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Awesome article Emily wrote for A Wanted Mag about how the band got together. For more check out the site - www.awantedmag.com

Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to be a musician. I studied other things but always knew where I was headed. When my parents asked me what my back-up plan was I told them I would be a freelance non-fiction writer if life as a musician got tough. This really cracked them up. My safety net was as impractical as my dream. They never tried to persuade me to become anything else though, and I always felt their support and respect for my ambitions.

I am the youngest of three and my older brother and sister helped me get there too. I was born in New Delhi, India but grew up in a little rural town in Ontario, Canada with a population of 1600 and not a lot of action. Probably out of boredom, my brother would often invite me to come hang out in his room and listen to records. I spent many rainy afternoons crouched on the floor beside his turntable in awe of what was possible. Later, he bought me my first recording device, a Fostex X-12 cassette four-track. I used it to record my very first songs. It really helped me compose and develop arrangements. He loved to remind me that the Beatles had achieved greatness with just four tracks. He told me to aim high.

When I was 15, I was accepted into a performing arts high school in Toronto that was a couple hours away from the town where we lived. Of course my parents wanted me to be able to go but it did pose a bit of a dilemma for our family. Both my parents were teachers there at the time and the prospect of selling our house and relocating to Toronto so I could attend ESA was pretty daunting. To my amazement, my older sister, who was just getting herself established in Toronto, volunteered to let me live with her. She was only twenty-three and when I think about it now I realize what a sacrifice it was for her to take on the responsibility of having me and my unusual friends hanging around, stealing cigarettes from her purse and borrowing her blouses without asking. It was at that school that I really started to develop my own style of song writing and formed some key friendships that still remain central to my existence.

I went to university in Vancouver and Montreal, majored in Electroacoustics, graduated with a Fine Arts degree, and went back to Toronto for a period of uncertainty and boredom. I had hit that critical transition point where you're supposed to make decisions and move in some direction. I was stalling. Toronto felt safe, comfortable and uninspiring. Just then I was introduced to Jimmy Shaw. He was back in Toronto from NYC, a Julliard graduate who had sold his trumpet for an electric guitar. We hit it off on the spot and started making plans for making music. Before long we were on an overnight Greyhound bus bound for New York. It was a fantastic cliché and we made it real. We arrived in the city with nothing. Looking back, I know we could have made it easier for ourselves, but I'm glad we didn't. We were determined to find a place where we could live and work - still a somewhat novel idea in 1998 - and we found it in Williamsburg on Metropolitan Avenue between Bedford and Driggs. I know it is hard for current residents of the neighborhood to imagine, but at that time you were hard pressed to get a roll of toilet paper let alone luxury goods. There were no ironic rock t-shirt shops for babies or organic brunches. Our grocery store was the bodega across the street. Most days breakfast was a white bun in a black plastic bag with a cup of beige takeaway coffee.

The loft on Metropolitan was incredibly big, by any standards, with one kitchen, two horrible bathrooms and eight separate units down an L-shaped hallway. The big room in the front with the blue windows was our recording studio. It was perfect. Sure, the space was beyond industrial, with concrete floors, bars on the windows and diesel trucks in the garage below poisoning us with carbon monoxide while we slept. But we had the space and the freedom to play loud and we needed that more than any conventional domestic comforts.

The loft was heated with oil and in the winter we did endure some truly outrageous circumstances. For years the oil company refused to set up an account for us and by some twisted logic insisted that we could only buy more oil when it had completely run out. We couldn't predict when the tank would be empty and it often happened in the middle of the night. It's a crazy feeling, being so cold that it actually wakes you up. Compounding the problem, the price of oil fluctuated wildly, making it impossible for us to budget heating costs for this massive industrial space. More times than I care to remember, Jimmy and I had to knock on each of our "room mates" doors and ask for chunks of money out of nowhere: Sometimes it was $80 and sometimes it was $250, there was no way of knowing. When you are so cold that your eyelashes are snapping off you somehow find the cash but we felt terrible about it as everyone living there was doing so out of creative necessity. We hounded the oil company for years to treat us as they would their regular residential customers and eventually they gave in, put us on a monthly pro-rated program and delivered new oil before the old was gone.

This was a minor victory but the place still had major issues. I worked on fixing it up for years, to no avail. Friends from those days tell me their impression of me was of a stressed out and skinny Lady Macbeth with cropped black hair, consumed by her desire to bleach the stink of cat piss from her concrete floors, charging up and down Bedford Ave burdened with buckets and cleaning supplies, haggling with Sydney (the guy who sold used furniture that was basically garbage) or jogging with the junkies in McCarren park.

Meanwhile, the other residents of this questionable headquarters were getting on with making art and making music. Helen Verhoeven's paintings grew in size and scope; Nick Zinner finished his Casio Parker recordings and spent time taking photos or rehearsing with Challenge of the Future before forming YYYs with Brian and Karen; Chris Seligman and Torquil Campbell completed Nightsongs and looked to Amy Millan and Evan Cranley from Toronto to complete their band Stars; Jaleel Bunton took up residence in the newly built front room and started working with Tunde and Dave on TVOTR; Angus and Aaron drifted in and out, recovering between Liars' tours.

For our part, Jimmy and I were being courted by supposedly high-flying managers in London promising us recording contracts. We took the bait, moved to London, signed a publishing deal in the first few weeks, lived in Hoxton for a year and made an album in our home studio called "Grow Up and Blow Away". Eventually we tired of lunching with powerless A&R guys and, sensing the end of the 1990's bland electro dominance, decided to come back to NYC in search of real live musicians who wanted to play our brand of rock and roll with us. Our timing turned out to be bang on. This was 2000. 9-11 and the subsequent garage rock revival were right around the corner. A new respect for live music was emerging. Jimmy and I knew we needed a drummer and a bass player and we found them down the street at Black Betty's after a Unitard show. Their names were Joules Scott Key and Joshua Winstead, best friends from Texas living in a Williamsburg loft more dangerous than ours. It seemed we were looking for them and they were looking for us. Two duos. We've been METRIC ever since.

In 2003, the band left NYC and moved to Los Angeles to make "Old World Underground, Where Are You Now." A year later, Jimmy & I finally gave up the Metropolitan loft and moved back to Toronto where we made 2005's "Live it Out." Our latest album is called "Fantasies" and we recorded it in a farmhouse outside Seattle and at our own studio in Toronto called Giant. We mixed it with John O'Mahony (another character from those early days in Brooklyn, another story for another time) in NYC at Electric Lady Studios on 8th Street. It felt like the right thing to do, bringing METRIC back to where we started, and giving the album a title that refers to dreaming. Joshua has since moved back to the city and is living in Chinatown. I split my time between my place in Toronto and my new West Village home.

To this day, I keep an eye out for the bands and artists that lived in that loft on Metropolitan. We were all in a desperate rush to get out of our absurd living situation but I don't think any one of us regrets having gone through it. We knew what we wanted to achieve. It worked. There was a spark. No, this wasn't an idealized 1960s version of community. It was distinctly 1990s. We were accidentally immersed in each other, becoming ourselves. Simultaneously, we crafted our distinct identities and sounds, side-by-side in rooms separated by nothing more than flimsy drywall.

Now it is summer 2009 and somehow I am living the life I imagined as a kid. The band has made four records, toured all over the world, bought a building and built a recording studio - this time with no diesel trucks! We devised a new way of releasing our records that has rewarded us beyond our expectations for maintaining control of our music. We've played with everyone from Sonic Youth to The Rolling Stones and it still amazes me that none of this would be happening had we never met back then in Brooklyn.

Written by Emily Haines