Emily Haines biography
Emily Haines (born 25 January 1974 in New Delhi, India) is a Canadian indie rock singer-songwriter. She is the lead singer and keyboardist of the band Metric and a member of Broken Social Scene. As a solo artist, she performed with her own name and under the alias Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton. Her voice is contralto.
Biography
Emily Haines was born in New Delhi, India, and raised in Canada. She is the daughter of Canadian poet Paul Haines. Her sister is the Canadian television journalist Avery Haines and her brother is Tim Haines, owner of Bluestreak Records in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.
After settling in Peterborough at the age of three, she grew up in a house rich with experimental art and musical expression. Paul would often make cassettes of rare and eclectic music for his daughter to listen to and her early influences included Carla Bley, Robert Wyatt, and later PJ Harvey. By her teens she followed her parents' footsteps by attending the Etobicoke School of the Arts (ESA) to study drama. There she met Amy Millan and Kevin Drew, with whom she would later collaborate in hHead. Emily also briefly dated Kevin Drew.
Haines and Millan formed their first band around 1990 while at ESA, and with songs later written and recorded while at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1992-1993, at Toronto in 1995, and at Concordia University in Montreal in 1995-1996. The result was Cut in Half and Also Double distributed in 1996 with a limited number of copies. The song "Carpet" bears a resemblance to a song later recorded by Metric, "Too Little Too Late".
Emily Haines met James Shaw in Toronto, and the two of them began dating and making music. They took the name Metric in 1999 after a synthesizer beat that Shaw used on his sampler and as a reference to their musical precision. The two moved to New York, where they recruited their rhythm section and began recording. In 2001, the bassist Joshua Winstead and the drummer Jules Scott-Key joined the band. Metric released four studio albums so far: Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? in 2003, Live It Out in 2005, Grow Up and Blow Away in 2007 (but recorded in 2001) and Fantasies in 2009.
In 2004, Metric appeared in the 2004 drama film Clean. Emily Haines and the rest of the band, appearing as themselves, performed their song "Dead Disco" and then went backstage for a small speaking role. "Dead Disco" also featured on Clean Original Soundtrack.
In 2006, she released the studio album Knives Don't Have Your Back under the moniker Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton. The songs "Our Hell" and "Dr. Blind" were issued as singles. Knives Don't Have Your Back was followed in 2007 by the EP What Is Free to a Good Home?. These recordings were inspired by the death of her father, poet Paul Haines.
Her solo work is typically more mellow and piano-based than her work with Metric. She occasionally plays a limited number of solo shows, often with Amy Millan as the opening act.
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