Our Lady Peace
words Karen Bliss shutter Chapman Baeler OLP triumphs after turmoil of making new album
“We were really trying to get to that moment when you’re first in a band, where you don’t really know much, but you just know that there’s something great about what you’re playing together at that point. So we were trying to find those moments within each song, and it was just really difficult to decipher once you get to 30 and then 40 songs,” explains Toronto singer-guitarist Raine Maida of the difficulty in making Our Lady Peace’s latest album, Healthy In Paranoid Times. “At the same time, throughout this whole process, we were also trying to better everything that we’ve done; we’re trying to make a more mature record, something that doesn’t sound like (2002’s) Gravity or f*ckin’ anything close to it.”
Much has been said about the stress and tension that arose, leading Maida at one point to even quit the rock band he’s fronted for 13 years. Working once again with noted Canadian producer Bob Rock (Metallica, Motley Crue), OLP—which has sold more than five million albums worldwide, two million of those in Canada—just kept second-guessing itself. From the first batch of songs to the last, Maida, bassist Duncan Coutts, drummer Jeremy Taggart and guitarist Steve Mazur were unhappy with everything they recorded.
”It just got really stressful,” says Maida, his frustration apparent even now. “Every session was very different from the session before. The first thing we did was really exciting, but then we'd say, ‘OK, at the end of the day this sh!t's not good enough. This isn't great.’ There was a session we did in Malibu for a month and that was f*cking brutal. We had basically broken up, fired Bobby, quit. Dark, very dark.”
But they continued writing and recording, finally amassing 45 songs from which to choose. The resulting album, Healthy In Paranoid Times, sounds like a whole other band: Our Lady Peace had evolved in private, through multiple albums’ worth of material no one outside the group is likely ever to hear.
The lead track, “Angels Losing Sleep,” exemplifies this: Maida's voice is smoother, less nasal, but still earnest; the music is less bombastic. Then there are the slow, atmospheric tracks “Picture” and “Apology,” the effervescent bounce of “The World on a String” and the lilting “Don't Stop.”
Maida has also grown bolder with his lyrics—partly due to his humanitarian missions to Iraq, and most recently Darfur, through War Child Canada. Healthy features the single “Where Are You,” an intense plea for world harmony, and “Wipe That Smile Off Your Face,” a scathing anti-Bush track. “Lyrically, Our Lady Peace has often been a bit on the ambiguous side, kind of tried to keep things universal,” says Maida. “As soon as I came back from Darfur, my whole thought process had changed. I wanted to say what I wanted to say, and if Clear Channel doesn't want to play a f*cking song because it has lyrics about Bush, then too bad.”
But what stopped Maida from quitting the band? “At no point did I really want to do that,” he says, his voice softening. “It was more like you're fighting with your brother: You know you guys are going to get back together at a certain point. I think, as bad as it was, we all knew that in our hearts.”
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