A casual glance at the recording history of Emily Haines suggests a pattern over her two decades in music: a solo album every 10 years – “Choir of the Mind,” her third, arrived this fall – with a steady stream of albums from Metric, her day job, if you will, and various collaborations in between.
“Seems like I’m on a schedule, right?” Haines says on a call connected as she walked through a park in her hometown of Toronto recently.
“I wish that there was a coherent and completely organized way that all these things unfold, and I could be one of those people who have their (act) together,” she says. “But I feel very much at the mercy of a bunch of external factors when it comes to not only the writing, but when the music comes out.”
“Choir of the Mind,” which brings Haines to Los Angeles for two shows on Tuesday, Dec. 12, emerged as she considered her life over the decade that had passed since her 2006 solo album, “Knives Don’t Have Your Back,” which like the new record is billed as Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton.
“I’m sure you’ve had that feeling where for some arbitrary reason that 10 years that’s behind you becomes one concrete chapter,” she says. “And feels completely like time you just put in your pocket, and it consolidates in an unusual way.”
Those feelings intensified as she and her three band mates in Metric wrapped up touring behind 2015’s “Pagans In Vegas,” the group’s sixth studio release, and upon moving back to Toronto after a decade or so away, Haines says she sensed the time, and the songs, were right for a quieter, more introspective album.
“I’m always just writing, so whether something ends up being for Metric or a collaboration or solo, it’s always sort of choosing the channel once the song exists,” Haines says. “The thing with the choice of how a song will sound, in a way it’s sort of the superficial dressing for the song, the clothing, the look and the style.
“So the process of writing a Metric song begins the same way that writing something for a solo record would be,” she says. “It’s always fascinating to me which songs have the architecture that can withstand really loud guitars and huge synth riffs and the kind of sounds that can unify a crowd of some thousands of people (as Metric plays to).”
For “Choir of the Mind,” Haines says she intentionally left her songs stripped down to the bare bones of voice and piano, with just a bit of bass and guitar added in the studio by her Metric partner James Shaw.
“I felt as though we all have a bit of, I don’t know, content consumption overload,” Haines says. “And I wanted to make something that was kind of as delicate, as fragile and strong as possible. Normally if I hear something I farm it out other instruments.
“In this case I kept it quite close to my heart,” she says. “And so much of the percussion is breathing, and so much of the harmonic information is just my voice, just my body.”
The lead single, “Fatal Gift,” is typical of that approach, building from a single piano melody beneath her voice until an almost subterranean ripple of bass appears in the distance, and finally her voice, overdubbed into a choir of clones, carries it to a frenzied finish.
“I was really pleased with how that turned out,” Haines says. “It’s a very unusual sound, like, ‘What is that?’ I don’t know where we are, but it’s emotionally correct, I feel.”
While informed by the past, the songs are designed to live in the present and open doors to the future, she says. In the past, visits to Toronto reminded her too much of who she once had been: “Just completely restricted and burdened by the memory of yourself, as if you’re haunted,” she says.
“Until this time I kind of always felt suffocated by the past, from being a kid here,” Haines says. “For whatever reason, it switched, and now it feels like the layers of memory, it’s like rings in a tree or sediment, it’s all there for me to appreciate.”
The other theme that flows through the album and its songs is a sense of wonder and discovery of the femininity – not, as it’s often presented, as the flip side or counterpoint to masculinity, but as a life force and independent spirit of its own, she says.
“What is the feeling, if you were to give the most positive and illuminating sense of what a feminine energy is?” Haines says. “Removed from your standards multiple-choice options of a woman as a virgin, whore, mother, or, I don’t know, I think nurse is in there.
“It was really more like an exploration and a study and a fascination than any kind of proclamation,” she says. “I just wanted to bring out whatever I felt that was in myself, and to my great surprise and happiness I think that to the extent that femininity is associated with being a girl, I feel like that part of me is somehow totally intact and thriving and miraculously – definitely injured, and definitely wounded – not killed.
“Which is something to say for a 43-year-old woman with 20 years in music, you know? So yeah, it was all coming from a really positive place of checking in and discovering that things are not as bad as I thought.”
Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton
When: 7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 12
Where: The Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever, Los Angeles
How much: $25-$85
For more: Emilyhaines.com
