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Interveiw
Struggles and Epiphanies with OLP Frontman's Raine Maida
by Maurice Steilmann
Canada's Our Lady Peace has been undergoing some serious changes as of late. Their fifth and latest album, Gravity, is a departure from their lyrical intricacies and complex atmospheric moods, instead embracing the straightforward simplicity that grabs audiences and sweeps them into hard rock's encompassing folds. With the fatherly supervision of metal production luminary Bob Rock (Metallica's The Black Album) and the addition of new guitarist Steve Mazur, the group is paving new road over a well-trodden path. The Synthesis spoke with vocalist Raine Maida in order to shed some light on the band's rebirth and their subsequent change in direction.
So what are you reading right now?
I'm kinda a magazine whore at the moment - everything from like, Foreign Affairs to The Economist…just crazy shit to take my mind off music, really. I read crazy studio and recording music gear magazines as well. It's kinda like escapism for me - UTNE Reader, stuff like that.
I've never really considered Foreign Affairs or The Economist as escapist material.
It's not like it's school for me, but you feel like you're learning so you definitely have to involve your headspace. You have to try to absorb it, so for me, all of a sudden I don't have melodies going through my head, so it's a good thing.
You say you want to keep your mind off music. Are you feeling tormented by music right now or something?
No,I don't know. When you write songs,well for me anyway, it's like I always have ideas running through my head. I've been taking sleeping pills for the last couple of years because it gets really tough for me to sleep because of melodies and stuff. It doesn't torment me, but it's definitely always there, so whatever I can do. That's why I watch tons of movies. I love films, and reading as well. It gets you away for a little bit.
Are you allowed enough free time away from your music to feel rested?
Not in the last three years, because I think I found a very creative spurt in terms of writing, epiphanies in terms of where I am as a songwriter.
On your last album, Spiritual Machines, the lyrical content focused on finding your spirituality. Did you find it in yourself or find it in a new way?
I kinda found it in a new way. I had a chance to go to Iraq last year with two friends of ours that have a charity called War Child in Canada. They took us there and we filmed a documentary. All of a sudden you get a different look at the human spirit. You look at the kids and the sanctions and the affect they had on the kids. Saddam is such a motherfucker, any money he got for the Food For Oil thing with The UN he never gave back to the country. Here's a total dictator who has 900,000 kids dying in the Gulf War because he's a fucking prick who really doesn't give a shit about his own people.
You start talking to these kids who are about eight, nine years old that weren't even born when the war was going on. They've had to grow up in a society where they don't have pencils or new books, so school's kinda a non-issue for these kids. They're totally handcuffed by their dictator bullshit leader. You look into their spirit and these kids are like, happy playing soccer in...feces because [Saddam] doesn't fix the sewage either.
It was incredible to see the spirit in these young kids. That kinda raised the bar for me in terms of what we're capable of as human beings and the fact that there's gotta be something there because these kids have nothing, absolutely nothing. They smile and they have no teeth because they've fallen out because they're malnourished or whatever, but there's something in their eyes man, and there's a spirit in there. It was pretty heavy. It sounds cliché to say it changed my life, but it pretty much did. It gave me a whole respect for being alive and respecting that everyone in this planet is in the same boat and you have to find some way to [make] peace.
How did this experience of traveling to the Middle East affect your take on your own music?
We visited some musicians there, and you talk about the human spirit again - they haven't had new violin strings for 10 years since the sanctions and these people are making music and playing on things that someone over here wouldn't dream of. They kinda just do with what they have.
What kind of things, for example?
Strings that were basically rusted and don't produce much tone. Somehow they found a way, and the same with the bows. I think they're made up of horsehairs, and seriously, you could count the hairs or it's just a bundle. You're talking like 20 or 30 left on the bow, but they adapted their playing style so the remaining hairs that they had on it wouldn't beak. It's incredible.
It's resolve. You would make music on rusted strings if you had to.
That's it. All of a sudden you get frustrated writing a song, you're like, "Fuck I can't write music today," or you just don't have it. It's like, there's always a way, you just need the will.
How has your lyric writing process changed since the last album?
Well, this was the first time using a different producer (Bob Rock). It was funny, he would tell me great Hetfield stories, about the way he would push James on that Black Metallica record that he produced. It was all about simplifying ideas and not being so ambiguous. I was ready for this, because after Spiritual Machines, all of a sudden, Bob just said, "You know what? I don't know what you're talking about man." It was kinda funny, he's like, "I have no idea what this fucking song is talking about. How can you be less ambiguous? How can you guide me through the song a little bit more, be a little more visceral with what you're saying."
At first in my head, I'm like, "This is just dumbing things down. This is stupid, I don't want to do this." And at the same time, I always looked up to bands like U2. I thought back and I really connected with a lot of those lyrics. Maybe there is a middle ground. So we didn't really butt heads, it was just a challenge for me. I was like, "Okay Bob, I need some time and I really need to go back and work on this stuff."
The same thing for me, what we were talking before. I couldn't stop lyrics and stuff. I didn't sleep in Maui for the first month. I got like two hours a night. I ended up having to go back to UCLA, to the hospital in LA and get some tests done cause I ended up getting shingles.
If your music was an animal, what animal would that be?
Now our music is a tiger. With our new guitar player (Steve Mazur), we're ferocious. I'm so psyched. We just did these three club shows and finally got to play for a couple of hours instead of like forty minutes at these [radio] festivals. We made a guitar change in the course of Gravity and the new guy we have…the future looks really bright for us because it's like this rebirth. He came in half way through [the record], and just the way he plays, it's hard to explain. Steve is just a God, he was born to play guitar, it's just in his blood and it kinda oozes off him. You can't help but be inspired by it, so onstage just during sound checks, it just feels like we're a garage band just trying to get a record deal. It's amazing.
I just got one more question for you. What if God was one of us?
Uuuh, wow.
That line is so played out, but -
No, it's pretty profound. If God was one of us he wouldn't have, I don't know, he wouldn't have woke me up so early today. I consider God to be the driver that drove us in from Secaucus [NJ] into [New York City], and fuck, it was like back and forth the whole way through the Lincoln Tunnel. I almost puked, so maybe he would have had a little sympathy for me this morning.
Source: Synthesis.net
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