Northern Dial Artist Profile

Chantal Kreviazuk

Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Winnipeg-born pianist and singer-songwriter Chantal Kreviazuk emerged in the late 1990s with a style built around intimate piano writing, strong melodic instincts and emotionally direct lyrics. Her 1997 debut Under These Rocks and Stones produced songs including "Surrounded" and established her as a major new Canadian adult-alternative voice. A successful cover of "Leaving on a Jet Plane" expanded her soundtrack audience, but the second album Colour Moving and Still became the clearest early statement of her own writing.

Colour Moving and Still went double platinum in Canada and produced "Before You" and "Dear Life." At the 2000 JUNO Awards, Kreviazuk won both Best Female Artist and Best Pop/Adult Album. Later solo records including What If It All Means Something, Ghost Stories and Hard Sail kept her recording career active, but her influence increasingly expanded behind the scenes through songwriting with her husband, Our Lady Peace frontman Raine Maida. Their writing and production work reached major international pop artists as well as film and television projects.

That dual career is the key to Kreviazuk's significance. She is part of the generation that made piano-led singer-songwriter music a substantial Canadian mainstream format in the late 1990s, while her later work helped connect Canadian songwriting talent to the global pop industry. Her and Maida's humanitarian work was also recognized with the JUNO Humanitarian Award in 2014. The result is a career whose importance sits both in the records carrying her own name and in songs written for other voices.