Our Lady Peace says live performance best litmus test for song's reach

Two members of the award-winning Canadian rock band Our Lady Peace say sharing a new song live with a concert audience is a great way to get a sense of how it will be received.

Raine Maida and Steve Mazur are in Calgary for a performance with Matthew Good Friday evening at the Grey Eagle Event Centre.

"It's taken a while to put the album out in full but I think it's time well spent. As a band, I think you use live as a litmus test for new music," Maida told The Homestretch on Friday.

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The band released a four-track EP last fall titled Somethingness and while touring in the U.S. in October, randomly dropped some of the new tracks into their set list.

"We kept throwing three Somethingness songs and it just felt like these were old songs already," Maida said.

"There's an integrity in the music that really translates and fits in the set nicely."

The group added five songs to those on the EP and released Somethingness as an LP last month.

Maida said recording at Jackson Browne's studio in Santa Monica was an incredible experience.

"It's one of those rare studios in the world where when you set up and record, even though I am behind this glass wall, everything feels very connected," he said.

"The first song we recorded was Drop Me in the Water and that just set the tone for the whole record."

They tried to capture that live experience by avoiding some of the more common editing techniques many recording artists use today.

"It's so easy these days with digital technology to take something and you overdub stuff, cut things up and fix them, and we just said, 'No, let's try to do this as old school as possible and just live with it. Do a couple more takes and try to get the best take.' I think maybe that's why people are kind of vibing on this more because they feel that energy," Maida said.

Mazur says the band's staying power — the core group has been together for about 25 years — is about finding common goals and talking it out.

"There are a lot of dynamics in a band that come into play," Mazur said.

"There has got to be a lot of mutual respect. It there's not that, you are going to have problems."

And it's like any other successful relationship.

"If you think you can just be in a band and ignore all those relationship characteristics like communication, then you are in trouble. You have definitely got to get into that stuff."

Maida agrees.

"There's a common goal too, to make interesting music and to keep pushing ourselves as artists. Whether you work for an NGO or here, is you lose sight of the common goal, no matter what you do, you're not going to stay together."

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With files from The Homestretch