Goin' Down Her Road

Wit

h rays from the afternoon sun streaming through the skylight in her living room, Chantal Kreviazuk sits on a couch summoning up the twilight. She's holding a honey-brown guitar, strumming the same melancholy chords over and over. There are no words to this tune; in fact, it's not even a complete song yet. It's just an idea, a musical mood, that came over her a few days earlier. "I'm sort of always writing music in my head," says Kreviazuk, "to the point that I sometimes get overwhelmed."

It's been a productive year for the 27-year-old singer-songwriter. Her latest album, the elegant Colour Moving and Still, was a best seller in Canada, and in March she won two Juno awards over such heavily favored nominees as Joni Mitchell, Celine Dion and Alanis Morissette. But Kreviazuk's mind is already on her next album, her next batch of songs. The musical direction of the next solo album is still being worked out in her head, but in the meantime, Chantal will be heard from in other ways. She has been selected to sing the Canadian national anthem on July 11 at Major League Baseball's All-Star Game in Atlanta. (R.-and-B. singer Brandy will perform the American anthem.) Kreviazuk is also working on a score for Cleopatra, the 1912 silent film produced by movie pioneer Helen Gardner. Cleopatra will be broadcast in the U.S. on Aug. 10 as part of a Women Film Pioneers festival on Turner Classic Movies cable channel.

Kreviazuk seems a bit subdued about her baseball gig ("I'm a big sports fan," she says. "I'm not a big fan of this whole commercialized sports thing"), but she is openly enthusiastic about working on Cleopatra. She's recorded songs for movies and TV before, notably a cover of In My Life for the series Providence, and one of Leaving on a Jet Plane for the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon, but her work on Cleopatra is her first try at writing and performing an entire score. It has also given her a chance to collaborate with her husband Raine Maida, vocalist for the rock band Our Lady Peace. The two have a computer set up in the basement of their Toronto home on which they watch scenes from the film and compose music to match the imagery. The songs they've finished sound terrific--moody, rhythmic, mysterious. Says Kreviazuk: "This is a really nice way for us to let our creative juices flow together."

If Kreviazuk's life had a sound track, the early songs would be sweet pop followed by at least one track of heavy-metal discord. She grew up in a comfortable neighborhood in Winnipeg, learned to play piano at age 3 and attended the University of Manitoba as an English major. At 21, while on vacation in Italy, she was hit by a motorcycle and nearly killed. After several surgical procedures (including having plates and screws put in her lower jaw) she dropped out of college and decided to pursue music instead.

Unrequested, Kreviazuk hikes up her skirt to reveal a deep scar on her upper thigh. "When people have suffered, and when they've been through stuff, I know what it feels like," she says. Her empathy echoes in her work. Her 1996 debut album Under These Rocks and Stones included a song about a former boyfriend's suicide. Colour Moving and Still (1999) features a song called M about her real-life friendship with a girl who died from an inoperable brain tumor shortly after her 13th birthday. Kreviazuk met the girl at a local hospital. "I found it very humbling," she says, recalling the youngster's struggle. "And it gave me a reverence for life and family and how precious time is." Kreviazuk's lyrics are often about searching and suffering. The music she writes, by contrast, is usually warm and inviting; even as her words speak of loss and pain, her melodies throw their arms around you.

Despite her success--both her albums have sold more than 150,000 copies in Canada--Kreviazuk wonders whether thoughtful pop music can sell in a teen-pop-obsessed marketplace. "People don't really want to hear introspection right now," she says. "It seems like all they want to hear is Baby One More Time or Oops...I Did It Again--which is really the same song sold twice." One gets the sense, though, that Kreviazuk is committed to writing songs of substance. Says she: "Once you've written something of meaning, it's hard to go back." She's heading down her road, and, whatever accidents occur, she's intent on going forward.