TORONTO – It’s getting late in the evening at a Scarborough recording studio, and Chantal Kreviazuk and Grammy-winning producer Boi-1da are duelling on their laptops with such cheery back-and-forth one-upmanship, they could be going head-to-head in a computer game.

But instead of games, they’re playing beats. And there’s no trash-talk filling the air, just elaborately adorned soundscapes beaming through a high-quality audio rig. In fact, as the pair dance to each other’s creations, they swap obviously genuine words of encouragement.

“That’s cray!” enthuses Kreviazuk after diving into one of 1da’s underwater bangers, an unclaimed beat that could end up with one of the many hip-hop heavyweights who have collaborated with the 26-year-old from Ajax, Ont. — a group that includes Drake, Eminem and Nicki Minaj.

When one of Kreviazuk’s diverse creations blares free — a sonically juicy kiss-off ready-made for the top of the pop charts — 1da, whose real name is Matthew Samuels, gathers his hands beside his head and mimes the sweet swing of a baseball slugger. A home run, he’s certain.

And it certainly wouldn’t be Kreviazuk’s first time clearing the bases. The 39-year-old, a one-time Canadian pop superstar in her own right, has found a second act crafting soaring hits for others — a pan-genre melange of star pop artists who, assembled together, would form a truly schizophrenic mixtape: Drake, Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani, Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Josh Groban, Hilary Duff and Mandy Moore, among them.

She has songs on hold with Eminem and Kanye West. She has two prominent female household-name pop stars jockeying for pole position in a race to secure one of her unheard tunes. She has a recent Top 10 hit to her name in the form of Pitbull and Christina Aguilera’s “Feel This Moment,” and as a result of that song’s feature placement among marketing for the NBA playoffs, she finally has a bit of cred with her three sons (whom she shares with rocker husband Raine Maida).

What she doesn’t have is widespread credit for her creations among the general public. And the two-time Juno winner, whose solo career included multiple multi-platinum albums, has had to gradually come to terms with channelling her creativity into the charts in semi-anonymity.

It’s still not necessarily easy.

“If I had too much time on my hands, and I thought about that all the time, then that might really bother me,” Kreviazuk said, perched in a chair in the well-appointed east Toronto studio.

“But you know what? I have a full, rich, complex life. And I’m happy and I’m challenged on so many levels, in and outside the music business and in and outside of my creative world.

“So you know, really, sure, do I want to scream from the mountaintops: ‘Aiiee — that’s my song?’ Well, my kids are in the house jumping and dancing to it when it comes on in the NBA, so I won. And that’s all that matters to me — is that I get to be a cool mom.”

And, recognized or not, Kreviazuk takes obvious joy in her blossoming career as well. Even if it’s not the career she ever really imagined for herself.

Sometimes, Kreviazuk might spend a week in a session with another producer or songwriter, trying to cook up ideas that could then be served up to any variety of artists. Sometimes, she’ll write with a specific artist in mind, working on vague instructions on what they might be looking for — for instance, one artist with whom she’s involved was recently on the prowl for tunes with a “90s hip-hop/R&B vibe” — or simply a hunch based on an artist’s past work. (She’s often collaborated with Maida, her partner and polar opposite in demeanour. Energetic, effervescent and rarely still for long, Kreviazuk is a roving hurricane with the zen Maida her calm centre).

In the case of “Feel This Moment,” Kreviazuk wrote the hook. She played the chorus’s memorable chord progression on the piano — A-minor, D-minor, G-major, C-major — and sometime-songwriting partner Nasri Atweh came up with the “whoaaa-OH-OH-OH” vocal melody. She then built on that with “one day whennn the light is glowing.” Next, someone in the room suggested nicking the keyboard riff from A-ha’s “Take On Me,” and the blueprint for a hit cohered into view.

Almost immediately, the song was on the radio and a smash for Pitbull and Aguilera.

“What’s so interesting about it — that one went to the radio and it’s a hit worldwide, but I have the same feeling about other pieces of mine right now. And they’re not flying off the shelves,” she said.

In fact, she has more than three-dozen songs ready right now, in various styles, suitable for any number of artists. She says it’s not worth getting hung up on genre, because memorable melodies easily float over such boundaries.

“I would argue with people that there’s not much of a line between genres,” she said.

Indeed, it’s not necessarily easy to draw a stylistic line through some of Kreviazuk’s warmly received co-writes, which include Stefani’s globally influenced club hit “Rich Girl,” Groban’s grandly dramatic ballad “Brave,” Clarkson’s spike-studded rocker “Walk Away” and Lavigne’s petulant-punk kiss-off “He Wasn’t.”

And yet, it’s obvious that Kreviazuk has made significant inroads into the world of hip hop and R&B, given her burgeoning connection with a cluster of well-known hip-hop artists.

It wouldn’t have necessarily seemed a perfect fit for a Winnipeg-reared mother of three to slide into sessions with some of the world’s most prominent rappers, and she says there are indeed considerable barriers to entry.

“In the urban world, people are really into their crew, and so it’s really hard to penetrate that and why should I penetrate that? It has to be by chance. It has to be organic. It’s very, very difficult to get heard.

“But there’s something that drives me about the backbeat or about the soulfulness.”

It’s not always a positive experience. She vents about a recent encounter with a well-known hip-hop star who treated her with dismissive scorn, referring to her by a derogatory slur even when she was in the room.

But she’s tough, and she perseveres through such experiences. More often, she wins over such skeptics.

“The moment you put your talent out, everybody respects you — for the most part. There’s the exception to every rule, don’t get me wrong, but (usually) the second you show people the goods, it’s an even playing field. And that’s a really great feeling.”

She certainly earned the deep respect of 1da, who met her in a session with Grammy-nominated Bay Area singer Keyshia Cole.

“Off the bat, I just loved her energy before we even did anything,” he said. “You don’t have to overthink anything in the studio with Chantal. I just do my part and she does hers and we both do it exceptionally well. She’s incredibly talented and I think one of the best songwriters and singers in the game.”

Even with such an easygoing collaboration, guessing at what a major artist might want — given that they tend to be mercurial creatures — is a frightfully precarious position to be in.

She recalls writing the moody, fragile “Over My Dead Body” for Drake. When she recorded the demo version of the song with Toronto producer Noah (40) Shebib, she mostly hummed “the sounds of vowels and consonants,” trying to disguise the lyrics she was really singing, because she worried that any spoken misstep could spoil the Toronto rapper’s perception of the song.

“I’m very weird with lyrics,” she said. “Drake’s a frickin’ genius … (and) I did not feel the audacity to write a Drake lyric.

“I felt that if I was to make those lyrics and pigeonhole (it), I could kill the song and he would not be interested. Because I feel like I don’t know these people sometimes. Are they going to hear it and the lyric is going to throw them off, and they don’t even want to have it? Would it be better if I didn’t put a lyric on it? These are big questions. You never know the right thing to do.”

Drake’s an uncommonly involved artist, Kreviazuk says, who listens to everything himself rather than having a manager or close associate comb through available tunes in search for a hit. The first time he heard her demo, he called Kreviazuk personally to rave about the job she’d done.

He then sat with her and “decoded” what she was singing, telling her what he’d heard and wanting to know what she had actually been saying.

Then? She fretted. It was the first song recorded for Drake’s album, a record that “took forever” to make, in Kreviazuk’s words. She was sure her song would be cut. But it wasn’t, and ultimately, her voice was the first one heard on “Take Care” — his Grammy-winning, double-platinum hip-hop opus.

Feature appearances such as that are rare. She was told that a song of hers was chosen for Nas’ celebrated 2012 disc “Life is Good,” and it was going to feature her vocals on the hook. She was understandably elated. Right up until the album’s release, she was convinced her tune was going to be included.

“Literally the album was supposed to come out the next day, and somehow my song wasn’t on it,” she sighs.

And such is the struggle. Even once she manoeuvres around the necessary barriers just to get a song to an artist, there are no guarantees — just because an artist likes a song doesn’t mean he or she records it, just because he or she records it doesn’t mean it ends up on the album, and just because it ends up on an album doesn’t mean it’s selected as a single.

And even when one of her songs does end up as a single, there’s no telling whether Kreviazuk will actually like what it has become.

“Someone recently cut my song and they saw me and I was kind of a little bit weepy,” she recalled. “I think they thought that I was really honoured because they’re such a big star. And I was really sad. ‘Cause I killed the demo. It’s like, stellar. It was out of the park. And I just don’t hear it that way anymore, the way it’s now going to be forever and ever.

“But that’s OK. I just have to get over that. I can’t be precious about records.”

For all Kreviazuk’s success behind the scenes, the question remains: Why can’t she sing and release any of these songs herself?

She had tremendous success in Canada in the late ’90s with grown-up alternative-pop albums “Under These Rocks and Stones” and “Colour Moving and Still,” which went platinum a combined four times, as well as the gold-selling discs “What if it All Means Something” and 2006’s “Ghost Stories.” Her last two albums — 2009’s “Plain Jane” and 2012’s “In This Life” — were released independently and garnered less media and radio attention than her prior work.

Ever a shrewd reader of the industry — and one would have to be to intuit and ride each wave in pop’s stormy sea — Kreviazuk realized fairly early on that while her solo career might still yield gems, they might not be of the gold or platinum variety.

“A couple years ago, I was like: OK, this is a scary time in music. Nobody buys albums anymore. I’m not ‘hip,’ I’m not ‘fresh off the whatever’ anymore. What’s my lane?”

She betrays no bitterness over the fact that a fickle industry would rather hear her songs filtered through other’s voices.

But she maintains her rightful pride in her versatile, vivacious voice, and she continues to hope for opportunities to have it heard. That’s why the Nas track being cut hurt so. Similarly, she relates a story about the making of “Feel This Moment.” Aguilera, for whatever reason, was not showing up to the studio to sing the song. Impatient, the powers-that-be began to discuss the possibility of having Kreviazuk sing it instead, since her demo soared.

“That’s the way it was going to roll. And I guess they told her that, and she got in a car, she went over and she cut it,” Kreviazuk says. “On the flip side, would the song have been a huge hit if Christina Aguilera hadn’t sang it? Would they have picked it as the next single?

“We have to be realistic here, people. There’s only one Christina Aguilera.”

If Kreviazuk is a surrogate mother for the hit songs of other artists, her live shows are an opportunity for a welcome reunion — and a reminder to those in the crowd of her eclectic talent.

She performs all of her creations in a live setting. And she still tucks away some songs for herself, songs that happen to feature something “quintessentially C.K.” about them.

“There’s a tiny little thing that I don’t quite give away for everything else,” she said, before playing one of those tunes. “Just a small thing I save for me. And it’s actually unconscious…. It’s just something that’s really for me.”

Over those crisp speakers, she plays one such song, a gently heartbreaking piano ballad. She’s told it sounds like a hit, and the gears start turning. Maybe it won’t be her song anymore after all.

But what does it mean for an artist to own a song, anyway? Lately, Kreviazuk has opened her solo shows with an elegant interpretation of “Feel This Moment.” Midway through the song, she transitions into a song she both wrote and recorded herself with “Today” — a lilting beauty she included on “Plain Jane” — because it shares a theme with the NBA anthem: carpe diem.

Before she finishes, she carefully winds back to “Feel This Moment,” in a hushed fashion quite alien from the South Beach cooler-spilling vibe of the original. Kreviazuk’s version might not be punctuating LeBron James’ dunks, but it packs a chilling jolt nonetheless. Though raised by different parents, it still undoubtedly carries her DNA — and those close to her see the resemblance, even if few others ever will.

“It’s stunning,” she says. “And that’s my song! That gets to be my song for my whole life, because I get to go out and I get to play it for my audience.

“And that is the best feeling in the world.”