In Repair Explained

In Repair
Cover:In Repair (Our Lady Peace single - cover art).jpg
Type:single
Artist:Our Lady Peace
Album:Spiritual Machines
Released:November 15, 2000
Recorded:2000, The Hit Factory (Avatar Studios), New York City[1]
Genre:Alternative rock, post-grunge, art rock
Length:4:14
Label:Columbia
Producer:Arnold Lanni
Prev Title:Thief
Prev Year:2000
Next Title:Life
Next Year:2001

"In Repair" is a song by Canadian alternative rock group Our Lady Peace. It was released in November 2000 as the lead single from their fourth studio album Spiritual Machines.

Content

Raine Maida stated that the lyrics "focus upon how people tend to treat each other as machines in our day-to-day life. We really need to take stock and focus our energy towards those in our lives that matter. Sometimes it seems as if we need an oil change."

The song, as with most songs from the Spiritual Machines album, follows a theme concerning a futuristic artificially intelligent and robotic society, as described in Ray Kurzweil's 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. In both the original release of the song and its second release as part of OLP's A Decade compilation album in 2006, the song is immediately preceded by a track entitled "R.K. 2029", which is a narration from Kurzweil's book read aloud by Kurzweil himself.

Critical reception

In her review of Spiritual Machines, Allmusic's MacKenzie Wilson commented that "Maida's lazy nasal-like vocals carry the song with sheer essence" and said that, "There are no thunderous riffs plaguing the song's initial plea for a little soul-searching.[2] "

Music video

The music video was created by Oli Goldsmith and is an animated collage of the more than 200 artworks he painted for the Spiritual Machines project. The band makes no appearances in the video except for a brief moment when characters resembling them appear in the background. Saul Fox's image appears several times in the video also. The video premiered on Muchmusic on November 22, 2000.

In 2001, the video was nominated for Best Video, Best Rock Video, Best Post-Production, and Best Director at the MuchMusic Video Awards, which it won all but Best Rock Video.

Notes and References

  1. Graff, Gary (2001). "Our Lady Peace Sound Off" Wallofsound,go.com at the Internet Archive. Retrieved September 19, 2009
  2. Web site: [{{Allmusic|class=album|id=r522988|pure_url=yes}} Our Lady Peace — ''Spiritual Machines'']. Wilson. MacKenzie. Allmusic. 2009-10-12.