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Pop Art: Our Lady Peace Walks the Fine Line Between the Concept and the Hook
interview Page 1
Page 2 of interview
The phrases "Canadian rock band" and "concept album" bring some terrible things to mind—double-album Rush sci-fi epics and putrid Triumph records, for starters. It's no wonder that Our Lady Peace guitarist Mike Turner bristles at the notion that his group's latest release, Spiritual Machines, is a "concept album." Loosely based on the writings of inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil, Spiritual Machines certainly has a unified theme—dealing with the integration of humanity and mechanics as our society becomes more and more dependent on machines to do our work and entertain us. It is important to note, however, that even though there are songs on the record that address these issues directly ("The Wonderful Future" and "In Repair"), there are also plenty of straight rock tracks, as well. And there are no alien races, blind messiahs, or evil wizards, as you might expect to find on your typical "concept record."
Since its formation in Toronto in 1992, Our Lady Peace has had a pretty smooth ride to the top of the Canadian rock heap. It's first album, Naveed (1995), contained the modern rock hits "Starseed" and "Naveed," and established the band as one of North America's premier post-grunge alt rock acts. Two solid follow-ups, 1997's Clumsy and 1999's Happiness…Is Not A Fish You Can Catch, kept things rolling smoothly, as the band (which includes guitarist Mike Turner, singer Raine Maida, bassist Duncan Coutts, and drummer Jeremy Taggart) went from the club circuit to playing bigger venues abroad and stadium shows in its native land. None of this information prepares listeners for the mechanized soul searching of the new record. Like Radiohead or Pink Floyd—obvious influences, at least in terms of scope, if not musicality—Our Lady Peace manages to get deep into philosophy without losing its grasp on the basic craft of writing catchy pop rock numbers.
Musictoday caught up with Mike Turner as he arrived at his hotel in New Orleans before a show. The band had just been forced to cancel a Gainesville, Florida, appearance due to Mike and Raine's ill health. After a day of sleep and fluids, the group was ready to hit the stage again.
Musictoday: Let's talk about the new album. It's a concept record, and I'm curious to know its genesis. It has a lot to do with Ray Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. Were you the one who discovered the book?
Mike Turner: Yeah, I stumbled across it in a bookstore. I wish I could say there was some great intellectual motivation, but it has a shiny cover and that was really the only reason I picked it up in the first place.
Mtc: Has everyone in the band read it?
MT: I don't think everyone has actually made it all the way through it, because it is a rather weighty little tome. I think Raine managed to get through most of it, and the other guys have been sort of picking at it. We're very hesitant to call it a "concept record." I would say it's a "conceptually unified" record. It wasn't like we sat down, having read the book, and said, 'Man, we've got to write a record about this!' These were things we already had been talking about amongst ourselves, and Raine already had been writing about some of them on Happiness. So it was just more fuel for a fire that had already been burning.
Mtc: Did some of the songs exist before you read this and morph into being part of the album, or did they all spring from after you started working on it?
MT: Well, you'd have to ask Raine about whether they existed lyrically, but I think he was very, very inspired by the title section of the book, which suggested how technology was going to interact with our lives as time goes from this point on. Like I said, a lot of these were issues he had already been thinking about—[for example] if you look at "Is There Anybody Home?" on our last record. He was already wondering about technology and humanity's collision. I think the book sort of helped bring that more into focus. The only reason we ended up naming [the album] after [the book] is that we wanted to acknowledge the fact that we had been inspired by this book. Had it been more difficult to name it after it…when we brought it up, our manager, and obviously the legal arm at Sony, kind of went mental with the [idea].
Mtc: Why, cause they didn't want to be connected with the book?
MT: No, they didn't have a problem with that; they were worried that we'd get sued. Being lawyers, they see litigation at every turn. They were, like, 'Well, we'll get Sony intellectual corporate legal to talk to the people at Kurzweil licensing, and we'll broker an agreement.' And I was thinking, 'Man, by the time you guys broker something, I'll be fifty!' So I just went on one of Ray's sites and I e-mailed him.
Mtc: That's the way he became involved with it?
MT: Yeah, I thought for sure that ray@kurzweiltech.com was not going to actually go to Ray Kurzweil, right? Well, wrong, it actually does. He e-mailed back the next day and we've actually maintained a good dialogue. I got an e-mail from him just the day before yesterday. We've kept a good dialogue up. It just seemed like something organic and easy. He was into it and he did all the spoken word for it—after he said, 'Sure, name it after whatever you want,' he asked if there was anything else he can do. We had him do some voice over and it turned out he has an interesting voice, so…it just seemed very serendipitous that the opportunities presented themselves and very organic in the way it developed. It seemed not so pretentious and horrible, like the words "concept record" tend to bring to mind.
Mtc: I have to admit, I have not read the book, though I am curious after researching it and listening to the album. Is the melding of technology and humanity viewed as a negative or positive development? How do you view it?
MT: I personally view it very positively. And I think Kurzweil does, as well. Ray's got an optimistic streak that he is sometimes held to be apologetic for, which I think is the most ridiculous thing in the world. How can you be apologetic for being an optimist? There is certainly something to the fact that it's at least going to be schizophrenic; when you think about mechanization and, you know, cold hard analyses to assimilate through human abilities into a technical appliance, if there's any sort of mysticism involved—that the soul, or the spirit, or religion, or spirituality is something that exists outside of us as well as inside of us—then there is the fear that it could be lost. I don't necessarily believe that, but it is certainly something that Raine wrestles with. I guess a more important issue is that this is all something looking towards the future, this bright and wonderful future that could be there; but what about that your brother is having a crappy day today, your friend is depressed now. What about that? The future is wonderful, but what about right now and what we're dealing with and what we're living through right now? Rather than putting off your view of the world and your view of life for this goal, it's difficult to stay focused on right now.
Mtc: So it's a way to incorporate the future into your present day?
MT: Yeah, that seems to be the difficulty. All these wonderful things could happen, but they're not happening right now. So, you know, what relevance do they hold? Me, I think it holds great relevance, but I'm often called to task for the same fault of being too idealistic. I don't think I'm going to let go of that too soon.
Mtc: So it's not like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
MT: In the book, Ray doesn't really project it as the machines versus us. It's like, how many appliances do you use in your every day life in terms of technology? I guarantee you use an outside artificial intelligence for your research, through the Internet. I'm sure your cell phone has got all the options on it. Do you use a Palm Pilot?
Mtc: Not yet.
MT: Well, there are people who have their whole lives in those things. I think there is just going to be an increasingly seamless integration of technological appliances—and that's the only word I can really choose—that is going to be quite invisible. We are going to start to incorporate those physically. Like I had laser surgery and corrected my eyes. There are people getting cochlear implants who have never heard, who can [now] hear. Same with the visual cortex, with reverse engineering the human brain, we're just going to keep putting those things in place. And it will just be very seamless.
Mtc: If you start doing that, doesn't it expand everyone's life expectancy and cause problems for population in the long run?
MT: I'm sure it will. But Ray's projection on that is that the same technologies that enable the increase in human life will increase our ability to provide for everyone.
Mtc: So we'll find food and energy sources that enable us to handle this increase in man-machines.
MT: Yeah, there is almost a religious faith in technology at that point, which I have misgivings about. 'It'll be okay, we'll figure that out.' Well, are you sure? At who's expense? Or, is there an expense to be had? Ray even gets into some of the technologies that suggest the ability to provide food for everyone, from a nanotechnology standpoint, but I don't know. It's very hard to refute him, because he tends to have current day technology—like things that actually exist—and says, 'well, they're developing at this rate, we can expect them to continue developing at this rate, so, yeah, it's going to get there.'
Mtc: In a way, it seems like it becomes its own religion. In the same way that during the Dark Ages, religion was one of the only things keeping society advancing, through literacy.
MT: Very much so. I don't know if that faith is a whole lot different. If you have to believe in something, something you actually observe and can quantify, I don't think that it makes it any less special, unique, and spectacular, because it is something that we see. A hundred years ago, we thought that when a leaf fell into a stream, it turned into a fish, 'cause we didn't know where a fish came from. Spontaneous generation was what Pascal called it. We thought gravity was a mystery. Any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic. So I don't think it's any less special if we actually know what it is. So I think faith is the unifying feature in all of it.
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