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.”
Tay Keith Was an Architect of Modern Hip-Hop Whose Blueprints Will Last Forever
The first time I heard BlocBoy JB’s “Look Alive,” Tay Keith’s now-famous producer tagline simply sounded like background noise, hidden in the shadow of Drake’s star power. I was a college student far away from home, and the song was a little piece of my birthplace to take pride in: “901, Shelby Drive, look alive…” The biggest rapper in the world at the time was singing my area code and the name of a street I’ve driven down several times, a Memphis rapper was being newly hoisted onto the Hot 100, and a producer who would be the foundation of all the hip-hop I’d dance to for the next decade was being put on the map.
Just as J Dilla’s syncopated rhythms helped define much of the best hip-hop and R&B of the late Nineties, and the Neptunes’ bubbly sounds helped carry those genres into the 2000s, Tay Keith was building a time capsule of hip-hop’s late-2010s streaming era before his untimely death on June 18. Police found the 29-year-old producer in his Nashville apartment just hours before his imprint was to be heard again throughout fellow Memphian Key Glock’s latest album, Project X.
Music taste is often formed by one’s surroundings. Tay Keith was born and raised by a single mother in South Memphis, a neighborhood that became an incubator for hitmakers such as Moneybagg Yo, Glock, Blac Youngsta, Pooh Shiesty, producer Hitkidd, and the late Young Dolph. The same Bluff City that held the sound of Stax Records’ buttery soul artists like Isaac Hayes and Otis Redding also held the sharp snares and innovative triplet flow of Three 6 Mafia and their record label Hypnotize Minds. Encapsulated in his tag, “Tay Keith, fuck these niggas up,” is a city often overlooked in the annals of hip-hop; however, his speaker-shattering bass and quick, sharp, staccato snare, reminiscent of Memphis City Schools lunch-table beats made with Number Two pencils, became the secret formula for the genre’s success leading into 2020.
Tay Keith’s signature sound came into mainstream focus with his work on “Sicko Mode,” a song that gave Travis Scott his first Number One hit and took the young producer to the Grammys just months after receiving his bachelor’s degree from Middle Tennessee State University — a feat that he didn’t need for his success, but a feat he wanted for his legacy. “It was important for history, not just the history of my family, but the history of the rap game. People gon’ remember that,” he told Huff Post in 2019.
Months after the awards show, his tagline was brought to an even bigger audience as he and Beyoncé defied the cardinal rule of “don’t fix what ain’t broke” by remixing Frankie Beverly and Maze’s 1981 classic “Before I Let Go.” The Black community’s staple song for every graduation, cookout, wedding, and sometimes funeral was given new life with the heartbeat of South Memphis and Houston’s Third Ward. In an interview with On the Radar Radio, Tay Keith said the record, which he made in a hotel room, was one of his favorites. “It showed the world that I could be versatile,” he said.
Showing the world his versatility was only half of Tay Keith’s intention in his work; the other half was to be a vessel to bring others who grew up like him to the top of the music game, like Sexyy Red. In crafting her 2023 hits “Pound Town” and “SkeeYee,” and flipping Hurricane Chris’ “Halle Berry” to create “Get it Sexyy,” he brought the Midwest rapper to the top of the charts in nearly a year’s time. He talked to Rolling Stone about their musical relationship and how they bonded over listening to the same music from their vantage points in Memphis and St. Louis: “A couple of weeks ago we was in the studio and she played this song…It’s this song called ‘Gutta Bitch’…. I couldn’t believe it. I’m like, ‘Oh, my fucking God, how does she know this shit?’ We just had that chemistry [from] a lot of old songs and shit that we just grew up to.”
With Sexyy Red’s ride to the top came a lot of criticism. The tattooed rapper, who doesn’t mince words and has been known to rap about “coochie” and “booty hole,” didn’t fit into the idea of respectability politics often applied toward famous Black women. Tay Keith, already established at the top of the music game, made sure to protect her throughout her ascent. “I feel like just me embracing Sexyy in spite of people, how people really feel or felt about her… just me being behind her 110 percent shows I really care for her,” he said in that same RS interview.
In his final years, Tay Keith was expanding his range and working with artists in different genres, namely country, as well as building up the next generation of producers with his label, Drumatized. Despite just finishing production on a Jack Harlow and Doja Cat song, his work with budding talent was the bullet point he was most proud of when we met for the first time last March during an office visit. The well-known producer had a shy demeanor, allowing his label partner Cambrian Strong to take the lead in explaining what they were working on next. Tay Keith spoke up the most before playing unreleased music from artists including Key Glock and country star Reyna Roberts, ensuring that his art was shared on a secure network safe from leaks.
In a pinned Instagram post from 2021, Tay Keith wrote a tribute to his mother, Toya, who died that year after battling cancer. In the caption, the producer proclaimed that his mom would live forever through him, a vow that feels eerie now that he has also left this physical world. But it is a promise that still holds true. Tay Keith’s name will take on eternal existence in the music that will close out the best parties of our lives; it will live in the producers who will rise to the top because of the foundation he built for them; it will live in the achievements of Drake, Travis Scott, Key Glock, and Sexyy Red; and it will live in the streets of Memphis, where he crafted a new blueprint of success for those who walked similar journeys.