of you may already know. Cape Breton is a funny place in a way because it is difficult to grow up there as a completely unique, fresh-faced person with your own identity. Every one of us from there exists within the shadow cast by our family history. Whenever I return home for a holiday and am introduced to someone who is meeting me for the first time, inevitably I have to go through a process that I call “presenting my credentials”. This involves saying my name and then immediately following up with the names of my mother and my father and where they worked. This tends to lead to what church we went to, and what high school I attended back in the day. If the conversation really gets serious, then we may even discuss whether my family traditionally voted Liberal or Conservative, which, in turn, would be enough to determine if the potholes on your street got paved and if your son or daughter would be hired for employment on a summer grant. After presenting my credentials as a former Islander, the person I was meeting would then be able to place me within the patchwork quilt of relationships that have always existed back home. That placement of myself within the hierarchy of the island would determine whether I was offered either a handshake and a wish for a good visit while I was home, or else I was invited to sit down and have some tea. If tea was proffered, then that signified that my credentials had been approved.
I couldn’t help thinking about this as I did the research for today’s post about the Canadian Indie Rock/Alternative band Metric. Metric is one of Canada’s leading alternative rock bands and have been for well over two decades now. They are fronted by lead singer Emily Haines, and include guitarist/keyboardist James Shaw, bassist Joshua Winstead and drummer Joules Scott-Key. Metric formed back in the early 2000s and have won several Juno awards, in addition to appearing on the soundtracks of cutting-edge movies and touring with some of the biggest bands in the world such as The Rolling Stones. I first came to know Metric in 2010 when they volunteered to sing as part of a larger benefit concert that was organized by K’naan to help raise money for earthquake relief in Haiti. During the live telethon that appeared on TV, Metric played an acoustic version of today’s song, “Help I’m Alive”. I thought that their performance was excellent, and I’ve been hooked on the band ever since. Because of that appearance, I soaked up all that they had to offer and fell in love with songs such as “Dead Disco”, “Sick Muse”, “Gimme Sympathy”, “Gold Gun Girls”, “Breathing Underwater” and a song from one of my favourite music posts to date, “Black Sheep” from the original motion picture soundtrack of the film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (which you can read here). But the truth of the matter is that I knew about Emily Haines before I ever knew about her band. This is when we come to the part where I have to present her credentials, as it were. Because to know Emily Haines is to know an entire network of Canadian musicians and bands. This is also true of her own biological family, many of whom are successful on a national and international scale. Somewhere in the midst of all that exists a very talented woman named Emily Haines. Let’s get to know her a little bit better by asking a question that I might get asked if I was returning to Cape Breton…”Who’s yer fodder?” or “Who’s yer mudder?”. Here are Emily Haines’ credentials.
Emily Haines was born in 1974 (which makes her just slightly older than my own wife). Haines was born in New Delhi, India. Her middle name is Savitri, which is based upon a famous epic poem from India. Her mudder/mother, Jo Hayward-Haines, ran a school for underprivileged children there and is a fairly accomplished painter and community activist. Her fodder/father is the poet and jazz critic Paul Haines. He is best known in Canada for his 1970s musical play Escalator Over the Hill in collaboration with artist Carla Bley, who, in turn, was one of the leaders in the “Free Jazz” movement of the 1960s. Emily’s sister is famed Canadian journalist Avery Haines, who, as of the typing of these words, is one of the co-hosts of the venerated journalistic institution on CTV called W5. Her brother Tim owns one of Peterborough, Ontario’s most eclectic record shops called Bluestreak Records. Both of Emily Haines’ parents are naturalized American citizens, which has allowed Emily to claim citizenship in three different countries (India, the United States and Canada). When Emily was just a child, she and her family settled in the Fenelon Falls area of Ontario. Fenelon Falls is approx. 45 minutes northeast of my home in Cobourg. It is in a part of Ontario generally referred to as cottage country. This bucolic town is located just a stone’s throw from Bobcaygeon, another town in cottage country that was made famous in a song that you can read about here. Not surprisingly, after growing up in a home filled with art and culture, Haines ended up enrolling in a special school known as Etobicoke School for the Arts. It was here that Emily Haines established a love for creating her own music. It was also where she met classmates who would go on to form some of Canada’s most respected bands. Thus, the upbringing she received from her biological family led Haines to a special school for artistically inclined people where she would end up developing relationships with people who would become her musical family. Some of these people included Amy Millan (who is co-lead singer of the terrific band Stars out of Montreal, and who has also been involved with another important band, Toronto’s Broken Social Scene). Haines also met singer, producer and pianist Kevin Drew (who would go on to be one of the founding members of Broken Social Scene. Drew also helped a dying Gord Downie to record his final two solo albums, as well as the important Indigenous album Secret Path). Haines, Millan and Drew would all be involved in the creation of one of my favourite albums of all time, Broken Social Scene’s 2002 classic You Forgot It in People. That album gave the world a variety of gems, including two of my personal favourites: “Lover’s Spit” (sung by Drew and frequently co-sung by Leslie Feist), along with “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” which is sung by Emily Haines. (You can watch/listen to that song here. The lyrics version is here). It was on “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” that I first came to know of Emily Haines as an artist. This led me, a few years later, to discover her as the leader of her own band, Metric, during that Haitian Relief telethon as she sang the acoustic version of “Help I’m Alive”. Which brings us back to the question of who actually is Emily Haines?
As I can personally attest, it is possible to be proud of the influences that you have in your formative years but also to become your own unique version of yourself as an adult. The shadow of our past never entirely recedes, but it does fade a little with the passing of time and the successes we achieve that fuel our personal journey out into the greater world that exists beyond that of our youth. Emily Haines comes by her artistic inclinations honestly. It is not surprising that a child who was raised in a rich artistic and literate environment would turn out to possess many of those same qualities as an adult. For Emily Haines, her personal artistic journey that began as a child and continued as a student at Etobicoke School for the Arts blossomed as she entered her twenties in the mid-1990s. While writing and performing her own material, Haines met a fellow young musician named James Shaw. She and Shaw hit it off personally and professionally and began writing and performing together. It was this partnership that eventually led to the creation of the band Metric. It was while Metric was first touring that Haines and Shaw got to discover not only how to make music that people would enjoy listening to but also how the business of making music for a living actually worked. They burned their own CDs and did the artwork for the front covers themselves. They designed their own t-shirts, too. All of which would be sold out of the trunks of their cars or the edge of the stages they were fortunate enough to sing upon. Word of mouth quickly spread. Metric was a band that was developing enough of a buzz that it came to the attention of the committee in charge of awarding the prestigious Polaris Prize. Thus, their second album, Live It Out, was longlisted for the Polaris Prize, bringing with it recognition for the band on a national scale. This happened on the heels of Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People breaking through and helping to establish all of those band members as serious players in the Canadian music scene. A few years after Live It Out was longlisted for the Polaris Prize, Metric’s fourth album, Fantasies, (on which “Help I’m Alive”, “Gimme Sympathy”, “Gold Gun Girls” and “Sick Muse” all can be found) was shortlisted for that same prize. This album didn’t win that award, but it did earn the band the first of many Juno awards for Album of the Year, as well as Group of the Year. All together, Metric has won five Juno awards.
I enjoy watching Emily Haines sing. She appears to me to be a woman who is confident in who she is and in how she presents herself to the world. She is nobody’s Barbie doll. Emily Haines has performed as a member of many successful bands and has now fully established herself as one of our country’s most powerful and talented voices as she fronts her own band and helps Metric to entrench its place in the hierarchy of our musical canon. I have a feeling that if Emily Haines was living and performing in the U.S. and Metric was an American band, that some clever marketing executive would have come along and devised a P.R. campaign around her good looks and strong voice and would have made her much more famous than she is in her home country of Canada. Here, she seems comfortable just being herself and letting that be enough to speak on her behalf. There is something tremendously “Canadian” about not waving our own flags when it comes to promoting ourselves on the world’s stage. But believe me when I tell you that Metric, as a band, and Emily Haines, as an artist, are both very much the real deal and are respected throughout the music industry as a whole. When it comes to ranking our current Canadian bands on the success of their careers, Metric comes in near the top of every list out there. Luckily enough for people who live in my area, Metric will be appearing at a free concert next month in neighbouring Peterborough as part of that city’s annual free concerts in the park series. That show is one that will be well worth checking out. At a time when it seems like you have to almost remortgage your home in order to afford concert tickets, to be able to see a band of Metric’s calibre for free is a rare bit of good fortune, indeed. So, if you live near me, then go! I am sure that the Metric concert will be a highlight of your summer. As for Emily Haines, I would hazard a guess that a highlight of her summer will also be playing in Peterborough because, no doubt, that will involve making time for a bit of a family reunion. No matter who we are or how successful we become, it is always good to be able to go home and bask in the nostalgic glow of simply being your fodder’s daughter or your mudder’s son. Enjoy the trip home, Emily. Thanks again for the upcoming concert. I am sure it will be an awesome time for all concerned.
The link to the official website for Metric can be found here.
The link to the official website for Broken Social Scene can be found here.
The link to the official website for Peterborough, Ontario’s summer concert series called Peterborough Musicfest can be found here.
The link to the official website for the Etobicoke School for the Arts can be found here.
The link to the official website for Fenelon Falls, Ontario, can be found here.
Finally, the link to the video for the song “Help I’m Alive” by Metric can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.
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Listened to Help I’m Alive and Breathing Underwater. I am now officially old. But my memory still works. This was one of my theme songs when I was young.
https://youtu.be/0kQv_7PRd24?feature=shared