Music
Our Lady Peace's 'Naveed' turns 20
by Tyler Munro
March 25, 2014
Old as it makes us feel, Our Lady Peace’s Naveed is fresh off its 20th anniversary, and to the surprise of no one who heard it back in March 1994, the Canadian quartet’s debut album sounds almost as fresh today as it did the day it was first released. A big part of that is obviously songwriting, and Raine Maida immediately solidified himself as one of Canada’s best with songs like “Starseed,” but behind the scenes producer Arnold Lanni had a ton to do with the band’s signature sound.
Catching up with RiffYou, Lanni sat down to tell the story of how Naveed came together, and his brief oral history is filled with interesting tidbits. Among them, that the band wasn’t even fully functional when they first hit the studio.
“They didn’t even have a drummer,” said Lanni. ” Basically, it was Raine, Mike, the original bassist Chris, and they had another drummer that bailed before we recorded a note. It’s not like they were a band gigging around town.”
Lanni says he met the band after speaking at a seminar and eventually came to work with them after checking out one of their practices. Eventually, he became known as the band’s unofficial fifth member, falling somewhere between that other Green Day guitarist and U2 super-producer Daniel Lanois.
But while origin stories are well and good, what we’re really interested in is the hot gossip, and that’s there in spades.
While he tiptoes whether “Starseed” is a better track than “Naveed,” Lanni says “Is It Safe?” is the album’s hidden gem. Most importantly, Lanni went into how he harnessed Raine Maida’s, uh… interesting delivery.
“The neat thing with Raine, is I’d say, ‘Raine, can we make some funny noises?’ And he was so into it. He was just so good at animating his voice that we knew [people] were either going to love it, or hate it. That seems like a simple thing to do and say, but when you’re the singer of a band and someone says ‘they’re either going to love or hate it,’ there’s a natural reaction to think that you want everyone to love it. But, he was brave. I really admired him for that.”
Two decades later, it’s clear that people loved it.
