Raine and Chantal make good on their promise to expect the unexpected

words and pics by Scott Roos

A few weeks before Raine Maida and Chantal Kreviazuk arrived at Prince Albert's EA Rawlinson Centre, Maida offered a simple piece of advice to anyone planning to attend.

“You just have to expect the unexpected,” he said.

On Thursday, Sept. 24, he made good on that promise. There was a set list, of course. There were songs from the couple's Moon vs Sun project, including “I'm Going to Break Your Heart,” “I Can Change” and “Bring That Boy.” There were also songs from their individual careers, including several Our Lady Peace favourites. But there was plenty of room in between the songs for something less scripted. There were stories, jokes, audience interaction and the unmistakable chemistry of a couple who have been married for nearly 30 years. That chemistry was really the secret ingredient of the evening.

The stage was sparse and intimate, with soft lighting and a few stand-up lamps providing most of the visual atmosphere. Maida played acoustic guitar while Kreviazuk spent much of the night at the piano, joined by a drummer and bass player. It felt less like a large rock concert and more like being invited into the living room of two very accomplished musicians.

That was clearly the intention.

In our pre-show conversation, Maida explained that the music would be familiar, but the space between the songs was deliberately less predictable.

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

That freedom became one of the show's strengths.

Kreviazuk was the more conversational of the two, frequently engaging with the audience and helping move the stories along. Maida's humour was more understated. It was dry, deadpan and often delivered as a quick comment after Kreviazuk had finished making her point. It was classic married-couple banter. You could almost see the two of them communicating without needing to say everything out loud.

The musical interplay was just as interesting. Maida's Our Lady Peace catalogue provided some of the evening's biggest opportunities for reinvention. “We Are All Innocent,” “Clumsy” and “Starseed” were given stripped-down, almost MTV Unplugged-style treatments. Hearing Kreviazuk's piano and harmonies woven into those songs gave them a different character. These were songs Maida has performed countless times, but they no longer sounded quite like OLP songs. They sounded like Raine and Chantal songs. That is an important distinction when considering the couple's collaborative work.

During a recent interview NSMZ, Kreviazuk talked about how differently she and Maida hear music.

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

That difference was audible throughout the evening. Maida's rock sensibility and Kreviazuk's piano-driven songwriting didn't always pull in the same direction and that was precisely what made the arrangements interesting. There was also a noticeable vulnerability in Kreviazuk's performance. She acknowledged that her voice wasn't necessarily in top form, and there was a gritty, slightly strained quality to it at times. But it worked. Rather than taking away from the performance, that texture seemed to suit the material. Whether she was adapting to what her voice was giving her that night or simply leaning into it, she made it part of the performance.

An early highlight was “In This Life,” which gave her an opportunity to put that voice front and centre. The audience was clearly with her. And that audience participation was something Maida had specifically talked about before arriving in Prince Albert.

He recalled a previous run of shows where the crowd became an active part of the performance.

“The audience were just so engaged and they just made it for a really lively evening,” he said.

The same could be said for Thursday's crowd. By the time the show reached the encore, the audience was even given a say in what they wanted to hear. “Feels Like Home” was one of the selections, while Kreviazuk also delivered a surprisingly cool version of Our Lady Peace's “Superman.” The crowd lapped it up. There was something fitting about ending the evening that way. The entire concert had been about taking familiar material and looking at it from a slightly different angle. That included the relationship between the two performers themselves. Kreviazuk described that relationship during our interview as an ongoing process of discovery.

“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 (an audience),” she said.

That is probably as good a description of Thursday's concert as any. It wasn't simply an OLP show. It wasn't simply a Chantal Kreviazuk show. And it wasn't entirely a Moon vs Sun show, either. It was a little bit of all three, held together by two people who have spent decades learning how to make their very different musical personalities work together.

Maida had told me before the concert that playing places like Prince Albert was special because they don't get to communities like this very often.

“We don't get there a lot,” he said. “So it's definitely, it's not a once in a lifetime thing, but it means a lot to us. We can't wait to see everyone.”

Judging by the response inside the Rawlinson, the feeling was pretty mutual. The audience came for the songs. They stayed for the stories, the humour, the musical surprises and the opportunity to see two longtime Canadian artists let their guard down a little. And if Maida's pre-show warning was to expect the unexpected, Prince Albert got exactly that. They got a concert that was familiar enough to feel comfortable, but loose enough to feel like it could only have happened that night.

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