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Our Lady Peace

4am

The band jammed it out a little bit, but not a lot because we didn't want to deliberate over this. On the first record, I don't think Raine played any guitar. But on this record, he played some guitar and there's a string out of tune purposely. I said, 'I want you to play it and sing it as if nobody was here.' Sometimes, you have to give up so much of yourself that you're almost embarrassed. And because of the subject matter, I think he sang a lot of the vocal with just the assistant. And once that guitar tone was laid down, we deliberately didn't fool around with the tune. We wanted everything to sound as uneventful and immediate as possible. We didn't want to get great huge sound. We plugged into the amp, put up a mic and literally left it. What did change, though, was we had an original mix and we spliced in a different mix to capture the right mood. Basically, what you hear is Raine on microphone just singing a song about him and his dad.- Arnold Lanni, Canadian Musician, April 1997

Raine stayed later one day, just with the engineer, and came up with it. I think for him it was an emotional cleansing. If you listen to the lyrics, you'll understand. He came in the next day and I wanted to record it immediately. I handed him a guitar and had him singing within two minutes. We could have gotten a better sound, but I wanted to capture the rawness. For the first few minutes what you hear is Raine's debut on the guitar. He was nervous to do it, but the way I looked at the whole project was the studio and the instruments are just tools. There was nothing to be afraid of.- Arnold Lanni, Words and Music, July 1997

4am was like an epiphany. It happened at about 4 a.m. in my bedroom one night -- I wrote the chords and lyrics in about five minutes. Those types of things scare me, because you can't rely on that stuff. I get a little worried about that. When it happens that quickly, you feel like it's a gift. Sometimes I feel like I didn't write it, that someone, wherever, gave it to me.- Raine Maida, Vancouver Sun, 27 Jan. 1998

That was just a press roll [coming into the second verse]. That comes from trying to make everything fresh. We pay attention to that kind of stuff.- Jeremy Taggart, Modern Drummer, Feb. 1998

Lyrics

I walked around my good intentions
And found that there were none
I blame my father for the wasted years
We hardly talked
I never thought I would forget this hate
Then a phone call made me realize
I'm wrong

If I don't make it known that
I've loved you all along
Just like sunny days that
We ignore because
We're all dumb and jaded
And I hope to God I figure out
What's wrong

I walked around my room
Not thinking
Just sinking in this box
I blame myself for being too much
Like somebody else
I never thought I would just
Bend this way

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