From left to right: Joshua Winstead, Emily Haines, Joules Scott Key, James Shaw
After spending time apart focusing on other projects (Broken Social Scene, Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton), Metric unite for their first album in nearly four years with new release Fantasies. We got a chance to talk to guitarist Jimmy Shaw about the band's time apart, their writing process, how songs pass the "road test" and the Beatles vs. the Stones. Plus we got to pick his brain about such topics as fantasies, Fleetwood Mac moments, soaring pterodactyls and underground roller-coasters. Yeah, it's not all shop talk here.
Rhapsody: So, how do you guys celebrate a new release?
Shaw: Actually, last night it was a combination of champagne, a drink that we made up on tour called the Ginger-E (a mottled ginger, lime and tequila) and a chocolate fondue. I'm not going to lie to you.
Rhapsody: Did you practice some of the new songs at live shows to see how the audience would respond to them?
Shaw: It's funny the way we did it. We booked a tour and we did a lot of writing in 2007 ... By the end of that year we felt like we were really close to having a finished record. So, we booked a U.S. tour and played 30 days all across the U.S., and it was totally awesome. And we had a great time. By the end of it, we looked at each other and said, "I don't think this is good enough." We put it through the road test and most of it didn't pass … We virtually went back to the drawing board and started again. That's when Emily [Haines] went down to Buenos Aires and everybody sort of disbanded for a minute. I went into the studio and wrote some tracks. At that point it was more like knowing what you want to do by process of elimination. And that's how most of the songs on this record were actually written.
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Rhapsody: How does a song pass the road test?
Shaw: I guess it's just a song gets better and better and you get more excited to play it and every time you do, the song itself gels more and the crowds are reacting better and better. I think there's something that happens when you have a new piece of music and it's just exciting to have a new piece of music. And the first time you play it, it's cool 'cause it's the first time, and then by the third time it's, "Oh god that section's really not working." You only want to push so far. If your roof keeps falling in on your house, there's only so many times that you try and fix it before you get an entirely new roof or move and get a new house.
Rhapsody: You guys worked on this album in various locations. How did the different surroundings affect your sound?
Shaw: The first place that we started was a studio called Bear Creek; it's about 30 minutes outside of Seattle, and it's like a 10-acre farm. It's the longest family-run studio in America. A family called the Hadlocks started it in the late '70s. It's just such a rad place; it's so beautiful. It's an old converted barn. That's where we wanted to start the writing of the record because we wanted to have the theme be highly organic. We basically had a totally tripped-out Fleetwood Mac moment. It was really fun -- to soak in the woods, play with acoustic guitars and basically pretend we were hippies for 10 days. And then cut to a year later where we're in Toronto and it's winter and we're in my studio, which is out behind my house, like an old converted auto shop. And that's when all the dance-rock elements really started to play a role. It was winter in Toronto and the only way you were going to get your ya-yas out of it was to make some rock 'n' roll … It's the place where you actually have to dance to get warm.
Rhapsody: You've said the sound of the record was more based on the idea of soaring pterodactyls than that of another band. Where does that imagery come from? What do you mean exactly by that?
Shaw: I may be stretching to actually try to quantify what I'm talking about because it is totally esoteric. It doesn't have that much basis in reality; the fact is that we are all crazy enough to know what I was talking about in the studio. I think it's somewhere along the lines that the idea that it's a pterodactyl means that it's timeless and it's prehistoric, yet it's futuristic. It's not now, it's not like a dirty pigeon, it's something that comes from a different era. And the idea that it's breaking out of its egg and looking over the edge of a cliff was symbolic for us of where we're at in our career. We felt like in the middle of making this record we're sitting on the edge of this canyon; we do know how to fly but we're a little bit scared to take that first jump. Just the idea of shutting off the Earth and leaving your safety place and just soaring down into the canyon, the future, to the unknown, the possibilities.
Rhapsody: How do you think this record differs from any of your previous albums?
Shaw: I think it differs in a sense that it's more refined. We took more time to do it. And we didn't stop ourselves from exploring anything. We never censored ourselves or stopped ourselves from doing anything that had any sort of sense of practicality. For the first record, we only had studio time for so long and it was all kind of mapped out -- it was more of "let's go in and record it and it will be done." With that, it was much faster, and we booked a tour right in the middle of it. It was supposed to be two weeks but ended up into 10. And we came back with a three-week deadline and had two songs done. There was not a lot of experimentation involved. With this one, we allowed our brains to wander and go wherever it wanted us to go and not really worry that it was taking us too long.
Rhapsody: What was your biggest fantasy as a kid?
Shaw: I don't know; that's a hard one. Okay, when I was a little kid, I met this guy who lived next door to my grade school. His name was Roman and he was this weird little kid and he told me that there was an underground roller-coaster under my neighborhood. We spent two summers -- I'm talking years of my life -- searching for this roller-coaster. There were all these underground parking lots, and at the corner of these parking lots would be a locked door that probably went to a furnace room but we were like, "That's the door, we're going to figure out how to open it." That was like the longest-standing fantasy for me, that there was an underground roller-coaster in my neighborhood.
Rhapsody: You guys have your own separate projects like Broken Social Scene and other things like that. How is that both an advantage and disadvantage when you come back together to work as Metric?
Shaw: I think it would be really hard for us to find a disadvantage. Really what it does is it keeps everybody inspired. Imagine this: everybody has some dream and it's completely unrealistic. Within the confines of their monogamist relationship, every time they thought that they went out there to experiment they were allowed to. In music, we are allowed to. That's what it's kind of like for us. It doesn't emotionally detract from Metric whatsoever. There's never a moment where Metric has a show booked and someone's like, "No, I can't do that, I'm going to do that instead." Metric is always priority No. 1, and whenever Metric needs you, you are in this band 100 percent.
Rhapsody: One more question. I'm going off a lyric from "Gimme Sympathy": Who would you rather be, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?
Shaw: Can I say the Kinks?
Listen to the entire interview here.
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Founded in 1982, Metal Blade Records was young metal fan Brian Slagel's DIY solution to the absence of metal music in record stores across the nation. In a time of tape-trading and word of mouth propelled by a burgeoning underground scene, he saw an opportunity missed by major labels to get metal out to the masses, and nearly 30 years later Metal Blade is still thriving and bringing metal to your doorstep. Boasting an eclectic roster, from Florida death metal legends Cannibal Corpse to Polish black metal heroes Behemoth, as well as Christian metallers Whitechapel, thrash apprentices Lazarus A.D. and heralded deathcore outfit Job For a Cowboy, Metal Blade is a veritable heavy music institution. Here's a taste of some Metal Blade essentials, available for streaming exclusively on Rhapsody. ]]>
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What's new? What's good? What will you find here that you won't hear
anywhere else this week? Sit back, relax and click through to the premieres, the originals and the exclusives available only on Rhapsody!
This week:
What's new? What's good? What will you find here that you won't hear anywhere else this week? Sit back, relax and click through to the premieres, the originals and the exclusives available only on Rhapsody! This week:
