A Canadian success
Chantal Kreviazuk's first record is closing in on platinum

A little over a year ago, Chantal Kreviazuk sat in the lounge at the Westin Hotel downtown and confessed some anxiety over a performance set to begin in just a few short hours at Barrymore's.

The Winnipeg native had scored some prize opening spots on Amanda Marshall's sold-out Canadian club tour, and that night's show was not only her first gig before Marshall's crowd -- it was her first in a venue larger than the hometown piano bars where she'd been honing her chops since she was a teenager.

Flash forward twelve months or so, and, more than a year after its release, Kreviazuk's slow-burning debut album Under These Rocks And Stones is creating a buzz north and south of the border not unlike the one Marshall's first record was generating in late 1996.

The album is closing in on platinum sales (100,000 copies sold) in Canada, while her latest single Surrounded -- a piano-based ballad written for a close friend who committed suicide -- is in heavy rotation at radio and MuchMusic.

And Kreviazuk, 24, is back headlining the same, sold-out Barrymore's in the midst of her own Canadian club tour. She's still a bit anxious, perhaps, but for entirely different reasons.

"I used to think it would be great doing my own shows because everybody is there to see you and no one else," she says from Toronto.

"But now I'm up there with all this mega-guilt because everybody paid all this money to see me. I feel like I have to put on a Russian circus or something."

Actually, Kreviazuk says, she's adjusted quite well to life amid the hustle and bustle of the music industry during her steady rise to prominence over the past year.

"It's up and down like anything else. Certainly things have become much more comfortable and natural for me," she says, adding having a constantly hectic schedule means "I actually feel productive. I really didn't feel productive before, just sitting around waiting for the record to come out."

Achieving a certain measure of fame hasn't come without a downside, she admits. Witness the gossip flying in recent weeks about her relationship with Raine Maida, the lead singer for Canuck rock monsters Our Lady Peace.

Modest success has given her her first taste of fan strangeness, too.

At a recent Toronto show, for instance, Kreviazuk was fittingly weirded out when a female fan slipped her a letter backstage claiming the songs on Under These Rocks And Stones revealed the whereabouts of her missing daughter.

"She really believed it -- (that) I know where her daughter is," she recalls.

These days, Kreviazuk is concentrating on "attacking the American beast a bit more." Rocks And Stones was released there last summer, and has quietly edged almost halfway to gold status on the strength of the singles God Made Me and Surrounded.

After plugging the same record for nearly a year and a half, though, she says, she's "starting to itch creatively" and is in the first stages of deciding "what do I want my next album to be about emotionally?"

One might assume some of the intensely personal material on Rocks And Stones represented an emotional exorcism for Kreviazuk, that the next record might wander off into less soul-baring territory.

Not so, she says: She'd like it to be even more honest.

"I want it to be even deeper," she says. "If this is my one outlet to be really pure and creative -- if this is my one opportunity to be creative -- I don't want to blow it."

By: Ben Rayner