Who: Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton
When: Friday, December 8, 2017
Where: Nordstrom Recital Hall at Benaroya Hall
Why: Uhh…
What:
https://twitter.com/chrisburlingame/status/939374351564005376
How:
Somewhere lost to the dustbins of cyberspace, the remains of my old music blog Another Rainy Saturday are floating around, out of reach to all. One thing I remember was doing an interview with Metric frontwoman Emily Haines several years ago, and asking if she would ever do another solo album, after her 2006 album Knives Don’t Have Your Back, and a follow-up EP the next year, What is Free to a Good Home? I remembered loving that album, and being pleased that her answer was something like “Hell yeah!” I can’t tell for sure when that happened but I was delighted to find that Haines had found the time to complete and release another solo album, and that she made it through Seattle on Friday night to play songs from it.
As much as I love Metric (I think they’re the greatest rock band to come from Canada; don’t @ me, Hip-sters), listening to Haines’s solo work is a different experience altogether. With the band, she’s an incredibly important piece of a puzzle that forms a tight rock band. If a band was created in a lab specifically for my enjoyment, there’s a very good chance Metric would be the result, assuming everything worked according to plan. With the minimalism of the singer-songwriter format, Haines’s songs are carried by her gorgeous harmonies, with the melody used to propel her voice through the song. It’s hypnotic to listen to, and through the PA system at the Nordstrom Recital Hall (upstairs in Benaroya Hall), they sounded heavenly.
Haines began her show in a somewhat-scripted fashion, when she came out, she feigned being woken up by an alarm clock after losing a bout with insomnia. Between songs, there’s a pre-recorded voiceover (in Haines’s voice) to simulate her inner dialogue. At one point early in the show, it tells her (or she tells herself), “You deserve every bad thing that has happened to you; you’re going to hurt like hell forever.” Haines sang her first song, “Planets” over pre-recorded instrumentation. Her next few songs saw her behind a piano, before the voiceover telling her she has a show to perform, and she’s joined by her band (drummer Justin Peroff, bassist Sam Goldberg, and guitarist Jimmy Shaw; the former two were members of Broken Social Scene, and the latter is Haines’s partner in Metric, though, if you think about it, Shaw and Haines have also played with BSS).
When the band came on stage, the show took up a slightly more upbeat feeling, with Haines waiting until between songs 11 and 12 before addressing the crowd directly. She called the show something like a fleeting moment that we could share together. And that was why I found it so enjoyable, spending almost two hours in the presence of a singer/songwriter I revere. The show began shortly after 8pm and finished a few minutes before ten. She spent most of her time with us behind a piano, which was fine with me because it proved a perfect companion for Haines’s voice, the most important instrument on stage. Yet when the was wrapping up, just before the encore, Haines came out from behind the piano to dance across the stage while “Fatal Gift” built into a dazzling crescendo that gloriously fell into a million pieces before Haines and her band left the stage (only Haines returned for the two-song encore, after putting on a red hoodie). She is still very much a rock and/or roll star, so at least one cre
There were a lot of emotional moments in the show, including when Haines performed “Sprig,” a musical adaptation of a poem her father wrote, before thanking the great men in her life (her father, brother, and band members, in particular). Another memorable moment came late in the show, when Haines sang “Strangle All Romance” a cappella, with lyrics like “Seduce me, surprise me / Pretend we met by chance.”
When the show was over, I looked at my watch, surprised it lasted close to two hours (there was no opener). My notes say I jotted down said something about Emily Haines calling the show a fleeting moment that we’re all sharing together. It was that, especially when I saw more time lapsed than what it felt like. It might have been a fleeting moment, but it was one I wouldn’t want to have had to spend anywhere else.
- Planets
- Wounded
- Crowd Surf Off a Cliff
- Nihilist
Arby’sAbyss - Our Hell
- Detective Daughter
- Mostly Waving
- The Maid Needs a Maid
- Statuette
- Minefield of Memory
- Sprig
- Legend of the Wild Horse
- Doctor Blind
- Reading in Bed
- Winning
- Fatal Gift
- Strangle All Romance (encore)
- Choir of the Mind (encore)
