Happiness... Is Not A Fish That You Can Catch - Recording

Recording

For their third studio album, Our Lady Peace chose again to work with producer Arnold Lanni in Toronto. The band began writing, demoing and general jamming for Happiness... in late November soon after their appearance at the 1998 Summersault festival. Raine brought in many of the songs he had written in demo form already recorded and the rest of the band expanded upon those. Unlike previous albums, Mike Turner took little part in writing the album. Recording began in mid-January 1999. The band isolated themselves in the studio with little outside contact. They spent one and a half months recording the bed tracks of vocals and guitar and a week and a half each for drum and bass parts. The album took four months to record in all. For the first time, this album was recorded entirely on digital equipment using ProTools to edit. "It's the best thing for us because you don't have to wait between takes like if I'm doing a vocal take or Jeremy's doing drum stuff, if you want to do it again, you can do it instantaneously." Other new effects the band used included filtering percussion through a distortion box and recording guitar parts through antique microphones, including one used by Stevie Wonder.

Former drummer for John Coltrane, Elvin Jones makes a guest appearance on the final track of the album "Stealing Babies". Jeremy Taggart was a big fan of Jones' and was able to meet him through his drum technician while at a show in Seattle. He invited Jones' into the Toronto studio early into the recording sessions to record drums for the song, which were recorded in one take.

Halfway through recording, the band realized that the music they were recording would be very hard to recreate live, especially for Mike Turner. They decided to hire Boston area multi-instrumentalist Jamie Edwards, who had formerly played with Blue Man Group and that Jeremy knew through a mutual friend, to augment their live shows. "The turning point was when we decided to take off the table our usual constraint, which is that if we can't pull it off as a three-piece instrumental then we shouldn't be doing it," said Mike Turner. "Now we're like, we'll get another guy, we'll do whatever we have to, let's just make a great record. So we indulged ourselves with a lot of textures, a lot of other sounds." Jamie provided extra guitar as well as Keyboards and other special effects and ended up recording for the album. The band was looking to make a sonic leap forward from their previous albums. "We took the things we thought were original from 'Clumsy' and 'Naveed' and tried to overdo them." said Raine Maida, "As well, our songwriting really improved."

Raine Maida has stated that the album is so tight and so well executed because the band only recorded 12 songs during the Happiness sessions, instead of recording 20 or more like they did with their previous two albums. They strove to achieve a much simpler method of songwriting than on the previous albums which included tightening up songs and forming more cohesive tracks. This allowed each song to have the utmost attention given to it while being written and it sometimes took one week or more to record one song. "Annie" for example, took over two weeks of jam sessions to become a fully realized song. The only recorded song that did not make the album was the long running concert favorite "Trapeze", which had previously been recorded, and omitted from "Clumsy".

This was the first album of theirs to not be mixed by their producer Arnold Lanni. It was instead sent to Kevin Shirley at Avatar Studios in New York City. The mixing of the album was completed by late June 1999 when they played many of the songs for the first time for a large audience at Woodstock 1999.