Bobbyisms: On the road and in our heads

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: DUSTIN RABIN
Raine Maida continues to pump out music as a solo artist and with his band, Our Lady Peace. His latest solo effort, We All Get Lighter, hit stores on March 26.

I write about random things a lot. I write a lot about random things. Which came first, the troubadour or the Bohemian lifestyle? Canada has a long history of nomadic artists who have found inspiration and responsibility in their travels, crafting important ideas and valuable stories into song to spread their message.

Prevalent among our premier troubadour exports, Raine Maida has a long and decorated history over the past 20 years in music. In addition to fronting Our Lady Peace since its formation in 1992, Maida has explored the world, developed and produced a crosssection of Canadian talent and established a long-standing relationship with War Child Canada.

Maida is celebrating his second solo album We All Get Lighter, released on March 26 on Coalition/Warner. Not so great a departure from the spoken word roots of his debut solo full-length The Hunter's Lullaby, this new record succeeds in focusing his vision and scope into a much more unified whole.

While the balance of the record is consistent, it casts its warm foundation of guitar and piano tones against arrangements of horns, strings and voices that are at times lush and complementary, at times abstract and minimal. As such, We All Get Lighter is an album that particularly rewards listeners through headphones.

“There's a beauty to that phrase,” he began, referring to the album's title. “It's borrowed from a poet who I adore named John Giorno, who was one of the original beat poets ... I got to perform with him a while back at a spoken word festival, and I got a chance to spend some time with him. He's still a vibrant poet into his late 70s.”

“He signed my book at the end of the night,” Maida recalled, saying the title is derived from Giorno's personal message, a reference to a poem within. “There's a frailty and a wisdom that he was emoting the whole night ... it was very profound to me, it struck me that once we're fully grown, we're on this journey of becoming lighter again.”

Whether it's age, experience or family is unclear to him, however Maida is happy to embrace the responsibility of the journey, one that has introduced him to all sides of the world and inspired him to take action to improve what he saw.

The only problem is that he never stops working; Maida keeps himself busy with a dizzying list of projects year-round, and while the pace may be working to keep his output to a certain level of quality, it takes a lot of time and work to maintain the kind of output he sustains.

“My life is really about timing now, just trying to find the right moments to put stuff out,” he said. “There were two Our Lady Peace records between mine, I've been working on doing some scoring — there is just so much going on with me, musically. This record could have come out two years ago, but I'm glad it didn't.”

“I've had the song ‘Montreal' for four years, it wasn't until the end of the record that I ended up putting the horns on it, and it made me immediately fall back in love with the song.”

While arranging horns, Maida re-awakened old memories of Italian composer Ennio Morricone, whose distinguished career included scoring infamous Spaghetti Western films, many of which scored the background of Maida's early childhood. Although he professes not to be a fan of the genre, he describes a deep bond with the landscape of the music, something he invoked when arranging the lead single.

We All Get Lighter is a remarkable artistic statement, Maida's own landscape painted over glimpses of his past and his surroundings. Yet despite the result, the grand compositions and careful arrangements, he described his own process as humble as that of the generation of poets in which he's found so much inspiration.

“I have my computer sitting in front me right now — within five minutes I can program a beat, put an acoustic track down and spit out some words, and I'm there,” he said simply. “I'm in it already, and that's how I see myself — on this record everything started like that, and then it's just a matter of adding and subtracting some stuff. It's just about finding the right textures.”

For more on Raine Maida, his new album We All Get Lighter or his other ongoing projects, visit him online at rainemaida.net or follow along on Twitter @mrrainemaida. And for standout tracks on the record, check out “Not Done Yet,” “SOS,” “Numbers” or the lead single “Montreal.”

And for more of the latest music news, views and conversation, consider following this column on Twitter @fsu_bobbyisms. Only one more issue before the school year is out! Finish strong, Fanshawe. I'm out of words.