interview by Bill Palmer

It’s launch day for their first new album in four years, but if Our Lady Peace is feeling any stress or apprehension over it, then they’ve fooled me. In fact the environment backstage at the Fillmore New York couldn’t be much more relaxed as we sit down for a launch day interview. I sheepishly admit to lead singer Raine Maida that the last time I interviewed him, by phone, I’d woken up that morning with a cracked filling and had been trying to hide the fact that I could only speak out of the left side of my mouth. Raine manages to spin my admission into a light-hearted joke about drummer Jeremy Taggart, who’s sitting next to him, minus his signature thick-rimmed glasses. I point out to them that Burn Burn has just debuted at #1 overall in iTunes in their native Canada, and #3 in its genre in the U.S., and when they express pleasant surprise at the numbers it occurs to me that they themselves haven’t yet bothered to check them.



It’s a far cry from the band that nearly busted itself up during the tumultuous process of slowly grinding out its previous record in the middle part of this decade. “It was a long recording process,” Jeremy says of 2005’s Healthy In Paranoid Times. “We recorded some songs three or four or five different versions, and some of the life got lost in translation, and we kind of got a little spaced out. We didn’t really know exactly which way to go, and we were just a little bit lost – and that’s kind of where we ended up on the last record. It was almost like we were trying to save an album. And it didn’t really work, you know? And on this record we just never wanted to do that again. And by making six albums with a lot of great engineers and producers, we figured we should be able to do this by ourselves.”



That meant stripping Our Lady Peace down to literally just the four of them for the creation of Burn Burn. No producer. No record label. And a recording studio inside of Raine’s house. But would the tension of the previous sessions still need to be worked out amongst the four of them before Burn Burn could commence? “I don’t think we really knew what we were in for. We just kind of got together to work on some stuff,” Raine says of kicking off the recording sessions. “We put up some mics, pressed ‘Record.’ I don’t know if any of the first three songs made it on the record, I can’t remember, but it just felt good, and it was easy, and it was inspired – and that was the most important thing for us. I think everyone in this band at some point before that was sitting in bed, wondering at night, is this thing gonna keep going? And then in a matter of like, a day really, I think we all realized, yeah, this is amazing. Let’s do this ourselves.”



While the last record saw the creation of dozens of songs, most of which never made the light of day, this time around there wasn’t much fat to cut. “We recorded fourteen,” Raine says of Burn Burn, “and ten of them pretty much made themselves apparent of what should be on the record, and that’s it. There was so much drama and other bullshit attached to the other record, this is the complete opposite. It was so easy.”



As the two of them would make a point of doing with each other so many times during the course of our conversation, Jeremy points out that he agrees: “There wasn’t really anything happening on this record other than writing songs in the studio. And on the last record, there was a lot more other stuff going on other than just recording music. And that just isn’t in the cards for us to be productive. We work best with momentum. Once we hit a wall, that’s where things start to spiral for us.”



Although Burn Burn took two years to make according to the calendar, that was a result of the long periods of separation in between each recording session; the sessions themselves were swiftly paced. “We were recording a song a day,” Raine says of the sessions. Adds Jeremy, “The coolest thing about it is no matter what the idea and how great we thought it was, we would always just move on. Even though certain songs that we recorded got really personal to individual people in the band, we would just move on and let it go. There was no fighting for ideas or any of that bullshit, it was just recording and let’s move on. And the end of it, you kind of forgot how the songs were recorded, so the songs just spoke for themselves. Escape Artist, I know that that song came super, super early, but I don’t know exactly when. We just know that we were really happy and we had a couple of pillar songs like that and Monkey Brains, to know that we had the bulk of a really good record.”
Working from home can lead to a certain degree of distraction, particularly when the work is a collaboration with old friends. So was that the case here? “I guess there was,” Raine says. “But we worked so quickly that the distractions were good. If we wanted to take off and see a movie, go to the beach, or go golfing or do whatever, we felt like we could do that and there was no pressure because it wasn’t like oh my god, we’re leaving some fancy studio that we’re paying fifteen hundred dollars a day for.”



When Raine released a solo record in 2007, he had told me back then how important it was to him that he owned that record outright, which at the time he said was something he didn’t think could happen with an Our Lady Peace record. And yet the record label listing for Burn Burn in iTunes is “Our Lady Peace, Inc.”


“We went through our record deal. It was a natural progression,” Raine says now of the fact that this new album belongs solely to the four of them. “The best thing was the timing, the way it happened. We got to own a record when we chose not to use a producer, and didn’t really know what was going on with our career in terms of going in to make a record. I think looking back on it, we were really fortunate that those things lined up the way they did. Because one or the other, if we would have been on a label still and chose not to work with a producer, I don’t know if that would have happened, or vice versa. So the fact that we didn’t have either gave us the perfect circumstance to make this record.”



At this point the atmosphere of the room is so sufficiently laid back that Raine is pouring glasses of wine for us, and as we toast, the opening act begins its rather loud soundcheck downstairs, which no one flinches at. Later a fire truck takes so long going slowly past the window that we can’t help but laugh at the siren that just wouldn’t die. But at this point Jeremy begins speaking increasingly passionately in defense of songs and bands that sound good live, a theme that he continues throughout the rest of the conversation.



“It’s so obvious where the spots are that felt really good in the songs that we’re playing from this record live, and the ones that we’re gonna play. Pretty much all of them, they have a sense of reckless abandon in them because they kind of got tracked so quickly. But at the same time they feel like performance songs, they feel like a live show. This record feels like you’re listening to us live, and when you come see us it’s just gonna be a different interpretation of that, as opposed to us trying to achieve our album.”



“And the last couple records were impossible to achieve, because there was just too much going on. I think when you see a band live and it’s not cutting the mustard, like, what’s the point? You should be that first, and that’s kind of what happened. In a sense it’s easier for us to just be like a power trio with Raine, and have really simple parts defined, as opposed to one part and then a complementary part, and then some piano to try and give it something else.”

“On our first record Naveed, that’s what it was,” Raine says of the band’s 1995 debut. “I remember saying to the producer, we do not want any fucking keyboard on this record. Don’t even bother bringing a piano or a synth up, or whatever.”
“Because we wouldn’t be able to do it live,” Jeremy adds.



“Yeah, and then we got away from that,” Raine continues. “And we loved experimenting. We really embraced the studio as this tool for adding sounds and textures. But then we always had a friend of ours tour with us, to be able to accomplish all that shit. And this time we just wanted to be able to get back to just the four of us.”



“We knew they weren’t going to be on the radio,” Jeremy says of album tracks like Monkey Brains and Paper Moon, “so we just had fun with those arrangements. We pushed them into whatever they were, whether they were long or odd or weird, it didn’t matter.”



Raine points to the two minute guitar solo at the end of Paper Moon, saying that they never previously felt like they could get away with something like that on a record. “It was always like there was a hesitation to go there. We did it on Superman’s Dead [from 1997’s Clumsy], that was a great example that we should have probably put more virtue or value in, because that was a song that was a single down here that did really well, and it had like a whole other ending.”



This time the band felt sufficiently free to go with whatever they were feeling that they yanked a song called The Right Stuff from the record prior to its release, despite having shot a video for it and considering it single-worthy at one point, simply because it didn’t fit in with the rest of the material. “One song had that little odd color,” Jeremy says of the omitted track, “and it’s the only time I’ve heard, after the fact, people go ‘I’m glad you didn’t have that song on the record.’”



Soundcheck is growing even louder at this point, and so there’s time for just one more question, this one from iProng reader Sherwin Smith, who wants to know if the band has any advice for other musicians who are starting out here in the digital age of music. Raine’s answer is the direct opposite of what you currently hear from just about all other circles: “Stay away from fucking MySpace and Facebook, and practice your instrument and learn how to write songs. You have to go back to what the real artists were able to do. And these days I feel bad for new artists because they have to be like Jay-Z, they have to be a brand. But that shit doesn’t work if you don’t have great songs and aren’t a good musician.”



“That’s what’s getting lost these days, unfortunately. We find ourselves fighting with it as well. But this record is a real shining example for us of if you just get in there and play well, and treat your art like an art, great things come.”



The interview is over, the recorder has been turned off, Raine has had to step away to check on something, and the soundcheck downstairs has grown so loud we can barely hear each other, but Jeremy’s not finished. He’s still trying to convince me that the great bands, the ones that stand the test of time, are the ones that sound great live in concert.



And he’s right.



A few hours later, Our Lady Peace takes the stage with a thundering version of Monkey Brains as an opener, with the energy coming from the packed crowd in the Fillmore continually growing throughout the first half of the set and building to such a crescendo by the end of Somewhere Out There that an overwhelmed Raine says “I don’t even know what to do up here” and then proceeds to sit out the entire first half of 4 A.M., allowing the crowd to sing the song instead. Later in the set he climbs up into the balcony and hangs off the outside of the railing while singing to the crowd, then filming the crowd with his cellphone, then thanking the crowd for “one of the top ten moments in OLP history.”

Our Lady Peace is touring the United States in August. Burn Burn available in iTunes now. Learn more at OurLadyPeace.net