Emily Haines is coming to the Great American Music Hall.
Emily Haines, the songwriter behind Canadian indie-rock favorites Metric, didn’t plan to have a once-a-decade release schedule for her solo work. The calendar and fates just aligned.
She released her debut, “Cut in Half and Also Double,” in 1996, “Knives Don’t Have Your Back” came out in 2006 (with a companion EP, “What Is Free to a Good Home?,” released the next year), and now comes “Choir of the Mind,” which she brings to the Great American Music Hall on Monday, Dec. 11.
“I feel like it’s definitely chance, and then I acknowledge it, and I sort of make attempts at simulating free will,” she says. “But it definitely seems to be that I’m handed my 10-year retrospective pretty precisely.”
That reflection comes well-earned over the course of the past decade, in particular. Metric has gone from an up-and-coming act to playing arenas and appearing in ever-increasing-sized print on music festival lineups. When she wasn’t fronting that outfit, Haines toured the world on her own behind “Knives,” an album wrapped up in the loss of her father. She’s worked on jewelry, clothing and, for this tour, her own fragrance, to be sold at shows. Throughout all of it, she continues writing — even for this phone interview, she says she’s already found her way to her piano bench — with work having started on Metric’s seventh record.
“I am a believer in adulthood and in owning your time and age,” the 43-year-old says. “I find it incredibly rude and selfish when people bitch about being older. I think it’s incredibly stupid and self-absorbed and vain. And it also just really contrasts with my vision of my life, which is … I’m going upward, I’m ascending, I’m working, I’m trying to evolve. And I believe that I’m a better writer and a better person and a better musician than I was 10 years ago.”
There are moments on “Choir of the Mind” during which that evolution becomes apparent, and the reflections aren’t always encouraging. On “Perfect on the Surface,” Haines posits that the “purpose of my life” is to “harness all my love, harness all my power, to be perfect on the surface.” On “Strangle All Romance,” the refrain “love is my labor of life” has a contextual emphasis on the term “labor.”
And yet, what Haines grapples with is how sometimes all those choices end up returning a person back to familiar places, but from a different perspective, an M.C. Escher-style, ever-ascending circular staircase. “I always kind of pictured one straight line going, you know, like a graph of success that’s just going up,” she says, acknowledging that doesn’t seem to be true for her anymore. “It’s this idea visualizing our lives perhaps differently.”
Those reflections may be most visible on the title track, which fuses Haines’ lyrics of past regrets (“If I could go back, if I could reach that feeling again”) with an interpolation from “Savitri,” the epic poem of Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, focusing on what Haines calls a “feminine force.”
“I believed it. I felt a feminine life force,” she says of the poem. “I thought it was very impactful, and every time I read it and perform it, it’s like it does something. It’s like an incantation that kind of maybe corrects a couple of things for a few minutes.”
Compared to Metric’s album touring schedules, Haines is seemingly on the road for only a few minutes, as well: 12 nights in gorgeous spaces that might be too small to hold a Metric concert. She’s got to return to the band after all, certainly by the time Metric plays San Francisco’s Mezzanine on New Year’s Eve.
“This is very much by choice a one-year art holiday for me,” she says. “To make this record, to do all these videos, to do all these visuals … it’s a dream for me to do just a 12-date run of handpicked rooms that I want to play.”