Background
By early 1998, while touring for Clumsy, the members of Our Lady Peace were already eager to get back into the studio. "We're all starting to get that itch," bass player Duncan Coutts said in a March 1998 interview. "We're all writing collectively and individually. Everyone's hovered over their four-track machines, if we're not trying to work things out in sound checks."
Mike Turner and Raine Maida say they wanted to make an album that didn't sound derivative, an accusation that had stung them in the past. Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan infamously accused them of ripping off his band. They tried to counter the remark for their new album. "We've toured so much for the last five years throughout the U.S. and Canada and with all the bands we've played with . . . music became so diluted and so disposable we said: `If we're going to make a record, let's put out something that maybe challenges people.'"
According to Raine Maida, the overall idea of the album is human obsession, "A lot of this record came from obsessions: Definitely seeing those obsessions in the States, the guns, the Gap ads and how the media determines who you are these days.... During the recording of this record, we talked a lot about death, for whatever reason. There's definitely an obsession with death and a huge fear. But in knowing that, it makes you hate these other things more, because it's not what life's about. Buying Tommy Hilfinger (sic) because it's cool has nothing to do with any kind of emotional value or content, and music for me does. So when they hit each other, I get pretty emotional about it."
Read more about this topic: Happiness... Is Not A Fish That You Can Catch
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)