Metric - Victim of Luck

0:00Emily Haines:You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Hirwe. Thanks to Gusto for their support of Song Exploder. I'm very grateful for the fact that this podcast is a small business. But when it comes to the business parts of the business, admin and payroll and stuff like that, I procrastinate like, well, like it's my business. Well, if you have the same kind of allergic reaction to this stuff, that's where Gusto comes in. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses, even tiny ones like Song Exploder.

0:40Emily Haines:It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Gusto is trusted by over 500 ,000 small businesses. So try Gusto today at gusto.com slash songexploder and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash songexploder. One more time, it's gusto.com slash songexploder. This episode is brought to you by booking.com, where you can find lots of great options to stay when you travel. When I was getting married, a lot of my friends weren't able to come out for either a bachelor party or the wedding.

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2:19Emily Haines:metric is a band from canada that was formed in 1998 they've won four juno awards including group of the year and rolling stone included them in their list of the 50 greatest canadian artists of all time in april 2026 metric released their 10th album romanticize the dive and for this episode i spoke to emily haynes and jimmy shaw about how they made the opening song on that out, Victim of Luck.

3:11Jimmy Shaw:I'm Emily from Metric, and I write songs and I sing and I play synths. I started this band with Jimmy in 98.

3:21Emily Haines:I'm Jimmy Shaw, the other co-founder and sort of the musical director, if you will. And there's Joshua Winstead, who plays bass guitar, and there's Jules Scott Key, who plays drums. So I'm curious, with such a long history of working together, was there a particular headspace or emotional place that you found yourselves in when you were going in to make this album?

3:45Jimmy Shaw:Yeah, we actually, it was quite a plan this time around. I remember I was talking to Jimmy on the phone and we were like, what's the vision? It's our 10th album. This is monumental for us. How should we approach it? And we had the idea of this, what would metric do ethos? Instead of referencing other artists while we were working, we would just reference ourselves and go back and be like, what would we do? What is this essence of who we are?

4:11Emily Haines:We've just moved our studio to this place in the countryside, kind of in the woods north of Toronto, and we call it Main Street. And it's an amazing space. And we were there all the time. We were there every day for a long, long time.

4:24Jimmy Shaw:I came into the studio with this idea of this fictional, sort of like Ziggy Stardust character and this story of a band, like an almost famous kind of could have been band. And the life that you spend, the dedication that you spend and the sacrifices that you make and the commitment to it, you stay with it regardless and that you'd rather that than any other life. And I came back to the piano and recorded it. It was the start of something. Scattered pieces long before all the stories. Like who discover you a starving artist? What's your thesis? I'm a starving artist. Clive discover. Geese start talking on the set.

5:21Jimmy Shaw:Show you a thing or two. Graduate from bars. Shoot us like magnets to a venue on the sun We'll all be buried where I'm bombing in Verdun Oh, not though, I know Someone's got to summit to the top And it could be me, but it won't be I know someone's got to summit to the top And I had been on a walk and heard that melody in my head, and I came back to the piano and recorded it, and then brought it in with all these ideas of somehow talking about this fictional band.

6:06Emily Haines:A lot of times when we start the recording process of these songs, and Emily brings something in, she'll usually have it in GarageBand.

6:15Jimmy Shaw:Or a voice note.

6:31Emily Haines:How do you go about translating something like that into what the arrangement's going to be for the full band? Those two little melodies, you know, there was the main melody and then there's the counter melody that happens up top. It was the sort of interaction between those two things that we were trying to explore and trying to develop. and so it was two things that happened on the first day there was like a modular synth sort of like a pulsing thing that's going like boom boom boom boom boom and it's kind of holding like some like very static harmony down and then the bass synth line

7:11Emily Haines:which was all sort of about those moving notes

7:20Emily Haines:You know, we were just kind of throwing everything at the wall in like a really relaxed and very enjoyable and fun way. And so was it just the two of you in the studio working on this? No, it's me and Emily and Liam. Liam O 'Neill. Liam is kind of like the other X factor. He's the keyboard player in Kings of Leon and was in the stills. And Emily and I discovered a long time ago that we can't really work with just the two of us. There has to be a third person in the room. Someone needs to man Pro Tools so we can be the musicians. Also, like, you know, Emily and I's relationship is like, we argue.

7:57Emily Haines:And when there's someone else in the room, it makes sense. If we're just arguing with each other, then it's just an argument. And so Liam is kind of like a fifth member of the band. It's like an extended family.

8:12Emily Haines:A lot of what we were doing in those recordings was smashing drum mics, over-compressing stuff, and going for like the sort of Dave Fridman, MGMT, big crunchy drum sound. So I have this early recording you sent me. What is this demo that we're listening to?

8:30Jimmy Shaw:so we would do bounces as the days went on. And the one that I sent you was the most indicative of when we started to get the right idea.

8:45Jimmy Shaw:But that was, like, many, many phases in.

9:08Emily Haines:What comes to your mind when you hear this older version right now?

9:12Jimmy Shaw:That any other band, this would have been totally great. But it was still just vague.

9:25Jimmy Shaw:You know, it's partly because of the audio quality, but it's partly because it's like trouble, whether it's trouble or luck. It's like, what are you saying? It's like still hiding behind some gauzy words.

9:38Emily Haines:But we knew there was something in this song for like a very, very long time. It was sort of like sculpture.

9:44Jimmy Shaw:It was in there, but it was in a block of marble, and we had quite a journey pulling it out. Countdown to a hardness, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It's time to live my life like it's never been done. Shoot me like a magnet, oh, to the sun. Yeah, better late than never, better. This song had many, many lives from that point forward.

10:15Emily Haines:Yeah, we got to this point in May of last year, and I was in Barcelona and I was walking around listening to all the mixes, and there was like three or four songs that were just reading like aggressive from like a sonic perspective so i called john john o'many is a mixer and an engineer and a producer that we've worked with off and on for long almost longer than anyone she has a good way of putting things sometimes he says you know if you want it to sound like there's reverb on everything you don't put reverb on everything because then you can't hear the reverb anymore you take reverb off of everything except the one thing that has the most transients, and then you put reverb on that, and then it feels like everything has reverb on it.

11:01Emily Haines:And so smashing these drum mics was just eating up every little bit of headroom for everything else, and you couldn't hear any reverbs or delays or anything because the drums were just eating everything up. So he was like, we've got to go back to the studio and we've got to re-record drums.

11:25Emily Haines:In this new drum recording, I noticed that there's a separate layer of just cymbals.

11:35Emily Haines:Well, if you want your kick and your snare to be like big, when you add splashy cymbals to that, you know, they're going to go crazy in the room mics. So the clean way to do it is to separate them and to overdub them. A lot of the time you lose the feel, but this time it kind of worked.

11:56Emily Haines:More with Metric after this.

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13:46Emily Haines:so what was the work that you had to do then in order to get the song from where it was to

13:51Jimmy Shaw:where it ultimately ended up victim of luck was the last thing that we finished lyrically because i had done this rewrite and i was like i this is it i finally i know i have it i know this is it and then it was like i don't know about this i don't know about that and i guess we had one last session. And I was like, let's play Destroy the Ego. What isn't working? What are the words? Which word? What don't you understand of what I'm trying to say? How am I not saying it?

14:22Emily Haines:I don't think we were seeing it necessarily clearly at the moment, but we knew somewhere in us that the song was song one on the album. And for us, the first song is supposed to really encapsulate the rest of what you're going to hear. And so you couldn't start with like an abstract moment. It needed to like start with something tangible.

14:47Jimmy Shaw:I mean, I definitely prefer to write in code. Definitely there are times when it comes to me as like an external character.

14:55Emily Haines:The fictional band in the story.

14:56Jimmy Shaw:Yeah. And then in real time, it was like me owning that I was talking about myself. what we are. Frightened of heights we knew, scared to go too far. How I might look to you now, who have I become? Trash that mirror, let my black mascara run. And that's when we also said the phrase victim of luck for the first time. Say you're never better, baby, am I a victim of luck? Never better, baby At last I don't give a fuck

15:38Emily Haines:What did that phrase, victim of luck, mean for you?