Metric Confirm Fall Tour, Plans to Sculpt "Triumphant Studio Masterpiece"

Savvy new-wave-noise quartet Metric will take a break from prepping to record a "triumphant studio masterpiece" -- their fourth album -- just long enough to squeeze in a tour in September and October, their first U.S. jaunt since spring of 2006. The band will hit a studio co-owned by the band's guitarist Jimmy Shaw and former Death From Above 1979 rocker Sebastien Grainger in November to churn out their first new set of tracks since 2005's Live it Out (the band's first LP, Grow Up and Blow Away was just re-released, and frontwoman Emily Haines has released a solo album in the interim, as will Bang Lime, a group comprised of rhythm-section players Joules Scott-Key and Josh Winstead, in August). Read on to grab the tour dates.

9/19 - Philadelphia, PA, The Trocadero
9/20 - Washington, DC, The 930 Club
9/21 - New York, NY, Webster Hall
9/22 - Buffalo, NY, Town Ballroom
9/24 - Detroit, MI, St Andrews Hall
9/25 - Chicago, IL, The Metro
9/26 - Minneapolis, MN: First Avenue
9/28 - Denver, CO, Bluebird Theatre
10/1 - Phoenix, AZ, Martini Ranch
10/2 - Pomona, CA, Glass House
10/3 - San Diego, CA, House of Blues
10/5 - Los Angeles, CA, Henry Fonda Theater
10/6 - San Francisco, CA, Download Festival
10/8 - Portland, OR, Cafe Wonder
10/9 - Seattle, WA, The Showbox

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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.”

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