Raine Maida is a man who inspires mixed emotions. On one hand, he and his Toronto-based band, Our Lady Peace, have had million-selling albums both at home and abroad. On the other, those albums were filled with made-for-radio, commercial rock.

But even if you loathe his band and his nasal singing voice, Maida is hard to hate. For every naff lyric and musical misstep, there are bits of genuine goodness from him—he has participated in documentaries in Iraq and Darfur, and spoken out about world poverty. Indeed, so eminently likable is Maida that he could conceivably, while promoting his recently released first solo record, The Hunters Lullaby, end up winning over one of his biggest detractors in just one 23-minute phone call. On the line from his adopted home of L.A., Maida is self-effacing and inquisitive, so well-mannered that it seems unsporting to take shots at him.

“I’m pretty excited about this. It’s all about me getting to own my own music, which is pretty cool considering I’ve been signed with Sony for 12 years,” says Maida, who, along with the rest of Our Lady Peace, is out from under his record deal with the major-label monolith.

The press notes for The Hunters Lullaby describe an ambitious album: name-checking Saul Williams and Allen Ginsberg, declaring that spoken-word is “much more relevant than music”. As if cutting off criticism before it’s lodged, Maida writes, “I have yet to wrap my head around the difference between pretentious and earnest.” The album itself delivers on all of its preamble: fierce and lyrically driven, it has none of the rock trappings of Our Lady Peace. In some places, it sounds like poetry; in others, it recalls a less-erudite Buck 65, plugging simple, forthright ideologies into A/B rhyming schemes.

“This record is not a rock record,” explains Maida. “I don’t have to get it on the radio, and I don’t have to sell it, and once you remove that, you can get back to making art, which is more interesting. I was challenging myself, not just falling for the same trappings I usually do, where I sit there with an acoustic guitar. I’ve been listening for years to poets and this slam poetry, whereas music for years has been really kind of boring to me.”

Having held fast to his own musical ideals, Maida may surprise long-time OLP fans and even alienate them. But with his two children (his third, with wife Chantal Kreviazuk, is expected later this year) making quiet noises in the background, he sounds like a man at peace with his decisions.

“Before I made this album, I was naive,” he says, laughing. “I guess now I’m just, well, slightly less naive.”

Raine Maida plays the Commodore Ballroom on Tuesday (March 11).