Our Lady Peace have a brand new album just out, have released a 4 part mini-series style video for newest single, ‘Nice to Meet You’, and they’re going to be hitting the road with fellow Canadian rocker, Matthew Good, through March with stops in Penticton and Abbotsford on March 30 and 31 respectively.. busy time for Our Lady Peace, but guitarist Steve Mazur took time out to speak to a very excited Chris van Staalduinen about things.
Chris van: The title of the album is “Somethingness”. What does that mean to the band?
Steve Mazur: I think what it means to everyone overall is that there are a lot of hard parts to just living and being human and survival in general and things can get a little bleak sometimes; things can get a little formal sometimes; sometimes our political correctness and our formalities and everything, especially with the advance of technology, things tend to get a little robotic, a little stiff and one of the things that makes us human is that there is something that’s underneath all that. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re religious or not, or spiritual or not there’s something that does exist underneath all that, that I don’t think anybody can deny. Sometimes when you’re out there in the day-to-day and you’re reading the news and all this shit’s going on, it can be easy to forget that, but at the end of the day we’re all human beings and there really is something that connects all of us. I’m like an atheist, so those are my beliefs, but I still believe that there are those things that connect us. I think that there’s an element to everybody that’s good and wants to get to the good stuff in life. I think loosely it was a theme running through Raine’s lyrics and we just liked that direction for an album.
CV: Is there connectivity to the songs on the album? Or were they written separately?
SM: Well, we did put out the album in two halves. We did four songs first then we finished the other five and put them all together. If I look at them, one song here is probably three years old, one of them was written about two weeks before it came out, so it’s kind of all over the place. I think it’s a nice thing, though, you can hear different things. In the more newly written ones, I definitely notice a theme in Raine’s lyrics and we’re always writing: we all have our own home studios and everybody can play a little bit of everything, so I’ll get up and play terrible drums and then play guitar over it and then we send that stuff around and once we feel like we have three or four ideas then we can all get together in a room and see what we can do. Then once we have three or four songs we think we can record, we all get together. So we’ve been doing that process for the last bunch of years and probably have written twenty different songs and we have to be judicious and say “What are the ones here that we’re really proud of and that we really want to put out there?” It took a while, but sometimes that’s the way it is.
CV: Can you tell me why you guys decided to work with “Pledgemusic”?
SM: Yeah, it’s been a great experience for us. Everyone knows that nowadays the music business has changed and there aren’t the same revenue streams and stuff and that’s all fine, but Pledgemusic is just a really cool way of connecting directly with fans and for fans to be able to directly support you. They know that when they’re buying a record from us that it’s going right to us or like when someone bought one of my guitars, that money goes straight to us to helping us record and things like that. I think it’s rewarding for the fans and it’s also really great for us. It provides in some ways, some things that a record company used to provide, like advances to live on or cover recording costs whereas now we have to cover those expenses ourselves and we still like to go into nice studios and stuff to record. So, Pledgemusic helps us, but it also helps the fans to feel connected to you and like they’re directly helping you and being part of supporting you as an artist. We’ve been doing it for six months or a year now and it’s been great – I hope we keep doing it!
CV: And I believe there’s a charitable aspect to it, as well?
SM: There is. I believe we give 10% of funds to “War Child Canada” and we all really love and believe in that charity and it’s awesome to see a percentage of that money going to that and I’m sure that feels good for people, too, to go “I’m spending this amount of money on the band, but I’m also really helping some people really in need, too.” And that’s not just lip service, I really think it’s a great charity, so it is a bit of a win/win/win, if that’s possible.
CV: Were you a fan of Our Lady Peace before joining the band?
SM: I was, actually, yeah.
CV: I read that you were at a show around the time you joined the band…
SM: Yeah, I grew up in the Detroit area so we definitely have a big fan-base there, largely because there’s a couple of border radio stations (out of Windsor, ON) that are big in Detroit and were playing a lot of Our Lady Peace and I remember a friend of mine turned me on to them. I heard a lot of them because I was in high-school in the mid-nineties and so yeah…I remember getting “Spiritual Machines” the day it came out and I was all excited. It’s funny, around that time I moved to California, I’d finished music school and stuff and they were on tour for “Spiritual Machines” and I went and saw them play the L.A. show of that tour and that was the first time I’d seen them live and I loved it and everything and then it was crazy that for the next record they were looking to make a change and then stuff happened and yeah, it’s pretty neat to think about; that I went and saw them play for the first time and then maybe a year later I’m in the band. It was pretty cool.
CV: That’s the stuff dreams are made of!
SM: Yeah, pretty awesome, right?
CV: What was your favourite Our Lady Peace song before you joined the band?
SM: I really liked Spiritual Machines, Are You Sad? , If You Believe, also One Man Army was one of the first songs that attracted me to the band, originally. And then you know, “Happiness” and “Spiritual” those are albums that I listened to a tonne and Right Behind You, we’re going to actually try and do a couple times on this tour, so it’s fun getting to learn those songs and actually play them with the band.
CV: Do you have a favourite from the new album or is that like picking a favourite kid?
SM: There’s a song called Let Me Live Again. There’s something really special about that song – again, that was one that kind of came together closer to the end of the record and there’s something really deep to me about that song. Ballad of a Poet, to me is just really special, too. It was a really special moment what we were doing it in the studio and lyrically what Raine’s writing about especially with Gord Downie passing away, that song is very special to me, too.
CV: So that song is connected to Gord, then?
SM: Actually, the lyrics are absolutely connected to Gord Downie. We were in Edmonton and were opening up for Guns and Roses last summer in August for a few shows in Canada and we were doing an interview at one of the local radio stations. It was not long after Gord had passed away and the interviewer asked us “What’s your favourite memory of Gord?” and Raine thought for a second and started telling him about the first time he ever saw the Tragically Hip play and recounting that story kind of brought back the memory to his mind and so that song is basically recounting that night, when he was like nineteen years old or something watching the Tragically Hip for the first time.
CV: Cool. That’s awesome.
SM: Yeah, it definitely got to me and still does.
CV: You’ve been in Our Lady Peace for 16 years now. How has OLP’s music changed in that time? How have you guys grown as a band?
SM: I think I notice a difference when I hear stories about OLP before I was in the band. I think things are a lot looser now; I think there’s a lot more spontaneity, it sounds like, in the writing and recording processes. And I think you can hear that with our music, maybe a little more spontaneous, maybe thinking about things a little less… I love the records that the band put out before I was in it, but I think that’s a good thing that we’ve sort of loosened up a bit. I would say that even since I’ve been in the band, we kind of get a little more open-minded and less precious about what we do all the time, to the point where sometimes we kind of shock ourselves – “Are we really gonna go down this road? Okay, well, let’s try it…” And a lot of times we really end up digging what we do and you’ve gotta be turning yourself on with what you’re doing. If you’re not turning yourself on, then you’re probably not going to be turning on other people.
CV: Steve, thank you that was awesome. All the best on your tour and can’t wait to see you in Abbotsford later in the month!
SM: Thank you and you’re welcome and we’re looking forward to it!
Catch Our Lady Peace at the Abbotsford Centre March 31, and Prospera Place Penticton March 30.
written by Chris van Staalduinen
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