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I’m Teething On The Answers You’re Saving

Here is an interview with Raine. Thanks to CDNow for this.

Members of OLP -- Raine Maida (vocals), Mike Turner (guitar), Jeremy Taggart (drums), and Duncan Coutts (bass) -- haven't let all this success get to their heads. Least of all Maida, whose lyrics on the band's bracing new album, Happiness ... Is Not a Fish That You Can Catch, run the gamut from dark to, well, darker (the album title says it all). A sample of opening lines suffices to make the point: "We live, we die" ("Potato Girl"); "Lately I can't breathe" ("Blister"); "Goodbye, the future's sold out" ("Is Anybody Home?"); "I don't want to understand this horror" ("Thief"); and so on.
But stripping one-liners of their proper context is unfair and, even worse, potentially misleading. As it turns out, Happiness does not a depressing listen make, not only because Maida tempers his saturnine musings with wit and humor, but also because OLP's post-U2 aesthetic matches brooding atmospherics with sinewy six-string textures, stutter-step drum-kit syncopation and McCartney-esque bass runs. In the following interview, Raine Maida discusses the road, the studio, and, of course, metaphysics.

CDNOW: Our Lady Peace tends to tour with other well-known acts -- for instance, right now you're doing dates with Creed. Is this kind of spotlight sharing a deliberate strategy?
Raine Maida: It seems like every time we start booking our own tour, someone asks us to go on the road with them. We did do several weeks by ourselves in the States during the Clumsy tour, where we showed these video vignettes we directed. We were going to do the same thing for Happiness -- and I'm sure we will eventually -- but then the Creed offer came in. It was like, well, here's a chance to play in front of a lot of new people. It's not a bad thing, but it is a different audience, and in that sense, it's always a challenge for us. It's easy to play in front of your own fans.

Early in your career you opened for Van Halen. What was that like?
It was really tough for us. At one point we were basically kicked off the tour. Thank God we became friends with Eddie and Alex [Van Halen] because they decided to keep us on. There's something to be said for going out there every night knowing that people aren't going to necessarily like your music. You've got to play inside yourself and play because you love music. We did that, and it I think we became a better band in the process.

Let's talk about the making of Happiness. How long did you spend in the studio?
It took just under four months to make, which is about half the time it took us to do either of the last two records. [OLP's first album, Naveed, was released in 1994 in Canada and one year later in the U.S.] No matter how well it's going, or how proud you are of the music, 15- to 16-hour days in the studio for seven or eight months can drive you out of your mind. So this time it was kind of like, wow, we're done, and we're not totally drained. And because we didn't push ourselves to absolute exhaustion, everyone might be ready to go into the studio again this summer.

What do you suppose accounts for this newfound efficiency?
I think this time we really knew what we wanted to do from the get-go. We took the things we thought were most original on Naveed and Clumsy and used them as our foundation. It was like we were saying, "This is us, this is our record." At this point in our career, we just want to be Our Lady Peace. We want someone to like this band because it sounds like Our Lady Peace, not because it reminds them of another band or something. Love it because it's us or hate it because it's us; we're fine with it either way.

This is the third time you've worked with producer Arnold Lanni. Why did you decide to use him again?
There was never really a question about who to use as a producer. In fact, the only time I can imagine it ever being a question would be if all of a sudden Arnold said, "You know, I really like Shania Twain and the way her record sounds." That's never going to happen, because all five of us have the same sort of musical vision. We were personal friends with Arnold before we were musical friends. It's a really incredible relationship, because he's the only truly objective ear we have, the only one with no other agendas.

The songs on Happiness are really tight, really focused.
Yeah, on this record there were a few songs that wound up being a bit shorter than usual, and we just decided to keep them that way. Just because it's three minutes and 20 seconds, who cares? We try to create different moods for each song, but we also try to create one mood for the whole album. I always think of U2. I love every song individually, but I get this one image, this single color, when I think of the record as a whole. I'm hoping that's what people get from Happiness. As an entire piece it's really stable and feels like one color, even though when you're listening to it you get taken to a bunch of different places.

Your lyrics frequently tackle what might be considered metaphysical themes -- spirituality, psychology, the possibility and/or limits of meaning, communication and knowledge, etc.
Yeah. I always worry about dealing with questions like spirituality, because it can be really preachy. I try to be careful. On this record I think I came closer to bringing it down to earth, like maybe someone sitting in front of a TV, in their room, feeling really isolated and depressed and questioning life. I think if you put metaphysical issues in those kind of terms, it becomes really tangible -- to me anyway.

Yes, lyrically this album feels more emotionally immediate than, say …
Naveed, where it was more …
Cerebral.
Right. That's just where the lyrics sat with me this time. Maybe next time I'll get back to writing lyrics where you really have to pry them open in order to figure out what's going on. This record, though, seems more realistic, rather than idealistic, in the way I'm looking at the world. There's a little more sarcasm on this record but also a lot of humility. I'm realizing that maybe we're not all that different than the squirrels -- metaphorically, I mean. When you start to think like that, it helps deflate your ego a bit, which is a good way to write songs. It's also a good way to live.

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