SHINING BRIGHT: OUR LADY PEACE
Source: Canadian Musician, February 1998

Another band that's rising on the American scene right now is Our Lady Peace. Originally signed to Sony Music Canada, the Toronto-based foursome deliberately developed a fan base at home before jumping into the Big Pond to the south. "We waited because it was a brand new band, a baby band with a brand new record and great new songs, but they hadn't toured very much, and they hadn't gotten their feet wet in that respect," explains Eric Lawrence, OLP's manager at Coalition Entertainment. "They hadn't made a video before, all that kind of stuff -- we wanted to work out all of those bugs, wanted to try and build a story in Canada before we tried to get any other country interested. We sort of stayed insular and worked this record in Canada." Adds Coalition partner Robert Lanni, "Americans need to see a story built in your home country first." Once they made the decision, the band had to essentially start all over again, playing small clubs across the U.S.. "Our strategy was the same as it was in Canada," says Lawrence. "Start as a baby band, get out there and tour."
Although OLP is frequently heralded as an "overnight success," they've been working on this thing for a while. "It's been overnight for the last four years," Mike Turner comments wryly. "It's actually been surprisingly more gradual than people assume. We toured for almost a year nonstop in the States, and we still missed a large part of Florida, Denver, a whole bunch of markets, which we've been playing catch-up on now. But we've been doing all the work. Until we started the Van Halen tour, we did two entire tours of the States in a van. We were lucky enough, and that's what helped us get to the next level -- we had radio support, so when we played these clubs, people showed up."

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