Let's explore this concept of "irony."

When Chantal Kreviazuk showed up last year, she was instantly compared to Alanis Morissette, whose hit Ironic was ironic only for the fact that it wasn't. (Rain on your wedding day is inconvenient, not ironic.)

What's really ironic is how Kreviazuk has come full circle from Winnipeg lounge pianist to the new "woman in rock" and back again. On her debut album, Under These Rocks and Stones, you hear a rock band hammering out Morissette-like arrangements of her honest, soul-wrenching songs. The tune Believer, inspired by a drunk audience member who tried to stick his hand down her sweater, made the "angry young woman" tag particularly apt (sample lyric: "it's hard to believe God made you and me with the same hands." Ouch.)

During her 1996 promotional tour, Kreviazuk pointed out that if she had recorded without the band, "we wouldn't be talking."

True enough. But now you won't hear any band when the 24-year-old songstress performs a sold-out show in the Myer Horowitz Theatre tomorrow night. Once again, it's just the singer at her piano. As Kreviazuk proved during a showcase to launch the record, this is where she shines.

"It's just the most feasible on every level," she says. "It's just very me, it's very genuine at this point. It's the kind of thing you can do once you achieve that little bit of radio exposure."

Besides, it's cheaper.

"Videos are expensive, put it that way," she says. "Small house, big house, river property, parking lot view, it just depends."

Kreviazuk's video budget is more like apartment building-sized now. It's five and counting, including two for God Made Me, since the American label didn't like the first one.

"I guess America wanted something that was a little less off the cuff, something more serious, more worldly, I don't know what," she says, "But I like the first one better."

Having come into the music business with no expectations, she says, Kreviazuk seems to accept everything as though it were meant to happen. Even opening for Bon Jovi last summer didn't faze her.

"I thought it would be funny, so I did it - just so I can say I opened for Bon Jovi ... I think it's one of those things I just wouldn't say no to, somehow."

At the very least, it must've appealed to her sense of irony.

By: Mike Ross