TORONTO - Singer-songwriter-pianist Chantal Kreviazuk released her third album, What If It All Means Something, yesterday.

But she's already planning her next, an entire collection with husband Raine Maida, the frontman for Toronto rock outfit Our Lady Peace. They married in 1999.

"I think we're going to make an album very soon, 'cause we have a lot of material that we've written together," says Kreviazuk, 29, settled on a couch in the basement of a Toronto nightclub while her dog, Chanti, chews on a cookie and her mother, Carole, hangs out with an entourage of publicists, tour manager and a hair-and-makeup person.

"And it's time to get it out. Otherwise it's going to go to waste, or go places that are not relative to these songs. I think we're really ready. We're ready to do these press junkets together. We're ready to wake up and go to the airport together. Do sound checks together. Go to the slug-out radio festivals together. I've done it without him. I've made enough long distance calls. Now I want to call him across the room."

In fact, Maida co-wrote five songs on Kreviazuk's new 11-song collection.

The singer -- who will perform a private solo show at Revival on Dec. 9 for contest-winners and invited retail and radio guests only -- said it was an organic process.

"It was Raine saying, 'I have a great lyric for that spot,' or me saying, 'Wow, that's a really beautiful riff. Can I adapt that for a piece of music I'm writing?' " she says.

Sources of inspiration proved to be both extremely personal and purely observational.

Flying Home (Brenda's Song) was written by Kreviazuk on a plane enroute to attend the funeral last year of her 36-year-old cousin, who went into a coma after a seizure and died 18 hours later.

"I was the little sister," she says of their relationship. "She corrupted me and then fixed me. She was definitely my big sister 'cause I didn't have sisters in my own immediate family. She was pretty damn special."

Julia, meanwhile, was written about Julia Roberts, after Kreviazuk found herself dining alone in a Hollywood eatery with Roberts and husband Danny Moder at another table.

"I was just thinking, 'God it must be hard for Julia Roberts to feel like she's in true love in a world where she's just being completely adored for who she is.' I just thought, 'Man, she's got it all, but can you ever really go on a date?' She's such a superstar."

However, much of the new material was written in a beach cottage near the Malibu-Ventura county line in California which Kreviazuk and Maida rented last August as an escape from The Big Smoke.

"We decided it would be really nice while we were trying to write our followup albums, our respective albums, that we could maybe be in an atmosphere that felt like a bit of a retreat, so we created that," says Kreviazuk. She also accompanied Maida when OLP were recording in Hawaii, mixing the album in Vancouver, and touring the southern U.S.

The couple gave up the cottage a month ago to move inland -- still only six minutes from the beach -- and now permanently divide their time between L.A. and Toronto.

Currently in the midst of six weeks apart from Maida, Kreviazuk says she doesn't think their upcoming album will cause any problems for OLP.

"I don't think that Raine will feel as if he's letting anyone down," she says. "I wrote a lot of the (new) album about having to take care of yourself, and putting yourself first. You get to a point in your life where you're thinking about everyone else. Raine, for his own health, needs to be with his wife to let the creative aspect of our relationship manifest and blossom. Because it's very real. And there's a bit of an ache there for waiting, you know?"

By: Jane Stevenson