I know you've been collecting gear for almost two decades. The first piece of gear in your collection is a nice tie-in to the band's whole story of strong independence and DIY.
That's a great place to start. It goes so far back. I remember in the late '90s, we were living in New York City and doing all these recordings and demos. We had this friend [Chris Taylor] who was a lawyer in Toronto and doing all these big deals for people, like Nelly Furtado's first record deal. He got us a demo deal with Warner Bros. Records. They gave us $5,000 to record five songs. My thought was, "Cool! I'll buy $5,000 worth of gear, and then we can record a million songs." Warner Bros. was like, "No, that's not how it works. We need to see a studio invoice for $5,000."
Great. How did you manage to find a way around that?
I was like, "That doesn't make any sense. Why would I go and spend $5,000 somewhere else, and then when you say 'no' to my demos, then I'm back to square one?" I think that very first move was the lesson of, "Oh, the industry's not going to let us do this. The industry's not going to want us to be able to control our own thing." They like to see the money funneled back into what they can control. I don't even know if it's really that sinister; it's just the way that it's worked for so long. They don't know what column in the accounting book to put "the musician bought their own equipment." It was a very strange thing. I fought them on it. I won. I took that five grand, and I went and bought a Mackie D8B, which was one of those early digital do-it-all consoles. DAWs at the time were so rudimentary, and you couldn't open many plug-ins. The Mackie D8B had an EQ and a compressor on every single channel. That made me feel I could work entirely in the DAW and do what I needed to do. I'm not sure at that point if I'd gotten anywhere near the sonics of what a preamp could do, what a proper microphone could do, or what a proper mic position would do. I hadn't got to any of those places yet. Warner Bros. did turn us down. We kept going with it; we ended up doing an independent deal and finishing this record [Grow Up and Blow Away]. They gave me a budget to mix it. I went to the studio [Mission Sound] in Brooklyn, and I was sitting in front of this Neve 8028. I had no idea what I was doing at all. Not a clue. The owner came in, and he said, "Hey, your mixes sound good, but have you noticed that the meters are absolutely pinned? You're boosting 10 dB of 20 hertz somewhere. It's not even audible, but you're destroying it."
What other earliest recording experiences did you have? Did you have a 4-track cassette recorder when you were a teenager?
Yeah, for sure. I grew up as a classical musician. I was a trumpet player in high school. I went to these junior high and high schools where music was a very, very important part of it. It was a public high school, but they had these crazy music programs. I got into this school in Philadelphia called Curtis Institute of Music when I was 16. I was playing in orchestras, and then I went to The Juilliard School and got my BA. When I was at Juilliard, I ended up living with Torquil Campbell and Chris Seligman, who are both in the band Stars now. I started realizing that I hated classical music. I hated everything that it stood for, the fact that the art form itself refused to move into the future. There's zero consideration for the fact that human beings have changed, and entertainment has changed. I wanted out. Torquil had this crazy collection of four thousand records. He started playing me everything from Primal Scream [Tape Op #96], to The Smiths, to Prefab Sprout, to the Cocteau Twins. I didn't know any of this music. We decided to start writing songs together. As a trumpet player, I probably had four or five trumpets. I sold all of them except for my main one, a B-flat trumpet. When I walk into an orchestra rehearsal, and it calls for D trumpet, I have to transpose on sight. I bought a Tascam TSR-8 reel-to-reel [tape deck], a Fatar MIDI controller, a Yamaha QY10 – a mini sequencer/drum machine, a purple Ibanez guitar, and a couple other things. I put together this little studio, and we started writings songs. This was probably '94 or '93? This was super rudimentary shit. I used to go to Sam Ash and Manny's Music on 48th Street, stare at all the gear, try to figure out what everything did, ask too many questions, and irritate all the sales guys. This was back in the days of Akai S900s.
The samplers?
Yeah, tons of samplers. I had S900s for a long time. I'd buy sampler CDs with 1500 snare drum sounds on them. I was a very, very early Emagic Logic user. I used Logic for the longest time. It probably wasn't until into the 2000s when I moved off of Logic. I was using everything at my disposal to create whatever we possibly could.
When did you start collecting synths?
The synth thing happened to me a little bit later. Metric started when Emily [Haines, Metric singer and lyricist] and I got going in the late '90s. We met Joshua and Joules in 2000, 2001. Emily and I had gone to England and come back, and we'd done record deals that didn't work. It was all in the era where the industry felt like they knew how to turn one person into a massive star in two days with one song. Then, all of a sudden, there was The Strokes and The White Stripes. That's when the guitar thing happened for me. We went back to New York, met Josh and Joules, and we became a rock band. All we wanted to do was get in a shitty vehicle, drive to the next city, and play a rock show. We put out Fantasies in 2009, which was our biggest record. There were synths used on that record. Synths were always a part of what we did, but it wasn't an obsession of mine. When we made our first record [Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?] in 2002, and by 2003 we were working with a producer named Michael Andrews. He said, "I think you need to lean into the idea that Emily plays this mono synth up at the front and center of the stage. No one's doing that. Metric will probably be uncool for a minute, and then really cool later on." He played The Cars' records, and he's like, "That's the vibe." Big, chunky guitars with mono lead synths and dry drums. We based our first record off of that sound, where synth was prominent, but it wasn't like synth music. You'd never say that The Cars were a synth band, but the synth is very prominent in a rock 'n' roll way. It's not used as a textural instrument; it's used as a lead instrument. We went that way, and we stayed that way for the first two or three records. Then, around 2009 and 2010, I started hanging out with Liam O'Neil of the band The Stills from Montreal.
You worked with Liam on Formentera, right?
Liam had actually worked on [our fifth album] Synthetica with us first. He was a deep part of Synthetica. Then he worked on [our sixth album] Pagans in Vegas. He didn't do [our next record] Art of Doubt, but then he did Formentera. He was a huge part of Formentera. He's been this weird fifth member for a long time. He's also the keyboard player in the Kings of Leon. He's the best, friendliest, most awesome dude, and ridiculously talented. It was around that time, '09 or '10 maybe, that me and Liam, and his ex-bandmate Dave [Hamelin], were hanging around my studio a lot. We started getting really into synths and started jamming on synths all the time. Dave started coming in with crazy Eurorack [synth module] gear. He brought in Serge [Modular] and a couple of Buchla [synths]. I got into 5U [modular synths] and started building a big 5U system. I traded a [Sequential Circuits] Pro-One and a bunch of cash for a [Yamaha] CS-80, and I traded a [Roland] Jupiter-4 and some cash for a [Roland] Jupiter-8. I got an ARP 2600 from Bill Skibbe [Tape Op #44], who owns Key Club Recording in Michigan. The synth collection started coming together. All of a sudden, the control room was a 56-channel Trident [console] that was being dwarfed by a thousand oscillators. We renovated the studio, swapped rooms, and made the big live room the control room. That's where people were spending most of their time, as is quite common with electronic music. That's when the synthesizers started to get out of control, and Metric fans started to ask, "What's going on? Why is it that when a guitar player produces records, there's no guitar?"
Do you treat your guitars a lot, where there are almost synth-like sounds?
Yeah, I do. I've never really been a guitar-guitar player! Like, when you're in a guitar store, you see a guy walk in, and he picks up a guitar off the wall and he plays "guitar licks." [laughs] I don't even know how to play a guitar lick. It's not in my character! Maybe it's because I came from classical music, but I'm not totally sure I know how to play a blues scale on the guitar, which is a very weird, gray area in my musical knowledge. I think that it's good, because it keeps me who I am. I might be the only guitar player who doesn't know how to play a blues scale, and I'm proud of it.
