In fact, the singer can be downright nasty -- he swears, he spits, he knocks stuff over -- during the band's live shows.
But during the band's recent string of college dates in Eastern Canada, Maida has taken a different tack.
He has been apologizing to fans for the nearly four-year wait between Our Lady Peace's debut record Naveed and its sophomore effort, Clumsy, which was released this week.
"On stage I've been saying sorry a lot for the delay,'' Maida says. "It has really sucked for people in Canada ... I hate it when the bands I like take a long time between albums.''
OLP never thought it would take so long.
Veterans of only a handful of live shows, the Hamilton group released Naveed in 1993 with little fanfare and low expectations.
Success hit like a bomb. MuchMusic loved Maida's model good looks and rock radio loved Naveed's hard-driving first single, Starseed. U.S. radio soon jumped on the song and OLP hit the road.
Maida figures the band put more than 400,000 kilometres on tour vehicles over the past three years. They have opened for Van Halen, Page and Plant, Bush X, The Ramones and, last summer, Alanis Morissette.
A new bassist, 500 gigs and 500,000 albums sales later, the band got a chance to write new songs. But they soon found it wasn't working out. The delay grew.
"We were about eight months into our American tour, on the last leg, when we started to feel some pressure, like, `We better start writing. It's been a while,''' Maida recalls.
"Duncan Coutts had just joined the band (replacing Chris Eacrett) so we thought it was a good time to start. But it felt really forced.''
The group, which also includes guitarist Mike Turner and drummer Jeremy Taggart, headed to Toronto and rented a rehearsal place. The songs still didn't come.
They decided it needed a change of scenery, so members packed up and went to Coutts's cottage near Muskoka, Ont.
"We left those songs behind and started fresh, completely removed from MTV or MuchMusic or press or management. We just played music and wrote music,'' Maida says.
"Someone would wake up in the morning and pick up an acoustic guitar and they'd start writing. We were having fun again.
"And when you start enjoying something, you almost don't care if anyone's going to like it because you're getting off on it. So the pressure was totally off.''
It shows. Most of the songs written at Coutts's cottage made their way onto Clumsy.
And while much of the record is similar to Naveed -- same quiet/loud song structures, same esoteric lyrics -- Clumsy's sound, with added touches of strings and keyboards, is more evolved. The record is more solid and cohesive, too. There are several candidates for follow-up hits (Big Dumb Rocket, Let You Down, the title track) once the current single, Superman's Dead, runs its radio course.
"It's the difference between a one-hit wonder band and a band that makes records. A lot of bands in Canada, especially, are concentrating on making good records,'' Maida says.
"When we toured the States, we noticed it's not necessarily like that ... We saw all these bands that got propped up so quickly on MTV and they didn't even have a second single.''