Much like their 1990s grunge and alt-rock contemporaries in America, Canada’s Our Lady Peace were writing and recording murky, sorrowful songs about youthful frustration and adult rage, love lost and societal alienation. But there was always an underlying theme of hope throughout the larger message.
Thirty-plus years since their debut album, 1994’s Naveed, the band is soldiering on, and celebrating their three-decade longevity. On this particular night, it’s onstage at Plaza Live in Orlando, Florida, where Our Lady Peace are playing a sold-out show some 1,300 miles from their hometown of Toronto.
“I don’t think music is defined in years or numbers,” Raine Maida, the band’s lead singer, tells Rolling Stone. “I think it’s defined in energy, and in energy around the band. Right now is some of the best energy we’ve ever had.”
With Maida’s soaring, high-pitched voice and the band’s arena-filling sound, Our Lady Peace pulled off that rare feat for a Canadian group: making a dent across the border in the U.S. market. Singles like “Starseed,” “Clumsy,” and “Somewhere Out There” all cracked the Top 10 of Billboard’s alt-rock chart in the late Nineties and early Aughts, fueled in part by the band’s commitment to never lean too far into the dour.
“As heavy as we get, as dark as we get musically, I think there’s always this hopefulness and this light within it,” bassist Duncan Coutts says.
Onstage in Orlando, Our Lady Peace open with 1997’s hit “Superman’s Dead,” giving the crowd, many longtime fans now sporting gray hair and with their own kids in tow, a jolt back to the past. But don’t dare call it “nostalgia.” “That word makes me want to throw up,” Maida scoffs.
To be sure, Our Lady Peace have always been forward looking, especially at the tail end of the Nineties, when Maida’s lyrics became more cerebral. The songwriter grew skeptical of, even alarmed, by the increasing presence of the internet and big tech. While reading 1999’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, by futurist/scientist Raymond Kurzweil, he became concerned by where society was headed and channeled his anxieties into a new OLP album, 2000’s Spiritual Machines.
“It was this incredible thought-journey on what technology could do, what AI could do,” Maida says of Kurzweil’s book. “But no one knew. I don’t even know if Ray knew. I don’t think he had confidence in the exponential power of technology.”
Five of the tracks on Spiritual Machines were spoken-word excerpts from Kurzweil himself, including the ominous “R.K. 2029.” “The year is 2029,” Kurzweil’s monotone is heard saying on the LP. “The machines will convince us that they are conscious, that they have their own agenda worthy of our respect. They’ll embody human qualities and claim to be human, and we’ll believe them.”
“That’s going to happen in the next three years,” Maida says. “Live music and live sports — that’s what’s going to survive, that communal moment people just run to.”
Although this current U.S. tour is honoring 30 years of Our Lady Peace’s Naveed, Maida is more focused on the recent 25th anniversary of Spiritual Machines. He can’t help but worry if what Kurzweil wrote about, and what he and the band recorded on the album, is all coming true.
“I have teenage kids. I’m seeing in their psyches what [technology] is conjuring up, and it’s stressful,” Maida says. “The juxtaposition of us getting to go celebrate onstage every night with people, and see them crying in the audience and living through those older songs — that’s when art is great, when it’s a reflection of what’s happening in society.”
In May, the four-piece — rounded out by guitarist Steve Mazur and drummer Jason Pierce — released a concert album that aimed to capture the moments that Maida is talking about. OLP30 is a 23-song snapshot of a still vital band with 10 studio albums under its belt. Coutts says they’re already writing for another.
“There’s musical conversation going on, which is important for the life of a band. If you’re not growing, you’re dying,” he says. “[Throughout] our career, we didn’t have the recipe for Coke, we didn’t make the same thing over and over.”
That musical diversity prepared Our Lady Peace for their battle with the machines that Kurzweil warned about. While Maida and the band didn’t start out with such high stakes in mind, he’s embraced the mission — and is sure that the live music experience, like the one in Orlando and on upcoming dates of their tour, will keep us human.
“It’ll be this euphoric experience that’s elevated, because of everything else changing around us,” Maida says. “That is so precious, and we’re starting to feel like that’s why we want to protect it.”
