''Knives Don't Have Your Back'' is the debut

studio album An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), Phonograph record, vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as Digital distribution#Music, digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early ...

by Canadian singer-songwriter

Emily Haines Emily Savitri Haines (born 25 January 1974) is a Canadian singer and songwriter. She is the lead singer, keyboardist and songwriter of the rock band Metric and a member of the musical collective Broken Social Scene. As a solo artist, she has pe ...

and the Soft Skeleton. It is not her own debut album, as she released under her own name in limited number of copies an earlier work in 1996, the ''

Cut in Half and Also Double ''Cut in Half and Also Double'' is the debut album by Canadian artist Emily Haines that she self-released in about 2,000 copies in 1996 in Toronto. The song "Carpet" contains similar lyrics and vocal melodies to those in "Too Little Too Late," ...

'' album, which was self-released. The album was released in September 2006 on

Last Gang Records Last Gang Records is a record label formed by Canadian music industry lawyer Chris Taylor and concert promoter Donald K. Tarlton in the Fall of 2003 at the Pop Montreal Music Festival. Last Gang was nominated as Independent Record Label of the ...

. It debuted at 28 in

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

and has sold 20,000 copies there. She has stated that

Metric Metric or metrical may refer to: * Metric system, an internationally adopted decimal system of measurement * An adjective indicating relation to measurement in general, or a noun describing a specific type of measurement Mathematics In mathema ...

is still her first priority. The album is a collection of piano-driven songs backed with soft strings and horns and is said to feature guest spots by

Sparklehorse Sparklehorse was an American indie rock band from Richmond, Virginia, led by singer and multi-instrumentalist Mark Linkous. Sparklehorse was active from 1995 until Linkous' 2010 death. Prior to forming Sparklehorse, Linkous fronted local bands ...

's Scott Minor, members of

Stars A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night, but their immense distances from Earth ma ...

Broken Social Scene Broken Social Scene is a Canadians, Canadian indie rock band, a musical collective including as few as six and as many as nineteen members, formed by Kevin Drew (vocals, guitar) and Brendan Canning (vocals, bass) in 1999. Alongside Drew and Cannin ...

and

. She is quoted as saying the following: "When I was a little kid…I would creep downstairs to the piano and write rudimentary songs about imaginary places. I'm told the first song I ever wrote was a love song to a cranberry tree. I always used the

mute pedal A silent piano is an acoustic piano where there is an option to silence the strings by stopping the hammers from striking them. A silent piano is designed for private silent practice. In the silent mode, sensors pick up the piano key movement, con ...

. I hated the idea of anybody hearing me. Everywhere I've lived while working with Metric, I've written songs on the piano and played them for no one. On the advice of a friend, I decided I'd better start recording them before they were forgotten. Four meandering years later I ended up with this collection of songs featuring a few of my favorite people, a group I call The Soft Skeleton." The album's art is based on that of '' Escalator over the Hill'', Haines' late father Paul Haines' album with

Carla Bley Carla Bley (born Lovella May Borg; May 11, 1936) is an American jazz composer, pianist, organist and bandleader. An important figure in the free jazz movement of the 1960s, she is perhaps best known for her jazz opera '' Escalator over the Hill'' ...

. The album was "critically lauded", and was considered one of the best albums of 2006. At

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...

, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, it received an

average In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...

score of 73 based on 18 reviews. The song "Doctor Blind" was rated #457 on

Pitchfork Media ''Pitchfork'' (formerly ''Pitchfork Media'') is an American online music publication (currently owned by Condé Nast) that was launched in 1995 by writer Ryan Schreiber as an independent music blog. Schreiber started Pitchfork while working ...

's Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s.The Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s: 500-201
/ref>

Track listing

# "Our Hell" – 4:09 # "Doctor Blind" – 3:57 # "Crowd Surf Off a Cliff" – 5:56 # "Detective Daughter" – 5:10 # "The Lottery" – 3:45 # "The Maid Needs a Maid" – 3:21 # "Mostly Waving" – 3:12 # "Reading in Bed" – 2:49 # "Nothing & Nowhere" – 3:24 # "The Last Page" – 4:49 # "Winning" – 5:08

References

{{Authority control 2006 albums Emily Haines albums