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Interveiw
Our Lady Peace
by Christina Fuoco:
Raine Maida, lead singer of the Canadian rock band Our Lady Peace, and he of exorbitant good looks, admitted that his method of hiring guitarist Steve Mazur was a bit unorthodox-if not downright mean.
"I figured that the best way to try this guy out would be to sit him in a chair, put a guitar around his waist and put him in front of Bob Rock," Maida said in reference to the infamous producer of bands like Metallica, the Cult and Aerosmith.
"But he was awesome. He rose to the occasion. It's kind of cool to watch a kid like that go in there and kick ass."
Maida, who is married to Canadian pop chanteuse-pianist Chantal Kreviazuk, laughed when told that this was an incredibly unforgiving way of auditioning a guitarist to replace Our Lady Peace's Mike Turner, who left the band over the stereotypical "artistic differences." But he shrugged it off, calling the process arduous. Like Limp Bizkit, Our Lady Peace held a public search for a guitarist. However, Mazur earned the job after being introduced to Maida through mutual friends-not through a cattle-call day of auditioning.
Mazur, a Port Huron native who was living in Los Angeles when he was hired, makes his Our Lady Peace debut on the band's forthcoming album, Gravity, due in stores June 18 on Columbia.
Like finding a new guitarist, the process of hiring a producer was trying, Maida explained. Rock was one of a handful of knob-turners whom Our Lady Peace considered for Gravity.
"Josh Abraham, who worked with Crazy Town and Staind, was a really nice guy and probably a really good producer. We played some songs for him and talked for a while. At the end of the week, we still wanted to go meet with Bob. As soon as we got there and spoke to him, everyone seemed like good guys," Maida said about his options.
"The difference was, we sat with Bob and plugged in and there was this spark that just happened. Also, Bob, with his experience, worked with so many bands like Metallica that he was just able to pinpoint stuff really quickly. He told us that we sound like we're a rock band but we're not letting ourselves be the rock band we want to be. He was really secure. He's probably sold 300 million records so he has nothing to lose. He just speaks his mind." And speak his mind he did.
"I think he came in and said, You guys, you just need some balls." That's actually the thing he said,'Maida stated with a laugh. 'We said,'What do you mean?' He said, 'If this is a heavy song, be heavy with it. Don't turn your amps halfway up. I can tell by the way you're playing that you guys want to rock[but]I can tell you're not letting yourself.?"
In an effort to allow Our Lady Peace to become 'that' band, they simplified their music. Maida admitted that Our Lady Peace, in the past, had a habit of musically overindulging during the recording process. They would add layers upon layers of music, creating intricate prog rock melodies. Rock took Our Lady Peace in the opposite direction.
"There was a real simplicity in those songs that was different for us. He said, 'You're kind of busy and you only get busier,' recalled Maida via telephone from New York where wife/labelmate Kreviazuk is working on a new album.
"Bob really changed things for us. He made things really simple. When I first spoke to him on the phone, he said, 'Don't bring any of your gear. Bring a pair of drum sticks.' He's a vintage guitar collector. We get to the studio in Maui and there's Billy Duffy's Gibson [guitar] that he played on [the Cult's] 'She Sells Sanctuary,' Kirk Hammett's [of Metallica] guitars.'I was like, 'Holy shit. It's incredible.' It was amazing. We were like kids in a candy store. It was so easy to make music and record it.
"But Bob was really cool about trying to preserve our sound. He just wanted us to get to the point a little quicker. It was amazing. It felt like we were playing these songs live, and that was it."
Our Lady Peace began recording Gravity in October in Maui and wrapped up the project in February. They took frequent breaks, allowing themselves to look back objectively once they returned to the fold. The band opted for a low-pressure process, only recording a few hours a day.
"It was amazing. We're used to more like 18-hour days and 20-hour days. With Bob, just being in Maui, we would go surf in the morning and go to the studio at 1 or 2 p.m. We'd get enough done where we felt like we'd accomplished something, and said,'Let's get out of here.' It was our first real low-pressure record," Maida explained.
Lyrically, Gravity is almost an uncomfortable listen, and maybe even voyeuristic. It sounds as if Maida threw all of his and Kreviazuk's problems out to the public to decipher. The album is heavy on the subject of loss. However, Maida explained that it's not a physical loss but the distance felt occasionally between members of a couple.
"Most of the record is more about the feeling of, you can be right beside someone, yet...it's like that feeling when you go out for dinner and see a couple sitting at a table not talking. You just think, 'Fuck, this isn't good.' You feel empathy for them. It's that kind of feeling. You're tied to someone but you're just not connecting. Sometimes there's so much distance," Maida said wearily.
Maida added that, although painful, the songwriting process was cathartic.
"When I went into music, I always said that I would never do music that?s disposable, and had no meaning five years later. I kind of stuck to that."
Gravity comes out on June 18. | RDW
Christina Fuoco has her own methods of trying out new guitarists. Email her at cfuoco@aol.com for audition times.
Our Lady Peace in-store appearance June 18 Tower Records
Source: getrealdetroit.com
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