Exclusive Audio: Metric Offers an Orchestral Take on Buffalo Springfield

Today, listen to an exclusive preview of Toronto quartet Metric's iTunes session (on iTunes tomorrow), which will feature eight new tracks. The session includes an interview with the band plus the new songs, most of them featuring alternate arrangements. Some of the new versions are stripped-down and acoustic, but other tracks — like their gorgeous, melancholy take on Buffalo Springfield’s “Expecting to Fly” — expand the band’s usual musical palette with the addition of a string quartet.

Click to listen to Metric's Expecting To Fly.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

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