TORONTO -- Two years ago Chantal Kreviazuk was a brash but slightly jittery debutante on the Canadian music scene.

The Winnipeg singer was just one of many young women travelling in the wake of Sarah McLachlan, Celine Dion and Shania Twain as they smashed like a Frobisher Bay icebreaker through the ranks of the male-dominated rock world.

Two years of touring, recording songs for film (her version of John Denver's Leaving on a Jet Plane became the theme song for the movie Armageddon) and getting to know the music business from the inside has changed her tune somewhat. She says she has gladly traded the rookie's naive timidity for professional self-confidence.

"I made some decisions going into the second record that I wasn't going to worry about anybody's feelings and I wasn't going to care if anyone thought I was a bitch and I was going to put myself first," Kreviazuk said recently.

"Because I tend to be a person-pleaser. I tend to love giving gifts as opposed to receiving them."

Her second album, Colour, Moving and Still enjoyed a Top 10 debut on Canadian sales charts this month. While she was happy with the first album, Under These Rocks and Stones, Kreviazuk says she was concerned that the follow-up demonstrate a more mature voice.

"I decided that all of the songs needed to be written with that kind of emotional standard and I just wasn't going to write if it wasn't coming from somewhere really special," says the 26-year-old Kreviazuk.

"The way to learn is the hard way. For me, going out on the road for two or three years was the hard way. Realizing after, OK if I'm going to do this again, I'd better love this album because if I have to get up and perform it every night, by God I'd better love what I'm doing."

Her songwriting goal for the album was to be inspired by life, not the pursuit of chart or commercial success, says Kreviazuk. But life -- and death -- were to take a bigger hand in her songwriting than she had anticipated. Around the time she began to write songs for the album, Kreviazuk was befriended by a 12-year-old girl who had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. The girl, who Kreviazuk did not name, had been given two to three months to live.

"A lot of very special, exceptional, once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-world experiences happened to me as a result of knowing her," says Kreviazuk.

"It was so, so, so, so heavy. I did a lot of observing obviously. I'm seeing a child with her parents who are going to lose her and she knew she was going."

"She ended up living for six months, which was for her family an unbelievable blessing. She made it to her 13th birthday, and I got to be at her birthday party."

It was inevitable that Kreviazuk would write about the experience. The song M on Colour, Moving and Still is dedicated to the young girl, and from a line in the song came the record's title.

"She was almost 13 and teenagers don't want their pictures taken. She just wanted to be with her friends and be accepted and all those things were important to her, while her parents wanted to continually take pictures of her ... they needed to."

"And that's where the (title) comes from: 'I think were gonna have to record her sometimes against her will / We're going to keep her alive with black-and-whites, colour, moving and still."

"So you can imagine how it'll be OK for me to take this album out on the road with those being the kinds of things that made me write it. I mean, that's really what it's all about for me. That's forever."

Kreviazuk has also enjoyed some happy personal moments: she was recently engaged to longtime boyfriend Raine Maida, lead singer of Toronto rock group Our Lady Peace.

It's a much-gossiped about relationship in the music industry, this impending union of singers, and Kreviazuk has tried to keep it as private as possible.

"I think Raine does to," she says. "One of the things that I love about Canada is the ability to remain sort of anonymous and people are so cool about it and the press is so amazing."

"At the same time, I think that if you're going to spend your whole life with someone and people are asking you about it all the time, it's not healthy to evade it too much. When you love someone you're proud of them."

"I would never give any details of my personal life away. But as far as confirming that we're a couple, it is all I have -- that and my music."

By: Andrew Flynn