Toronto rockers Our Lady Peace have written their first concept album with Spiritual Machines, in stores tomorrow.

And frontman Raine Maida doesn't think there's anything pretentious about that given the involvement of the band's inspiration -- Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Age Of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.

OLP, specifically guitarist Mike Turner, made contact with Kurzweil via e-mail, and he wound up reciting a series of five different quotes from his book for OLP's record.

"It was really inspiring to have a guy of that stature be so personable, he was just a human being," says Maida, on the phone from Winnpeg as OLP's eight-city club tour makes its way across Canada enroute to the Phoenix tonight.

"And it's funny. It goes against all the stuff he's talking about. At times, he's basically saying that man is a part of evolution, and not the last part. We're just one chapter. And it's going to evolve to the point where man is really unimportant and fallible and can't compete with the computer. So it does get really dark to me and it kind of got to the point where I'm like, 'S---, there's got to be more than this.' "

Spiritual Machines also features Maida co-producing for the first time, as well as a guest appearance by Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron. Cameron filled in for an ailing Jeremy Taggart, whose knee was damaged when he was mugged in Etobicoke while walking his dog late at night.

"He wasn't down and out in the hospital but where they got him, he couldn't lift his knee up to drum, so it was kind of a drag," says Maida, who adds the band was on a deadline to take the album to Atlanta for mixing by Brendan O'Brien.

"Thank God, Thursday night Pearl Jam was in town and so Matt Cameron, on Friday, comes in. Jeremy gives him a call and Matt comes in and kind of helps out a friend."

To say that OLP have had an incredibly productive year is a bit of an understatement. After touring Canada, the U.S. and Europe on behalf of their 1999 release, Happiness ... Is Not A Fish That You Can Catch, they also staged their semi-regular summer festival Summersault featuring Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters and A Perfect Circle, among others. Frankly, the group didn't think they'd have a new album out until next spring -- at the earliest.

"It was so organic," says Maida. "It was so scattered. It just made it really exciting. It kept things really spontaneous."

OLP's club tour sprung out of the group's desire to give something back to their fan club, The Clumsy Congress. The majority of tickets have been given free to members, although anywhere between 150 to 300 tickets at each date were sold to the public.

"It's been pretty amazing," says Maida of the club jaunt thus far. "It's nice to exchange sweat with our audience again. This time, there's no fancy lights, there's no video, it's just a rock band up there for basically over two hours and I think we're doing like 25 songs. It's nice to be really raw again."

OLP's last club date is Wednesday night in Montreal and they plan to take the rest of December and January off.

Maida, who shot his first feature film this past October opposite wife-singer Chantal Kreviazuk in the Canadian indie anthology Century Hotel, has every intention of seeing her limited run in The Vagina Monologues at The Danforth Music Hall later this month.

"Yeah, every night!" he says. "I kind of sat at home before we left for this tour, she was just reading all the different scripts to me. It's amazing. I think it's pretty enlightning. Some of the stuff is dark and a little depressing but some of it's pretty sexy."

Maida and Kreviazuk, who play an agoraphobic musician and a hotel maid, respectively, in Century Hotel, also wrote the movie's theme song. An earlier collaboration saw them score the silent film Cleopatra for Turner Network Television.

"It was very different from Chantal's stuff or any of the stuff that I do with Our Lady Peace," says Maida. "They weren't so much structured three-minute pop songs but it was interesting. I think we will continue to do stuff like that."