Our Lady Peace (2009) Transcript

—

interview by Jenia Schukov & Melissa Payette

Our Lady Peace Transcript

CONFRONT: You’ve been around for awhile now, what makes you work so well as a band?

JEREMY: We’re musicians at heart who want to get better. By being a musician you pick the people you want to play with and we all got lucky in the sense that we found musicians that were good to work with creatively. We made a record that way and we just made record after record and this is number seven!

CONFRONT: So you have a strong chemistry as a band…

JEREMY: Yeah! It’s just easy for us to make music together. I think this record is a good representation of that idea. When we were recording the songs it just happened really quickly. We tracked songs fast and we did them pretty much live off the floor and it went really smoothly and quickly. I think that’s why. It’s a live performance based record.

CONFRONT: You guys have recorded a bunch of albums and won tons of awards, is there a moment that sticks out in the bands’ history as the moment you knew you had made it?

JEREMY: I don’t know, maybe last night in Ottawa? There were 30,000 people going crazy. That was the first time in our career to play our own show in Ottawa where there are heads as far as we could see. To have that this late in our career is a good feeling. These are unachievable goals. These are things that just kind of happen. Having that many people come out to our show isn’t something we try and do. We just concentrate on the things we can achieve. That comes down to musical ability.

CONFRONT: What’s one thing that you’ve learned in the music industry?

JEREMY: To work. The only thing you can do is work. Whatever you need to work at like if you’re a band it’s song writing and performing together tightly so it makes the ideas come out so it’s not a big bundle of mess.  It just comes down to practice and writing and working and listening to music. Look at music no differently then anything else you try to do. Once people play music or listen to a certain type of band or genre and only that they’ll find that their well becomes shallow creatively because they’re only listening to a small portion of music.  If you keep playing you’ll eventually grow out of that genre and just get into music across the board. The further you get the more you realize they’re all similar. All those different types of music and the only reason I figured that out was by sitting at a practice pad. It wasn’t from doing talk shows or playing concerts in front of tons of people. It was playing and practicing that made me understand. It took me getting closer to my own instrument and to be able to play to understand all the other shit and success and fame that doesn’t really matter.

CONFRONT: For your new album what influences went into your writing and recording?

JEREMY: I myself am a huge history of music fan. As a drummer I’m a huge Elvin Jones fan who is an old jazz drummer from the 60’s-70’s who played with John Coltrane. Those are the kind of musicians that I keep pushing and try to get to. I love modern music and tons of new bands but when I’m trying to learn I find myself having to dig backwards into history and I find I learn more.  By the time you were heard in the 60’s you had a lot more practice then a band now. In the 60’s you played 7 or 8 times a week, every day or twice a day practicing like crazy. Now-a-days if you’re a band and you get lucky by being creative and having a song that luckily becomes a smash on the radio, you have to live up to that sound and that stuff that you created in the studio and it’s hard to have that match that without playing 50 times more gigs. When you’re a band now it’s hard to play the same city twice a month let alone ten times a week. The practice isn’t happening and you’re not playing in front of people enough to try and achieve that recording. That’s why people really like to see bands that have already got that stuff figured. There are a lot of young bands that figured that out already like The Arkells where they went on the road and played and played and played and started to make that record. Their record is based on that live performance. Those are the bands that do well like The Constantines and The Weakerthans who take the idea of seeing them live. When you go and see them it’s like the record but only better because it’s happening right in front of you.

CONFRONT: How has your music evolved since your very first album?

JEREMY: I think in lot in terms of how much better we are. I look back to where I was when I played because of how nervous I was and how I was going by the seat of my pants when I was a kid. Those first few records were very stressful and very hard and now that part isn’t there.  We were able to make the arrangements on this record a little tougher, weird and quirky and it added the element of the seat of the pants and nervousness thing because the arrangements were fresh while we were recording them. Escape Artist on this record is a good example because we barely knew the arrangement while we were tracking it so there’s still a lot more energy in the song because of that. There’s a little bit of reckless abandonment in it.

CONFRONT: I read that you guys recorded this whole album in Raines personal studio. How does that compare to the other albums?

JEREMY: In terms of the studio it was great because it was in his house so we were all living there and we’d get up and start recording right away and work full days. We’d get a lot of work done. It’s always better when you’re together instead of everyone reverting to their hotel room and then having to get back together. On this record it’s better because you wake up and everyone’s just right there.

CONFRONT: Would you say it made a difference compared to your other albums?

JEREMY: Yeah!! It was just all about the songs and the work. It didn’t have anything to do with people making dates or having to cancel. When you’re dealing with a major record label and a major producer it’s a whole other deal because of conflicting stuff and it’s a whole calendar you have to work with. On this record we knew we didn’t want to make it all in 30 days so we couldn’t just go into the studio with the producer and think we’d do a week here and a week there and it was just a lot easier to do it ourselves. We ended up being a lot happier by doing it ourselves.

CONFRONT: For sure. Do you have any personal favorites off of it?

JEREMY: Yeah I’d say Escape Artist, Paper Moon and Refuge.

CONFRONT: As for writing songs, what’s the process the band goes through from writing it to putting the melodies and stuff together?

JEREMY: For example those songs that I mentioned, like Escape Artist, those kind of came from us sitting in a room working on riffs. Steve had a bunch of really cool guitar riffs so him, Duncan and I would get together and work on those ideas and bring them to L.A and bring them to Raine and he’d have ideas as well. We’d get all those ideas together and start recording and we always have three or four ideas so we didn’t expect everyone to come in with like fifteen ideas and then we’d have our album. We were a lot more realistic to think three or four parts at a time.

CONFRONT: This is the longest you’ve gone between albums so what was it like getting back into it?

JEREMY: Well if you think about it Gravity and Healthy in Paranoid Times was four years in between those two records and that was all recording and it’s almost the same gap here except we took a year off. We’d start in spurts since we didn’t have a producer so it gave us time to give us perspective in between recording and evaluate what we’ve done. We didn’t even listen to the stuff we’d record and we’d move on and on and after 2 years we’d listen back to stuff from the beginning and whatever stood out on its own was the song that made it.

CONFRONT: What can fans expect?

JEREMY: Well it’s just an honest rock record and it’s very simple in terms of set up with guitar on the left and right, bass, drums and vocals. People should expect OLP at its best in a sense.