Chantal Kreviazuk is reclaiming her most famous hits for other artists

While you may know Chantal Kreviazuk as a successful solo artist, you might not know that she’s also written songs for some of the biggest artists in the world, including Avril Lavigne, Drake, Gwen Stefani, Kelly Clarkson and Kendrick Lamar.

Now, the Grammy-winning Canadian singer-songwriter is reclaiming and reimagining some of those hits on a new cover album, In My Own Voice, which will be released next year.

In an interview with Q’s Tom Power, Kreviazuk says she started to shift her focus to collaborating with other artists while she was pregnant with her first child. Rather than constantly touring and marketing her own music, she wanted to dedicate more time to being at home with her new baby and her husband, Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace.

“I can support my family and do the things, and I can still dip into my artist career, but it maybe doesn't have to be so intense,” she recalls thinking at the time. “I can be more situated. And I feel like it sort of worked because I'm still married and my kids still talk to me.”

Here’s a bit of what Kreviazuk had to say about her past collaborators.

Avril Lavigne

Kreviazuk met Avril Lavigne for the first time at a party when the Sk8er Boi singer was still a new artist.

“She was really young and very by herself,” Kreviazuk says. “I walked up to her and I said, ‘Hi, I'm Chantal.’ And she goes, ‘I know who you are.’ And I was like, ‘Well, let's hang out, girl!’ … We were fast friends … and she responded well to being around another singer-songwriter woman, I think, who was maybe a little older than her.”

Kreviazuk and Maida, who already knew Lavigne from their time on tour together, collaborated with Lavigne on her sophomore album, Under My Skin. Kreviazuk contributed to six of the tracks on the record, including Together, He Wasn't, How Does It Feel, Forgotten, Who Knows, and Slipped Away.

Kelly Clarkson

That same year, in 2004, Kreviazuk contributed to another massive sophomore album, Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway, which featured the hit single Since U Been Gone. She says “that’s when the phone started to ring” for her.

“We had a big single in Walk Away, which is on my [upcoming] album,” Kreviazuk says. “That was really fun. That was the first time I was like, ‘Whoa.’ … It was an early single on that record, I think. Someone sent a toothbrush to the house that sang Walk Away to me when I opened up the package. So I was like, ‘Oh, I think we have a pretty big hit here.’”

Drake

By chance, Kreviazuk ran into Drake at the Thompson Hotel in Toronto (now known as 1 Hotel Toronto) where they decided to collaborate that same day. The Canadian rapper was working on his sophomore album, Take Care. Kreviazuk helped write and produce the album’s first track, Over My Dead Body.

“I was obsessed with that song,” she says. “It was the first song they recorded for Take Care. And so I had to wait like a flipping year, and I drove them crazy because I was like, ‘Hey, what's going on? Can I come fix that up?’ Like I wanted to keep singing it and keep it alive. Because it's really hard to keep songs alive for projects.”

Kendrick Lamar

After the success of Take Care, Kreviazuk got the opportunity to work with rapper Kendrick Lamar on his seminal album, To Pimp a Butterfly. She co-wrote a song called Pay for It, which was originally intended for Lamar’s album, but ended up going to artist Jay Rock instead.

“I worked for a long time, on and off, on To Pimp a Butterfly,” Kreviazuk says. “I wrote a bunch of great bits, brought in full songs, a few things got produced and seemed like they were for sure going on To Pimp a Butterfly…. I didn't think Pay for It was the one. In fact, I recently recorded for myself the one that I think was the one that should have gone on To Pimp a Butterfly. It was called Happy For You and it's one of my favourite songs I ever wrote.”

Gwen Stefani

One of the biggest hits Kreviazuk co-wrote was Gwen Stefani’s Rich Girl, off her 2004 debut solo album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby. The hook of the song interpolates If I Were a Rich Man from the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof.

“The producer knew we are basing this around [If I Were a Rich Man],” Kreviazuk says. “And so they put the track up and there was me and another writer there, and it was like dueling writers.”

When the producer came back to the studio to see what she and the other writer had come up with, Kreviazuk played the song’s famous “Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na” hook for him. He loved it.

“It was just so instant to have somebody say ‘that hook,’” she says. “It was wild. And yeah, it's funny. I'll be in the grocery store and it comes on — na, na, na, na — and I can hear my voice in it too…. They often keep demo singers' layers in tracks, so it's pretty funny.”

The full interview with Chantal Kreviazuk is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Chantal Kreviazuk produced by Vanessa Nigro.