Emily Haines

Dancing to depression.

What's wrong with Emily Haines, asks Laura Barton

Friday June 8, 2007
The Guardian

"I found this thing," says Emily Haines, through jet lag and a sip of Pimm's, "that I drew when I was really young. On a piece of paper, it says: 'What's wrong?' underlined twice, and then a big empty box, and then it just says Emily Haines at the bottom. And I thought, oh my God, that's basically what I've been doing for my entire career! Walking into a situation and seeing how well I can identify what's wrong with it. And describe it. And I think I can do that pretty well."

The various incarnations of Emily Haines - her sometime membership of the Canadian indie supergroup Broken Social Scene; the angular danceability of her band Metric - share that quality. And it's there in her downbeat new solo record, Knives Don't Have Your Back, credited to Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton. "It's the same songwriting process as for Metric," she says. "But the whole point of Metric, sonically and in the whole philosophy of the band, is we're trying to kick the ass of depression. You're not allowed to wallow. So I bring those songs to the band and we speed them up and turn them into something we can dance to. Which is a great way to stay off antidepressants.

"I'm interested in the people who are inclined to be a little bit sad, who maybe see things in a sepia tone but without being mopes necessarily. And I like that about Metric - it's not the Jackson 5 pretending things are happy when they're not, it's acknowledging that actually things are a bit fucked and finding a way to turn that into something else."

Haines refers proudly to the fact that Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket, has said Metric are the band all 14-year-old girls ought to be listening to. It is a responsibility, she says, but one she accepts readily. Indeed, with songs such as Patriarch on a Bicycle and Glass Ceiling, Haines has established herself as a feminist songwriter. Her new record includes a song named A Maid Needs a Maid. Is this, one wonders, a direct retort to her fellow countryman Neil Young's A Man Needs a Maid? "I can see there would be a feminist reading of that song. But it wasn't really intended that way. I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but growing up I never understood that song, I didn't know what he meant. Whaddyawant? Someone who cleans up after you?" She olds her pale features into a frown. "And when I was writing this record, I realised I had that exact feeling, as a result of touring and other things, where my ability to connect with somebody actually came down to being a very functional approach to love and companionship." It is, she confesses, something of a habit of hers to try to solve a problem by writing a song about it. "But that doesn't work," she adds ruefully. "It doesn't solve the problem."

There is an air of zealotry and self-awareness to Haines. She speaks of her new dedication to writing songs that aren't about what's wrong. And she has a new ambition to embrace spontaneity. "I feel like I meet people more and more where there's a tone that, 'You're going to get old so you might as well start now.' And so it's a daily decision of mine to allow things to happen that haven't happened before." Today, for example, she went to Trafalgar Square to recreate a photograph of her father, the jazz-poet Paul Haines, who died in 2003.

She has now come to terms, she says, with the fact that the life she has chosen, as a touring musician, as a dedicated experiential liver, may preclude some aspects of conventional life. "I'm accepting I may not have it all," she says, looking somehow bold. "I may not have a husband and a family. I may have an adventure."

· Knives Don't Have Your Back is out now on Drowned in Sound Recordings

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007