Request magazine
May 1995
by Karen Woods

Our Lady Peace has come in from the cold, literally, to do a sound check at the Starfish Room in Vancouver for the band's second sold-out show there in as many months. Guitarist Mike Turner was amazed the first time; he thought people were lined up around the block because the club hadn't opened. He's not blase yet, but he finds it amusing that people are treating him differently now that the Toronto quartet's debut, Naveed, has gone gold in Canada and was released in the States in April. "They keep saying, 'Congratulations on your success'," he says incredulously. "We didn't know we were successful. We're barely breaking even."

Whether Turner's aware of it or not, most young bands would sell their relatives for the kind of opportunities Our Lady Peace has had in the past year. He and singer Raine Maida were in another band -- "not a very good one," Turner says -- so they sacked the rhythm section and hired bassist Chris Eacrett and drummer Jeremy Taggert. The band attempted to put a demo together, "but we ran out of money after three songs," Turner says. "It was all self-financed, same old story. A friend of ours was going to CMJ, so we dubbed a few copies of what we had -- they didn't even have printed sleeves, just a phone number jotted on them -- and he passed those out. We started getting phone calls right away, and it was like, 'Well, maybe we ought to take this a little more seriously.'"

Sony Music Canada released Naveed last spring, and it's been a relatively smooth building process since then. The support of a record company is nice, Turner says, as is the increasing attention, "but it's not the be-all, end-all. Although it helps."

The point, after all, is the music. Our Lady Peace has the energy and emotion to communicate with its audience, especially live. It's what keeps fans coming back for more. Turner shrugs. "Music can be an addiction. But maybe if you were to substitute the word ambitious for addictive..." He switches into a posh British accent. "I think it was Oscar Wilde who said something about ambition being a two-edged sword." Back in his own voice, he says, "We're all in the gutter, but some of us look up to the stars, and you can be happy in the gutter if you don't know to look up. So the people who can become addicted and driven and sort of obsessed by music are the ones who look up and see the heights they can try to get to. But that drive never lets them be happy where they are."

Most artists experience that frustration. "There's a line between art and commerce," Turner says. "A lot of times, you make a painting, and you go, 'Yeah, I like that,' and you put it away in your basement, or you paint over it. Canvas is expensive. But sometimes you want to get whatever your art is out to a bigger audience. It's a perfectly human trait to want to know if you're doing a good thing."

He pauses. "Or it could be the idea that you are contributing something on a larger scale. Art imitating life, and the essence of art is the distance between conception and perception. The only way you know if you've gone that distance is to expose it to other people. For verification." He shrugs again. "We just play rock 'n' roll."

Request magazine, May 1995