Friday, August 29, 1997
Edging Your Bets
Our Lady tramps back to town
By Mike Ross -- Express Writer
It occurred to me during Our Lady Peace's last show in Edmonton, at the Dinwoodie Lounge in February - singer Raine Maida would make a great Hamlet. Leading his band at Edgefest in the Commonwealth Stadium tonight, the 27-year-old singer is dramatic, intense and given to dark, brooding moods with a potential to erupt into enraged violence - mostly directed against hapless microphone stands. He sings his deep, haunted lyrics as if they were almost too much for his soul to bear. The band's potent bursts of power seem to affect him like electroshock torture. He is the perfect angry young man. At least that's how he acts on stage. During a recent phone interview, Maida is surprisingly calm. He has no problem being compared to a tragic Shakespeare character. "Hamlet is good," he laughs. "I like that. "I definitely put myself into a different space when I'm on stage. That's the only reason I got into music, because the people I admired and who influenced me, that was the only way I knew music." One of his big heroes was Sinead O'Connor (as long as we're casting for Shakespeare, maybe she could be Lady Macbeth) - believe it or not. "I remember seeing Sinead in a small club in Toronto years ago," Maida recalls. "She was able to do with an acoustic guitar what I think most bands can't do with four or five members. She just sat up there by herself and played a bunch of songs. And it was just so personal and she just gave so much of herself, I almost broke down crying. . "That was my barometer. If you're going to go on stage and sing your own music, and, I guess, my lyrics, I just have to be completely honest. You just let yourself go with it." As for his lyrics, they're generally no less difficult to understand than "If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story" and so on. Maida makes his lyrics cryptic on purpose. "They're meant to be interpreted," he explains. "I have a huge fear of being pretentious or grandstanding with my lyrics. So I try to make them a little bit more ambiguous, just to make them more universal, just so that each listener can approach it from every angle and take whatever they want from it, rather than me just sitting there telling them about my problems. They're really not that unique." It's a fine balance, he says, between being "passionate about what I'm talking about and not giving it all away at the same time." While he won't do it on stage or through the band's videos, he is willing to explain one of Our Lady Peace's most recent hits, Superman's Dead, from the band's latest album, Clumsy. "It's just about how hard it is for kids to grow up today. They're inundated with the media and images and cliques they try to have to fit into. Two images that are really strong for me lyrically are `ordinary's just not good enough today,' and when I think of kids today, I would never think of a group of eight-year-olds going out to a baseball park and throwing the ball around. "It doesn't happen any more. I have a nine-year-old brother; he's either inside playing Nintendo or staying up late on a school night watching Beavis & Butt-Head. And you juxtapose that against the old Superman, on the black and white series. He was a real hero, good values, strong willed, a gentleman, but I think Beavis & Butt-Head wins today." At least he's taken arms against the sea of troubles and ... well, you know the rest.
