Our Lady Peace

Our Lady Peace is currently the most popular rock group in all of Canada, and apparently it’s for all of the right reasons.

They received rave reviews from the normally difficult Canadian pop/rock press. Our Lady Peace boasts a solid album titled “Clumsy”, with diverse material that is right at home on modern rock format, as well as Top 40 radio.

And, they’ve got a strong following throughout Canada, as an example of their popularity, the group sold out the Maple Leaf Gardens in their Toronto hometown in just two hours. Yet, aside from radio airplay on their two singles “Superman’s Dead” and “Clumsy”, OLP has hardly made a dent in either the box office sales or the album sales charts here in the USA.

While OLP is currently on their first tour as headliners, playing a series of club dates here in the States, they haven’t achieved anywhere near the amount of attention or established a proven track record here. So why, despite playing over 90 dates in North American last year alone, does the group seem to be toiling, as far as American rock and pop audiences are concerned, in relative obscurity? According to OLP drummer Jeremy Taggart, 1998 could quite possibly prove to be the year that OLP leads a Canadian pop/rock invasion that the USA marketplace hasn’t seen the likes of since Alanis Morissette exploded on the scene nearly four years ago.

“Right now in the USA almost all of the modern rock groups look alike and sound the same,”Taggart said.

“I mean with us, we can try and be honest as we can and keep our integrity, so that’s all we can do. We don’t really know about anybody else. I think the majority of bands in the USA, in the past three years, have been making two songs great, and the rest of their albums are just filler. They don’t take it upon themselves to be different. No one in these bands seem to have an identity. There’s about two or three bands on the modern rock charts right now who are their own bands,”he continued,” and the rest are all clones of those two or three bands There are way better bands in Canada, now, then in the last three years.

In America, it seems like everybody is playing catch up on all the bands that had big hits throughout the ’90’s.

So, hopefully that will change as well.” On their USA tour last year, Taggart and his fellow band members Raine Maida(vocals), Mike Turner(guitar) and Duncan Coutts, discovered that more than a few of the American groups they were either touring with, or checking out in night clubs across the country, were completely bogus as recording artists. “You know,”Taggart said,”I’m not going to name names, but what we saw, for the most part was sad. Because for a lot of these other bands, it’s like you’re letting your own life unfold in front of your eyes without your own help. I mean I wonder if some of them even play their instruments in the recording studio whenever they’re supposedly cutting their album! That’s what it seems like to me. I mean some of these bands are pretty credible bands, by that I mean they’re getting a lot of attention on radio and MTV in America. And in reality, those who are taking the credit for the recording the music in the studio, are actually doing nothing.” According to Taggart, OLP plays all their instruments in the recording studio and they write their own material.

In addition, OLP has a strong personal relationship, as well as a highly productive track record with the band’s record producer, Arnold Lanni. It was Lanni who, when many others producers turned them away, saw a vision for OLP’s music and recorded their first album in his Toronto studio back in 1993. It was also Lanni, who,after OLP landed a hit album in Canada on their first attempt with “Naveed”,encouraged the band to stay the course for the recording sessions which eventually lead to their second album “Clumsy”. “Arnold Lanni,”Taggart said,” wants to preserve the face of music. I think we all agree that music is a very passionate thing and it should be treated as such. You have to give back towards the whole scene with your work. It’s something where you want to be able to sleep at night, when you’ve finished your record. When you’re in the studio, upon leaving there, you know that you’ve given one hundred per cent of what you have. I think at the end of the day, if the record sells two copies in America and we’ve lost it, it’s because we made the record we wanted to make with our own ideas and people just didn’t want that. It’s not about that we didn’t try and appease people at the record company marketing department or at American modern rock radio. The album we made is about the music that we like.”