Our Lady Peace: Artist Of the Year (Part One)

Chart Magazine's Artist Of The Year might not be complete fodder for the media like a certain other Canadian artist who has a penchant for wearing monkey masks, but Our Lady Peace's Raine Maida and Jeremy Taggart took their time with us to talk about a millennial year which included the whirlwind success of their third record, Happiness... Is Not A Fish That You Can Catch, and the awesome Summersault festival.

Plus, they wouldn't stop talking about how proud they were of their latest baby, the new album Spiritual Machines. Just think of this more as an overview of OLP's crazy year rather than a rant, kinda like what that monkey guy's known for...

Chart: So what are you guys up to right now?
Jeremy Taggart: We're finished our record and we're preparing everything, in terms of playing live, of planning our video.

What's the first single?
Raine Maida: Have you heard any music yet? It's a song called "In Repair."

That's the one song I took real notice of...
R: The last 14 months have been amazing. We released Happiness, toured that, did our arena tour and did Summersault which was unbelievable, then made another record. I think basically, it doesn't happen a lot anymore when you make records that quickly. It seems like it may be starting to again, but it's, like, two years before bands put out records. Especially in Canada. It's a long wait. We're just happy we got the momentum and we'll keep going.

I don't think that trend of making records quickly is going to break anytime soon.
J: I think people are gonna keep putting out records, but most of them are still crap. The work ethic is still pretty low and people are pretty much piecing together two singles and filling up the rest of the tracks.
R: All of the drum takes [on Spiritual Machines] were done in, like, one or two takes. A lot of the bass stuff was like that. I did my vocals at home. It was just captured energy.
J: What we were trying to accomplish was five guys in a room just playing together.

Will there be another Summersault?
J: Oh yeah.
R: We're not sure if it's going to be next summer. We're going to be in the U.S. a lot next year. It depends. I think festivals are probably done now. But if you can get the right bands together...

It can work.
R: Exactly. Who cares if it's a festival? To do it just for the sake of doing it is not right.
J: We wanna do something special for music and obviously for Canada. To start working on another Summersault now is almost too late to make it really special. We always want to have a good head start on it and make sure that it happens properly. It's work in the sense that we're not used to it. You instantly become promoters and agents, trying to get a hold of bands and booking people.
R: We try to do it on personal terms, like with the Deftones there were issues about stuff and Jeremy just called Abe the drummer and tried figuring stuff out that way, try to remove the other people, but House Of Blues helped a lot.

Our Lady peace are featured on the cover of the December 2000/January 2001 issue of Chart Magazine. Click to the Chart shop to buy that issue.