Our Lady Peace: Thirty Years Out There, Four Hours Back
Whiskey Roadhouse at Horseshoe Council Bluffs, Council Bluffs, Iowa, March 6, 2026
Press Pass & Sponsor Note:
We applied for coverage all the way back in December, so this show was a long time coming. Special thanks to Kerri Gutierrez for working with us and helping get our approval finalized in early March. We also appreciated the venue allowing us to enter with the VIP guests so we could get our bearings, especially since this was our first time covering a show there. We’re also grateful to our sponsors, Mark Masters and Sheila Wren, whose support helped make this article possible. Big thanks to Patrick Roberts of Flannel for helping with pictures! OLP’s flashing lights were hell on the camera focus for the first 3 songs!
The road in
It started with a two-and-a-half-hour drive through light rain that never quite committed to being dramatic, just persistent enough to make the highway feel gray and a little smeared at the edges. That turned out to be the right weather for an Our Lady Peace night anyway. Their songs have always lived in that zone where the sky looks bruised but still somehow lit from behind.
Before the show, we stopped at Aroi Thai-Cajun Fusion Cuisine inside the Horseshoe, one of the newer dining options on the property. They were genuinely great about making the calamari without onions because of my allergy, which matters more than fancy menu copy ever will. The service was good. No complaint there. The pho, though, came out so salty it was barely edible. A split decision at dinner, basically. Good people, rough bowl.
That odd little pre-show imbalance ended up feeling like an accidental overture. Some things that night were careful and generous. Some things came in hot and hit harder than expected.
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The room and what it is built for
The Whiskey Roadhouse sits inside Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, and the venue’s own material leans into what the room does best. It is not trying to masquerade as a velvet-seat listening hall. It is a bar, nightclub, and concert room hybrid built for live entertainment, with regular programming and a calendar that keeps moving. Caesars describes it as one of the property’s nightlife anchors, and its live calendar backs that up with recurring weekend bands and newer late-night programming such as Roadhouse EDM Night.
This stop on Our Lady Peace’s OLP30 USA run with The Verve Pipe was not dropped into some sterile black box. It landed in a room used to movement, noise, casual drink-in-hand attention spans, and the particular challenge of making people stop talking and actually lock in. The Council Bluffs date was listed by the band as a March 6 show at 8 p.m. with The Verve Pipe on the bill, and setlist records for both bands show doors at 7 p.m. that night.
That is what made the crowd response more impressive. Both bands got the room to lean forward.
The Verve Pipe knew exactly what they were doing
The Verve Pipe did not waste time pretending they were there to warm up politely. Their Council Bluffs set ran seven songs, and it was built like a clean, compact argument for why bands from the radio era still matter when they know how to play their cards right. Setlist records show they ran through “Photograph,” “Cup of Tea,” “Villains,” “Colorful,” “Never Let You Down,” “The Freshmen,” and a closing cover of Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun.”
That sequence worked because it knew the room. They did not get cute. They gave people songs they knew, songs they could rediscover quickly, and then the exact kind of cover that can either collapse under its own ambition or hit like a flare. This one hit.
“The Freshmen” was the obvious sing-along moment, and the crowd took the bait immediately. Not in a cynical karaoke way either. More like people had been carrying that chorus around for years and finally got a reason to hand it back. You could feel the room widen when that song landed. Suddenly there were more voices than just the ones onstage.
Then they closed with “Black Hole Sun,” and that was the smartest move of the opening set. Not because it was unexpected, but because it was on point. They did not sand the song down or turn it into novelty. They played it straight enough to respect it and forceful enough to make it belong to the night instead of just to memory. That is a tightrope. They walked it without wobbling.
Our Lady Peace still knows where the nerve endings are
Our Lady Peace came into Council Bluffs on the 30th anniversary tour with a setlist that, at least for me, hit ten favorites without having to beg for them. That is no small thing for a band with a catalog this deep and a fan base that can argue for hours over which era hits hardest. According to the submitted setlist for the Whiskey Roadhouse stop, the band played “Superman’s Dead,” “Sound the Alarm,” “Innocent,” “One Man Army,” “Naveed,” “Life,” “Is Anybody Home?,” “Temporary Healing,” “Made of Steel,” Pearl Jam’s “Hail, Hail,” “Somewhere Out There,” “4am,” “Clumsy,” then an encore run that included 3 Doors Down’s “Away From the Sun,” “If You Believe,” “Automatic Flowers,” and “Starseed.”
There was one visible blank line in the posted setlist entry, which matches the feeling that the paper setlist in hand was close to Chicago but not exact by the end. A couple songs clearly moved around from what was expected. That kind of reshuffle usually tells you one useful thing: the band is still reading the room in real time.
The standout moment of the night was the extended intro to “Somewhere Out There.” Before the vocal came in, the band let the song breathe. The guys were basically playing to each other, stretching the opening like they wanted to stay inside it a little longer. It was not indulgent. It was conversational. It felt like a band that has been together long enough to stop counting measures and start trusting instinct. When the song finally arrived, it felt earned rather than triggered.
That is where the whole show lived. Not in nostalgia by itself, but in the friction between memory and present tense. “Superman’s Dead” still sounds like a song suspicious of the culture that feeds on people and spits out images. “One Man Army” still has that scorched-individualism pulse. “Is Anybody Home?” still lands eerily hard in an era where isolation now comes with better screens and worse habits. “Clumsy” still sways like a wound learning how to sing. None of that felt museum-preserved. It felt lived in.
The old mythology still works because the songs do
Part of what made this set feel right in a 30th anniversary frame is that Our Lady Peace’s origin story still has real voltage. The band formed in Toronto in the early 1990s after guitarist Mike Turner connected with Michael Maida, who later became Raine Maida. They pulled their name from a Mark Van Doren poem, worked early with producer Arnold Lanni, and landed at Sony Music Canada before releasing Naveed.
Then came “Starseed,” which was less a hit than a signal flare. The song got enough traction that Robert Plant heard it on the radio and, as Raine has retold it, that led to the band getting pulled into Page & Plant shows in the mid-1990s. That story matters because it explains why OLP never felt like a band built only for alt-rock fashion cycles. There was always something stranger in the bloodstream. Something spiritual, nervous, and a little feral.
You can still hear that all over the songs they chose in Council Bluffs. “Naveed” and “Starseed” still carry that early mystic-static energy. “4am” still feels like a private confession accidentally amplified for a room full of strangers. “Automatic Flowers” still hurts in that specific OLP way, where tenderness does not arrive clean but flickers through damage. “Somewhere Out There” is the smoother blade in the catalog, but it still cuts.
And yes, there was one complaint floating around because there is always one complaint floating around. Some fans wanted “Whatever,” the old wrestling-linked track that still carries a long shadow in OLP lore. The band revisited that song officially in 2025 as “Whatever (Redux),” framing the release around suicide prevention and mental health awareness. They did not play it here. Personally, with ten favorites already in the set, I was not leaving hungry.
What made the night work
The simple answer is that both bands understood the assignment. The Verve Pipe came in sharp, familiar, and efficient. Our Lady Peace came in with a set built to reward people who have stayed with them across eras.
The better answer is that the night worked because it never felt over-explained. No one onstage spent too much time trying to narrate their own importance. The songs did the heavy lifting. The crowd did the rest.
At a venue that routinely books everything from weekend live bands to touring acts and keeps its calendar crowded by design, this show managed to feel bigger than a stop on a route sheet. Not bigger in scale. Bigger in aftertaste. That is a different thing.
There is a reason those older OLP songs keep hanging around. They are built from questions more than answers. They do not tell you life is neat. They tell you life is noisy, fractured, spiritually itchy, media-poisoned, intimate in weird flashes, and still somehow worth pushing through. In a casino venue on a wet March night, that landed exactly the way it should.
Afterglow
The drive home took four hours because the storm finally got serious. Ice built up. Winds shoved at the car. Speeds dropped to 30 miles per hour for stretches just to get home safe. The road that had looked merely wet on the way down turned mean on the way back.
That ended up feeling like the right final image for this one.
You drive toward a show through light rain thinking you are going to hear old songs and have a decent night. Then the music hits harder than expected, memory gets louder than usual, the weather turns, and the trip home asks for more patience than the trip in. Somewhere between Council Bluffs and home, the whole night made its point.
Some music does not age out. It just learns how to travel in worse weather.
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