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Smooth Sailing

Chantal Kreviazuk soars in new album, Hard Sails. The Canadian pop-icon returns to the Royal Theatre Dec. 17.
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Chantal Kreviazuk returns to the Royal Theatre Dec. 17 alongside the Victoria Symphony.

As she calls from the road outside Mission, B.C., you can tell Chantal Kreviazuk is tired.

And why wouldn’t she be?

She’s just returned from Peru, released a new album and is out on a coast-to-coast tour of the country; but the more the Canadian pop-icon talks, the more you see how her life expands past her singing career.

Her world is fuelled by a passion to serve and being a positive role model for her fans and family.

The Winnipeg-native will bring her piercing vocals to the Royal Theatre backed by the Victoria Symphony on Dec. 17.

Hard Sails — released June 17 — is an emotionally raw and powerful look at the singer in a way we haven’t seen before.

The album comes after years of stacking up writing credits for Drake Over My Dead Body, Pitbull Feel This Moment and Kendrick Lamar Pay For It — which she performed with the rapper on Saturday Night Live last season.

But the songs on Hard Sails are Kreviazuk’s and you can tell.

The fifth track off the album, All I Got, is an emotional ode to her husband and Our Lady Peace front man Raine Maida. The opening lyric “I love you more than I love myself,” sets a tone for many of the love songs dedicated to Maida and their three children on the album.

“When I met Raine, I felt like I found my home with him,” she said.

The three-time Juno Award winner doesn’t shy away from the difficult emotions caused by loss and grief as the album’s fifth track, Lost, is almost uncomfortably raw.

“It happened four years ago, and I thought I was going to have a heart attack,” she said. “I was actually in Vancouver and walked passed a recording studio and this song popped out me. It came out, in one fluid experience.” No script, no formal lyrics, just raw emotion and one session.

Fans of her break-out album Under These Rocks and Stones — released in 1998 and which went double-platinum due to the success of chart toppers like Surrounded and God Made Me — will recognize that famous voice and instrumental tones on Hard Sails. But Kreviazuk has grown since then and that maturity can be found throughout the album. “I’ve expanded (but) I’m not trying to be a different person. I hope my fans and I are riding together in tandem,” she said.

Her 18-stop tour, which wraps up in Victoria, will feature her classics and well as new material.

Kreviazuk has also been a tireless opponent of the pressures women face to look and behave in a certain way, and she refuses to allow those pressures to dictate how she presents herself.

“I take a lot of pride in putting out a message of empowerment and a message that we (as women) are pretty incredible,” she said. “There was a moment, where I actually started to believe that I was just a sexual object. I had these feelings of ‘what am I doing?’ And then I thought about my body and what I’ve done for my family, and I thought we can’t let such a toxin take us off our path of self-love, acceptance, peace and understanding.”

Kreviazuk has been an ambassador to War Child for 16 years and was one of the organization’s founding artists.