Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida and singer-pianist Chantal Kreviazuk were way ahead of the pandemic when it came to testing the limits of their relationship in a confined space. In fact, they documented the complicated process of working creatively as a married couple with the full-length documentary, “I’m Going To Break Your Heart,” and a resulting album under the banner Moon Vs Sun.
The two have been married more than two decades and have three sons. Both accomplished career artists, Maida has sold millions of albums with Canadian band Our Lady Peace, released solo albums and produced other acts, and Kreviazuk has earned numerous gold and platinum awards and written for, or with, such chart-toppers as Kendrick Lamar, Avril Lavigne, Drake, Josh Groban, Pitbull, Kelly Clarkson, and Shakira.
The film, which first premiered in Canada in 2019, will be available on streaming platforms and in select theaters on April 23, while the self-titled album hits DSPs on the same day. Mostly shot in the dead of winter on the French island of Saint Pierre et Miquelon, off the coast of Newfoundland and the last French territory in North America, “I’m Going To Break Your Heart” allows for an intimate look at an emotional clash of talents, including fly-on-the-wall spats as they write songs for the album in the quaint, but cold locale.
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A music video for the first official single, “St. Josephine,” is comprised of clips from the film. It opens with a scene from the couple’s therapy session and Maida can be heard in a voiceover, saying, “We’re two opinionated people trying to solve this musical thing. It’s not about perfection. It’s about progress.”
“I truly believe that every couple should be filmed interacting, should be filmed doing a project, and we would live in a different world,” Kreviazuk tells Variety. “Actually, everybody can be filmed interacting with others, at work or strangers, in any kind of transaction. I don’t think people are aware of their own facial expressions and their tones and timbres and they really matter, you know? Making the film impacted our communication.”
Kreviazuk believes the film allowed for “free speech” between her and her husband. “I’m not scared that anything I am honest [with Raine] about is going to result in death or divorce,” she adds. “So the thing I would wish to say to people is that you being frustrated with each other, or feeling like it’s not working, has so much less to do with your love for one another and so much more to do with your skill for communication. Communication is everything.”
“St. Josephine” is released to coincide with the Feast Day of St. Josephine, honoring former Sudanese slave Josephine Bakhita, who was canonized in 2000 by the Catholic Church as the patron saint of Sudan. While Maida and Kreviazuk have done considerable humanitarian work with War Child Canada (including in Darfur), which earned them the Order of Canada, it’s not the inspiration for the lyric.
Explains Kreviazuk: “It’s so wild actually. So random. Raine and I went to Saint Pierre et Miquelon the summer before we went back in the winter and filmed. We went to this adorable little cafe called Les Délices de Joséphine and I talk about it in the film with our marriage coach that we had the most romantic day there. We played Scrabble and drank tea and wine and had the longest silliest lunch that went into dinner. It was just so fun.
“So one of the things we were looking forward to doing when we came back there was going to Les Délices de Joséphine — and it was closed. That’s what it’s like in Sainte Pierre et Miquelon in the winter. There’s nothing open,” she laughs. “So the song really was written as an homage to this place that had created so much help for us and for love. And then we found out that Joséphine was Sudanese, and a patron saint of forgiveness and all this really cool stuff about her.”
Maida and Kreviazuk both recently contracted and recovered from COVID-19, and they don’t yet know when Moon Vs Sun will perform live again (they have toured a lot in their native Canada but live in Los Angeles). Kreviazuk, meanwhile, has a solo SessionsLive! concert on Feb. 12.
