An Evening With Raine Maida and Chantal Kreviazuk: 30 Years, Two Perspectives and One Very Unpredictable Show

by Scott Roos

There is something inherently fascinating about watching two people who have spent nearly three decades together try to explain each other. Especially when those two people happen to be Raine Maida and Chantal Kreviazuk. On paper, their story sounds almost impossibly tidy: two successful Canadian musicians who met early in their careers, fell in love, built families together, continued making music and somehow managed to maintain separate identities while becoming one of the country's most recognizable creative partnerships.

But anyone who watched the 2019 documentary I'm Going to Break Your Heart knows the reality was considerably messier, and, considerably more interesting.

The documentary followed Maida and Kreviazuk as they travelled to Saint-Pierre and Miquelon to write and record together, offering an unusually unvarnished look at the creative friction, personal struggles and emotional complexity that can come with being married to someone who is also a songwriter.

Now, that story has continued in I'm Going to Break Your Heart: A Rock and Roll Love Story, a book that expands the narrative well beyond the period captured by the documentary.

And this fall, the couple are taking that story, along with nearly 30 years of music, on the road with An Evening with Raine Maida and Chantal Kreviazuk. They'll bring the show to the EA Rawlinson Centre in Prince Albert on Thursday, Sept. 24. The resulting evening, however, isn't simply a concert. In fact, Maida is reluctant to put too many boundaries around what audiences will experience.

“I think you just have to expect the unexpected,” he says. “We don't really, honest to God, know what's gonna happen when we go on stage.”

There will be songs audiences know, new material and, presumably, a few surprises.

“We have a set list,” Maida says, “but the in-between stuff is really like anything can happen.”

That spontaneity is an important part of the show's appeal. There is no elaborate production designed to separate the artists from the audience. Instead, Maida and Kreviazuk are putting themselves onstage together and allowing the evening to develop organically. A previous run of shows on the East Coast gave them a taste of just how well that approach can work.

“The audience were just so engaged and they just made it for a really lively evening,” Maida says. “There was a lot of times when we were just actually talking back and forth to the audience.”

Kreviazuk describes those moments in slightly different terms.

“It's really, really amazing that he and I get a chance to go out on stage together and have this sort of transformative experience with other people from our culture,” she says.

That word... TRANSFORMATIVE... seems particularly appropriate when talking about this particular couple. Because the story of Maida and Kreviazuk isn't really about two musicians who happen to be married. Their relationship has been intertwined with their creative lives almost from the beginning. Kreviazuk met Maida in 1996, around the time her own career was beginning to take off. Her debut album, Under These Rocks and Stones, arrived in 1997 and established her as one of Canada's most distinctive singer-songwriters. Meanwhile, Maida and Our Lady Peace were on the verge of becoming one of the country's biggest rock bands. The timing is almost remarkable in retrospect.

“I met Raine on the first day that I was in Toronto to shoot the music video for my first single,” Kreviazuk recalls.

Nearly 30 years later, she still remembers those early moments with remarkable clarity.

And while both artists would go on to build substantial careers independently, they also discovered that there was something uniquely productive — and occasionally frustrating — about putting two songwriters in the same room. Kreviazuk laughs when describing the process.

“When I write with Raine, when I get the chance to write with him, I mean, he's brilliant,” she says. “And he hears completely differently than me. It's always a different experience.”

Sometimes that difference can be the thing that gets a song unstuck. She recalls bringing Maida the song “All I Can Do” and finding herself unsure about what should come next.

“I said, I don't know what to do after I say, ‘all I can do,’” she remembers.

Maida's suggestion? Just keep saying it.

“And it was one of my biggest songs in my solo career,” Kreviazuk says.

The same thing happened with “Time.”

“I said, well, what's the chorus?” she recalls asking him.

“And he said, ‘That is the chorus.’ And I said, ‘That's not a chorus.’ And he said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, that's the chorus.’”

It was. Those stories are funny, but they also illustrate something central to the couple's relationship: they don't have to agree in order to create something together.

“I think that there's a respect there,” Kreviazuk says.

That respect, and the willingness to recognize that the other person is fundamentally their own person, became an even more important theme as their relationship matured.

That is where I'm Going to Break Your Heart becomes more than a rock documentary.

The film captured a particular moment in their relationship, but the book allowed them to step much further back and examine the lives that brought them together in the first place.

Maida says the documentary “captured a moment,” while the book is considerably more expansive, stretching from their individual beginnings through their careers and relationship and into the present.

For Kreviazuk, the process of writing the book became an exercise in memory and reflection.

She says she originally wrote far more than ultimately made it onto the page.

“I edited out about 80% of what my original words were,” she says. “I'm a chatty Cathy and some of the things were too much.”

But what remained was, in many ways, the part that mattered. She says readers have contacted her to tell her that certain passages made them feel understood -that even when she didn't explicitly say something, they recognized their own experiences in what she had written. And perhaps that's the real purpose behind the book and documentary. Not simply to tell the story of Raine Maida and Chantal Kreviazuk, but to acknowledge that long-term relationships are complicated, imperfect things.

The couple have been open about seeking help and working with relationship coaches, something they believe played an important role in keeping their marriage healthy.

Kreviazuk talks about the importance of understanding that two people can share a life without becoming the same person. Raine is Raine. Chantal is Chantal.

“It's like a coaster. We're just... we're two sides,” she says. “But they're the same thing.”

For Maida, that commitment, in part, is at the heart of what inspired the song “I'm Going to Break Your Heart.” Once you choose someone, he says, there is an understanding that you're going to go through the inevitable ups and downs together.

“The fulfillment of committal is pretty amazing,” he says.

It's an interesting idea in an era when relationships can sometimes feel disposable. Dating apps make it easy to move on, Maida observes, while modern culture can encourage people to abandon jobs, relationships and commitments at the first sign of difficulty.

Their story argues for something different: that there can be value in staying, doing the work and discovering that the person you've been with for decades can still surprise you.

And perhaps that's also what makes the live show so compelling. The couple aren't presenting a polished retrospective of their careers. They're not simply recreating the documentary onstage. They're continuing the conversation. There will be songs from their respective careers, new material and covers. There will be stories. There will be audience interaction. And there will almost certainly be moments neither of them planned.

Kreviazuk says the ability to perform together is itself a kind of discovery.

“You're new every day,” she says. “And hopefully in a marriage, you get chances like Raine and I have gotten to have discovery.”

After nearly 30 years together, that's a pretty remarkable thing. Especially considering where they started. Kreviazuk was launching her solo career. Maida was fronting Our Lady Peace as the band was becoming one of the defining Canadian rock acts of its generation. Since then, both have collected JUNO Awards, Grammys, hit records and countless songwriting credits. They've raised a family, navigated the pressures of two demanding careers and, perhaps most importantly, figured out how to remain individuals while building a life together. Now they're bringing all of that history into the room with them. And they don't quite know what will happen when they get there.

“It's going to be a lot of fun,” Maida says.

That's probably the safest prediction anyone can make.

An Evening with Raine Maida and Chantal Kreviazuk comes to the EA Rawlinson Centre in Prince Albert on Thursday, Sept. 24 at 7:30 p.m. Bring an open mind. There will be a set list.

But apparently, there are no guarantees about what happens between the songs.

Raine Maida last performed in Saskatchewan with Our Lady Peace in 2025. This show, with spouse Chantal Kreviazuk, will prove to be something entirely different. (photo by Scott Roos)