But being able to put it all into a great song is special.”įor the Haim sisters, recording the new album was a recovery process of its own. “I know so many people with funny or sad or interesting stories. “Knowing her so well, I couldn’t believe how clearly she was nailing the things she was going through emotionally, and with a new, clever voice,” says Rechtshaid, who has since recovered. Even so, Rechtshaid says he thinks Danielle’s direct way of expressing herself in the music will make its themes hit home for all listeners. Rechtshaid, who is Danielle’s partner, was diagnosed with testicular cancer during the production of Haim’s last LP, 2017’s Something to Tell You, and that experience informed much of this album’s lyrical content. While confronting a sexist music journalist on the acoustic track “Man From the Magazine,” Danielle channels Mitchell’s ability to sound both world-weary and strung-out, even as she’s going in for the kill.Īt times, the album carries a darker, murkier sound than do the band’s previous releases. It all sounds very Joni Mitchell, and naturally, there are a handful of references to the folk legend on WIMPIII, some more obvious than others. “It was instant - she would write things that felt iconic and still uniquely hers in one or two takes.” He says he wanted to capture the “looseness and sense of freedom” that comes with seeing the band play live, even as they were methodical and “using math brain” when it came to songwriting. “Sometimes it was just about handing Danielle a guitar and asking her to sit and play where a solo should be,” Batmanglij says. The drum sounds themselves became more acoustic - the band compares them to Chad Smith’s echoing snares for Red Hot Chili Peppers - and the electronic punctuations, when they do come in, are weirder and more evocative, like the sparkling trumpets on the love song “Another Try,” or the P-Funk bass squelches on “3AM.” III has less of the accented percussion that’s become one of Haim’s signature features - which was “very hard for us to do, as we’re all drummers and we like to have a lot of syllables,” says Danielle. Produced with Rostam Batmanglij, formerly of Vampire Weekend, and longtime collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid, Women in Music Pt. for the longest time before we got signed - we wrote ‘The Wire’ in 2008.” Until “Summer Girl,” she says, “we’d never written a song and then just decided a couple days later that we were going to release it into the world.” This was the opposite of how their major-label debut, Days Are Gone, came together eight years ago: “We’d been sitting on those songs for years,” Danielle adds. “The excitement of that process kind of informed the rest of the album,” Danielle says. Its rollout began even further back, in July 2019, when Haim put out their first single, the Lou Reed-interpolating “Summer Girl,” just a couple of weeks after they recorded and mastered it.
Now, after a two-month delay, due in part to the pandemic, they have decided it’s time to release Women in Music Pt. Lately, they’ve put the fun and games on pause to use their platform for activism, sharing photos taken at LA’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations - including a “prosecute killer cops” sign - and calling for Mayor Eric Garcetti to remove the current LAPD chief from his position.
HAIM DAYS ARE GONE RAR SERIES
In May, the sisters reunited in person for a series of virtual choreography lessons for fans, spurred on by tutorial requests for the moves in their music videos. Alana Haim, 28, has taken up needlepoint, documenting her new hobby with a video set to the Ying Yang Twins.
Danielle Haim, 31, posed for an at-home photo shoot to promote the single “I Know Alone,” surrounded by empty wineglasses and beer cans, and draped only in a discarded copy of the local newspaper.
The sisters share social media accounts, and diving into the world of Haim Instagram often feels as if Blink-182 had peaked in 2020: gross-out humor, partial nudity that’s more goofy than seductive, and generally a good time for all. Since their album rollout was upended, they’ve been hard at work making the best of things, for themselves and for their fans.