Metric’s Emily Haines vs. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

There’s no lack of blockbuster films stuffed from opening credits to final fadeout with pop songs. Usually, a glut of pre-existing tunes by name artists foreshadows a certain dearth of craft in the rest of the film –stilted dialogue and no character development? No problem! Throw in four radio hits, and nobody will notice.

That’s not the case for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, the quirky, music-drenched Universal Pictures feature about charming everydude Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), who must fight the seven evil exes of his dream-girl Ramona to win her hand. While executive music producer Nigel Godrich curated one of the hippest soundtracks in recent memory for Scott Pilgrim, nabbing new and old music from ASCAP members and affiliates Beck, Metric, Broken Social Scene and Beachwood Sparks, the songs are more than just ear candy. They actually feature into the film’s plot.

Those lo-fi punk songs bashed out by Scott Pilgrim’s band Sex Bob-Omb throughout the movie? Those were penned by Beck. How about the dour art-rock screeds performed by battle-of-the-bands opponents Crash and the Boys? Broken Social Scene wrote ‘em. The music in Scott Pilgrim mixes with its manifold video game and comic book referents to form the movie’s colorful, pop culture-obsessed aesthetic.

We talked to Metric’s lead singer Emily Haines about her Scott Pilgrim vs. The World experience, the ethics of film placements and a whole lot more besides. Read on for the interview.

How did you get involved with Scott Pilgrim vs. the World?

That was a phone call from Edgar Wright, the director, saying that he was looking for a song in particular to sell a certain scene. And also the fact that the writer, Bryan (Lee O’ Malley), had drawn inspiration from, among other bands, Metric for some of the characters in his graphic novel. So I think for Edgar, it was a logical starting point when he was coming to shoot in Toronto and trying to flesh out Bryan’s vision as he drew it in his graphic novel. And then it was just a matter of a really strangely perfect match with the song that we’d written, “Black Sheep,” that we played live and was part of our repertoire, but didn’t fit Fantasies for a number of reasons. It seemed perfectly suited to this exaggerated, amazing superhero group, The Clash at Demonhead.

So it was just total synchronicity that you had left “Black Sheep” off of the last album and it was just waiting around to be mashed with something?

Yeah. Exactly.

How is it used in the film?

The Clash at Demonhead is one of the bands. It’s really funny; it’s an excellent film. The different bands are characterized in different ways. But I don’t think that Bryan or Edgar are really trying to actually match – it’s not like there’s one band and you go “Oh, that’s Broken Social Scene,” or there’s another band and you’re like “Oh, that’s Beck.” It’s more that every band involved really wrote for Edgar’s vision of the particular scene, the particular band. But yeah, The Clash at Demonhead has this totally badass character named Envy, and Brie – the actress Brie Larson – did a great job conveying it. You kinda gotta see the movie to check it out. But “Black Sheep” is this really electro kind of edgy song full of attitude that I think is really perfect for what Edgar was looking for.

How did it feel to have a Metric song that’s essentially voiced by somebody other than Metric in the movie?

Cool! You know, I’m four albums in, plus a solo album, with no sign of stopping. Obviously making records is the main thing that you do as a band, but who doesn’t want the opportunity to explore other ways of working? To be part of something with a filmmaker that you really respect, and to learn something about the process and collaborate? It’s really a lot of the reason why I do what I do. It’s funny to see, because in the film Brie sings the song like she sings it in her own voice, and she totally nails it. As her, it’s very different than it would be for me as the character. But it was excellent. It’s a really interesting thing to be a part of.

Did you ever have a sense, in Scott Pilgrim or any of the other films or TV shows you had your music in, of giving up your baby? Or did you always think “This is a great opportunity?”

We make decisions quite conscientiously about what we have our music involved in, but I think that feeling of giving up something would come from being on a label, and having someone tell us what’s okay to put on your record, when it’s gonna be released, how it’s gonna be released and what kind of promo you have to do. All that stuff. We don’t work for anyone. So we have our own company and there’s never been a Metric song that was subject to that process. So for me, I feel like once we’ve made it and it’s our thing, we’re actually honored and grateful that people want to include us in their work, and essentially broadcast it over this other medium.

As we see it, for a band like Metric that’s not – you know, we’re not Pitchfork darlings, we’re not a mainstream thing – we’ve never had any backing from the conventional music industry, so for us it’s been really interesting to see this pop up as everything’s changing with music distribution. For film and television to pop up as a way for us to have our music heard – it’s cool! And creative, ultimately.

Did you have any say in the direction of the scene that included “Black Sheep?”

Oh my god, I would never want to. No, no desire. You know we wrote the song, we made it, we knew what the premise of the film was. We know Edgar’s films, we’ve met with Nigel Godrich. He worked in our studio. He’s Radiohead’s producer! And it’s just like, these are totally pro, interesting artists that we respect. We have all the time in the world to tweak the details of our work in the studio, and then once our work is done in the studio and onstage, that’s where it’s my realm to control. But if we’re interested in being involved with an artist, we give them the freedom to work with it.

Just the same way that whoever is directing the film is giving you freedom to write that song, and they love it the way that it exists.

Exactly. It’s true collaboration in my opinion.

So I had a question about the Scott Pilgrim track “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl,” which I’ve been listening to for years since I got (Broken Social Scene’s breakthrough album) You Forgot It in People. To my mind it’s one of the more emotionally intense songs in the Broken Social Scene catalog, and I wonder if you were ever worried about how it was going to be used in the film. You said you had total trust in the directors and creators, but did that song have a singular significance to you that you were concerned about translating to the screen?

It’s sort of an extension of what we’ve been talking about so far. I feel as though you can’t take away what the song is. The song is recorded and the song is performed by the band whenever we can together. Lots of times without me, because I can’t tour with Broken Social Scene as much as I’d like. It has significance for every individual person in every individual way, and I wouldn’t – even before it would be in a film or anywhere else – I wouldn’t claim to hold the key to the meaning of that song anyway.

I really do believe that the meaning exists in every single person’s mind. Without being too esoteric about it, it’s somewhat of a philosophical place…I know where I stand on this stuff, which is that the song is pure and it can exist (anywhere). It plays on the radio, and oh! There’s a commercial before and after it. You do a TV show, you do Letterman, and the whole thing is surrounded by commercials. You have it in a television show and it’s equated with that scene. You have it in a movie and it’s equated with that scene. You play it at a concert and it’s that experience on that day for those thousand people.

At some point, you actually just embrace the fact that music exists. And certainly people are not having a problem with that when it comes to downloading it for free, right? It just exists and there it is. That nobody really owns the meaning to the song. Obviously there are limits to this. Like Broken Social Scene would never allow “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl” in a Burger King commercial. Within the realms of creativity and art and actors acting, I think the song holds… it is its own, it has its own power.

So no. The longest answer ever. Obviously I put thought into this topic, and it mattered to me. I’m a huge Flaming Lips fan, and that song “Do You Realize?” – do you know it?

I do, yeah.

It’s just like, “What the f---, that’s just the best song,” and I hear it at concerts, and I always cry and it’s always so amazing…and then it was in a car commercial! And I remember being like, “Wow, that’s intense.” There’s that song and I had a moment of like you know “Wait a minute, can The Flaming Lips do that to me?”

Then you realize that you want the Flaming Lips to continue, you want this eccentric, interesting band that makes no compromises and does exactly what it wants and shoots cannons of confetti into the audience and rolls around in a hamster ball to continue. And you know what they might do? They might put their song in a commercial. You have no idea if it paid for their studio, or their kids' braces, whatever. And there is that thing with artists where you’re accountable, for some reason, to everyone else’s idea of how you’re supposed to survive.

And so it was an interesting moment for me to see it from a fan perspective, and being like, “No, Wayne (Coyne, Flaming Lips leader) and Co. could do whatever they need to do.” Since that commercial, I’ve seen another Flaming Lips show, and it’s up to me to have the power of my own life to not be like, “Oh wait! Oh no, all I can see is a car commercial.” You know, get over it. I can see more than a car commercial. And so I watched it, and cried again. It was amazing.

It’s a really thorny issue. In a way, the purity of that song is also your own construct. Who knows if Wayne and Co. – and they didn’t view it this way I’m sure – but who’s to say that they didn’t see it as a marketing tool, and just wrote this incredibly beautiful ballad that everyone could attach some kind of meaning to? You look at the extreme example like that Moby album Play, where he was very upfront about designing those songs to be in commercials. And lo and behold, he was extremely successful from a licensing perspective, though it was also a really great album.

Yeah, it is thorny, that’s a good word. As I said, for us, I see it more as a sign of positive change in the mainstream world that a band like Metric, from Canada, on their own label, with me spouting off about war and patriarchs on Vespas (ed. - on the Metric song “Patriarch on a Vespa”) and all the other things I feel compelled to write about and represent…that without changing in any way, us being just who we are, that it feels as though the mainstream is coming to us, and seeing value. But again, do we really see Edgar Wright as mainstream? I don’t know. It is a Hollywood movie…whatever. But is Michael Cera really mainstream? Whatever.

I don’t know if it’s a testament to the fact that we’ve been around this long, and we’ve actually created some momentum, so that people are starting to understand what we are and we’re not just outsiders anymore. Or if it’s that the mainstream is realizing that there are interesting things happening from independent artists, and that it doesn’t need to be Moby. They don’t actually want Moby in a way. They don’t want stuff that’s tailored, so I don’t know. I mean, we haven’t done commercials, really. That’s the one thing that we draw the line on.

Although…this is a great example. I don’t even know if you know our early records, but on Old World Underground (Where Are You Now?), we have this song called “On a Slow Night,” that’s probably been heard by like 500 people in total. It’s like track 8 or something. But we got – this was years ago – an Italian dark chocolate company to use that song. We were like, “That’s great! That’s fantastic! Oh my god, I’m flattered! Do we get chocolate?” So there are instances where it’s literally a compliment, when we couldn’t get a record deal to save our lives. And a waiter listening to a demo of (Metric’s debut recording) Grow Up and Blow Away gave it to a friend, who got it in a Polaroid commercial in 1997 or something. I think we got like 500 bucks, but that was so cool! We sort of existed for a minute, and we got a couple emails from people who were like, “Oh hey I heard your song.”

So I do think commercials are the thorniest of the thorny, but when it comes to film and television, these are creative people who need a soundtrack. And a lot of times, I feel like it’s better than radio. You know, if what’s surrounding your song is a scene with a doctor instead of an ad for Jiffy Lube…I don’t know. Choose your demons.

There are some that would argue that pairing music with a visual, as necessary as it is for the power of the film or TV show, can limit the imagination that a viewer can have about that song.

I wonder, yeah but didn’t people say this about music videos? I would think that at this point – and I’m not taking a hard line on this, I just think this is an interesting topic – you’d think people would have developed the skill to separate. Like “Oh look! here’s another Metric video with Emily mouthing the words in some questionable Canadian studio for a $20,000 dollar video!” I feel like having to make videos is as obtrusive to the purity of the song as other outlets for the song. And I do think that people would by now have the power to separate the visual, but maybe not.

Usually those videos that really stick in people’s minds are ones where the song is so powerful on its own that you pair it with a great video and it just becomes this perfect synergistic moment.

Yeah, like “Thriller.”

Like “Thriller.” Or where the song is so forgettable that the video is the only thing that you can remember about it.

I think I have more examples of that than the previous. But I don’t want to diss anybody so I won’t list any of those.

So if what Wikipedia says is true, you grew up in a really intensively artistic household. Was film ever a significant part of your upbringing or education?

Yeah, definitely. In fact my father (Paul Haines), along with being a writer and a poet, made some really unusual experimental short films. One of which involved, I remember at a young age, sculpting ears that looked like human ears in Vegas, and then planting them on our suitcases going through the Las Vegas airport so my dad could do this, like, “Will that be listening or non-listening?” stunt with the check in. That’s kind of the classic Paul Haines short film, but they’ve actually screened his works. They’ve been screened in New York and London. He was always working on oddball experimental films.

Do you think that’s had any influence on your affection for this multimedia direction that you’ve been taking over the last few years?

I don’t know. I think it was the whole thing together. Definitely the most influential part, looking back at my childhood, was my father’s involvement with Escalator over the Hill, which is…do you know that album?

I don’t.

It’s really cool. It’s often referred to as the Sergeant Pepper’s of the jazz world. So it’s 1974. He’s living in India with family who had me. He’s sending lyrics back to New York to this woman Carla Bley. I’m so excited whenever I get to introduce someone to it, ‘cause it’s totally mind-blowing. It’s a double album, and my dad wrote like a…it’s like an opera. They call it a “chronotransduction.” But Carla Bley says “we call it an opera for short.” And so it’s these interesting characters, and everything is sung by artists from all different genres. Linda Ronstadt is on there. Jack Bruce from Cream is on there. Plus all these heavy-duty outside jazz guys are playing on there too.

So I grew up looking at this cast of characters like The Muppet Show, you know? An incredible example of people from all different musical genres and different styles creating what I think is one of the most incredible albums ever made, and they financed it themselves, and they put it out on their own label. When I look at my life and the things I have done, that was obviously the blueprint for me. Including…there’s only so much you can do in terms of collaboration if you’re not willing to work with anyone other than musicians, so for me, I feel like it’s natural that I moved from the art collective from Buenos Aires that I was working with, on to film. For whatever reason, it always looked like more fun to me to be part of something with other people, and let them take what you’re doing and interpret it and make it part of what they’re doing, instead of just being on your own.

That’s exactly the impression that I have of Broken Social Scene. This loose collective of folks. Maybe some of them came up with the kernels of the idea for a song, but it really was like it could be nine people at a time that are contributing to the atmosphere of this thing.

Yeah, and Kevin (Drew, co-founder of Broken Social Scene), when we first became friends, he couldn’t believe that my dad was Paul Haines. He made a pilgrimage to our place in this small town where we lived, and he was totally obsessed with and he knew those records. And that idea really shaped it for him as well.

And that’s the thing. I feel like so often you have to justify your existence as an artist and a musician, and I’m always game for a good conversation, but it makes me sad sometimes when I’m aware of other peoples’ way of looking at the world, you know? Like they can’t see anything except as from an external, crass marketing standpoint, and they imply that everyone sees things that way. But it’s not how I grew up, and it’s not the world I live in. On the inside, the experience of working on Scott Pilgrim, for example, is getting to walk into our little studio in Toronto and see Nigel Godrich sitting at the control board. That’s amazing. You’re not thinking about advertising.

You mentioned collaboration, and that spirit that you embrace so much. Tell me about your collaboration with Howard Shore on the theme for the Twilight: Eclipse soundtrack. Had you worked with composers like that before?

No, never. I worked with this composer/arranger called Todor Kobakov on my solo album (Knives Don’t Have Your Back, 2006). He did all the string arrangements, but those were ideas that came from me, and we kind of fleshed them out together. It’s a different scale altogether. Howard’s career is just…I don’t know if you’re familiar with his Wikipedia page, but it’s pretty inspiring, I gotta say. He’s a Canadian rock & roll guy. He was in (Canadian band) Lighthouse when he was my age. And then somehow we’ve actually become quite good friends, and he’s been very kind and illuminating for me the path of his life somewhat.

It’s just so inspiring to see that someone who was in a relatively known – but not that known – band from that era could develop into pretty much the most sought after film composer. I’m really impressed, and mostly because working with him, he’s just a musician. It was such a relief, because when he called and said he wanted a band to write the theme song with, he was given options, and he said that he heard my voice and that’s what he went with. So it was on a really tight timeline, and it was an opportunity for me to really be a musician and work. So I went to his studio and watched the scene. He already had the key and everything laid out, and the progression, and showed me and Jimmy (Shaw, Metric guitarist) together what he was looking for.

We were a little bit disappointed that we had to write the uplifting part. We thought because (Twilight is) all about vampires and werewolves, we’d be allowed to be like “We get to write this really dark and brooding song!” Like you know, “F--- all those A&R guys that told us we were too dark all those years ago!” Then it was like “Oh okay, we gotta write the uplifting, euphoric resolution moment,” which is totally unknown territory for me. As is love, generally. So it was a really interesting challenge.

It was a very organic process. Sitting at a piano, (Howard) would be on the phone singing something to me, and I’d sing something back. I tried to focus my lyrics on the questions of conformity that are raised by those films, and that was that. It’s really a trip to go to see the film and hear how it’s the last piece of music. It’s like this seven-minute, beautiful London Philharmonic string recording from Abbey Road that leads into our song at the end. And then the melody that we wrote, which was our contribution, is throughout the movie. It comes like seven times in the movie. So yeah, it was really so excellent to be given the opportunity, and then to see if we could really do it. And we did, just little old Metric. It’s so fun to me. Here we are in our little studio in Toronto, on a movie soundtrack next to all these huge bands, and it’s just us. It’s cool.

I was just thinking about James Horner, who co-wrote the theme song to Avatar (“I See You”). You always think about a guy like him, and Howard Shore to an extent, writing these big bombastic scores because that’s mostly what they’re hired to do. But that was interesting that he comes from a band background, as you told me. He was probably writing songs for years before he wrote his first orchestral score.

That’s what I find inspiring. It’s actually just to that scale. My world is a three and a half minute world of writing songs, but then seeing how in his life and in his vision as a writer what Howard has done is to expand that, so that it can be the score for an entire film. And you know, it’s essentially just a different sense of proportion and scale. So I just tried to absorb by osmosis as much as I could in that short period of time. And he keeps me up to date on his various other projects, which are invariably really interesting, creative works. If I could be the female Howard Shore, that would be fine with me. Give me thirty years, forty years, and I should be able to figure it out by then.

Could you see yourself, or you and Metric, doing larger scale music, or long form stuff for various projects in the future?

Oh, I would hope so. That’s definitely always been the dream, You know Daft Punk’s doing Tron. This kind of scale, definitely. Our first album was produced by Michael Andrews in Los Angeles. We knew of him because of the Donnie Darko soundtrack. And he definitely produced that record for us as a labor of love, and was working on many film projects simultaneously, so that was our first glimpse of it. And I remember talking to Mike then about that…if all goes well, and we could really develop as artists and musicians, imagine if one day we could score a film. So I hope so.

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Scott Pilgrim vs. The World opened in theaters nationally on August 13, 2010.

Find out more at the film’s official website: www.scottpilgrimthemovie.com

Metric on the web: http://www.ilovemetric.com