All articles below are courtesy of www.bnl.org & rollingstone.com
BNL "Hits" Due in Nov.
Compilation to feature two new songs
Ladies' Greatest Hits is scheduled for release November 13th. The compilation features fifteen songs from the band's five studio albums, plus two new tracks: "It's Only Me (The Wizard of Magicland)" and "Thanks That Was Fun." One slot remains open, and fans will be able to fill it by voting for either "Alternative Girlfriend" or "Be My Yoko Ono" via VH1.com.
The two new tracks come from come from a batch of four the Ladies recently recorded. The other two -- "I Don't Get It Anymore" and "I Can, I Will, I Do" -- will be saved for future releases.
The Barenaked Ladies are also the focus of a new book by the band's friend Paul Myers (brother of comedian Mike Myers) titled Barenaked Ladies: Public Stunts, Private Stories. The book will hit U.S. stores later this year, but it is currently available in Canada and at www.werkshop.com.
The band is presently on their summer tour and will be on the road until the end of August.
Tentative track listing for Greatest Hits:
Old Apartment
Falling for the First Time
Brian Wilson
One Week
It's Only Me (The Wizard of Magicland)
If I Had $1,000,000
Call and Answer
Get in Line
It's All Been Done
Jane
Lovers in a Dangerous Time
Pinch Me
Shoebox
What a Good Boy"
Too Little Too Late
Enid
Thanks That Was Fun
Alternative Girlfriend/Be My Yoko Ono
JEAN GISMERVIK
(July 26, 2001)
BNL Return to the Road
Barenaked Ladies Steven Page talks about the band's next tour, video
Just coming off the rush their Grammy nomination for "Pinch Me," the Barenaked Ladies are already moving onto their next single ("Too Little Too Late") and the next leg of their Maroon tour, which kicks off February 7th in Atlantic City and wraps March 8th in Seattle. "We're touring non-stop," singer/guitarist Steven Page says. "We're just going to do this until the album is driven into the ground and everybody's sick of it."
Not that it's likely Page and Co. are going to be sick of Maroon themselves anytime soon. Thanks to the spoof-heavy parody aspects of their live show, he says that every night is different: "Even if the set list is the same, there's enough improv and nonsense to keep it fun."
So much fun, he says, that he finds it difficult to write on the road. "I have to go home and get grumpy to write songs," he says. "I kind of have to live a real life. And the world doesn't need to hear road songs anymore. They have resonance for a very small amount of people. [Sings] 'I miss my baby/Geez, that stripper was really great!' It's silly. I mean, truckers like them, but that's about it."
And giving the world more road songs wouldn't solve the current dilemma that Page sees in the songs on the chart as of late, "where there's been a dearth of really amazing, blow-me-away, make-me-weep kind of music," he says. "There's a distinct lack of beauty in music right now." Some pop songs, though, he says will do in the meantime, if only they were tinkered with just a bit. "'She Bangs' by Ricky Martin, as far as I'm concerned, slow it down by half and it's a lost Leonard Cohen song," he says. "It's got this minor key kind of thing, and I think Leonard Cohen would be proud to sing it."
As for BNL's own work, the band just wrapped the video for "Too Little Too Late" in Los Angeles, which has a "fairly convoluted" premise, since it's a film within a film within a film within a film. "We're making a rock video, and then it pulls back and you see that it's actually a film about a rock video," he explains, "and then it pulls back and you see it's a news report about the film, and then it's a home video, and it just doesn't stop. And if someone did a news report about that, then you'd be in the video. That would be cool."
JENNIFER VINEYARD
(January 12, 2001)
Barenaked Ladies
The Theater at Madison Square Garden, New York, October 7, 1998
The Theater at Madison Square Garden is impeccably clean. An annex to the Garden proper, the Theater comfortably seats thousands of spectators who typically come to see concerts by adult-contemporary favorites like Van Morrison and Sting. In the lobby, a generous selection of beer, wine, and soft drinks are on sale. The sound system is tame; ringing ears after the show are uncommon. In essence, it's a venue for people who don't go to a lot of shows.
And there's a reason why the Barenaked Ladies were booked to play there. Despite their insanely-high selling new album, Stunt, their hit single, "One Week," and their near-ubiquity in the pop culture of the moment, the Barenaked Ladies are cursed. For whatever reason, they have broken big among a certain crowd: 14 to 24-year-old, clean-cut white kids, who made up ninety percent of the audience at the Theater that night. The band has become the current heroes of a demographic which doesn't buy all that many records, and certainly doesn't frequent a lot of rock shows. And in this is the irony: the Ladies exist primarily as a live band. Even before they started attracting attention in the States, they were stars in their home country of Canada by virtue of their funny and spectacular live performances. They were thirty times better on stage than on record, and it's no surprise that they first broke through down here with their live album, Rock Spectacle.
But with their whitebread appeal, much of the music world has written the Barenaked Ladies off as insignificant, frat-trash popsters unworthy of acknowledgment during these fifteen minutes that they hog the spotlight. This, as the band made very clear at the Theater that night, is a mistake. BNL threw everything they had into the show, with frontman Steven Page leaping about the stage like some hyperkinetic goblin, and guitarist/second vocalist Ed Robertson offering an only-slightly more subdued counterpoint. Genres were rakishly tossed into the mix, from mock hip-hop novelty, (the monster hit, "One Week"), to honest-to-goodness heartland country (the skiffling "Crazy"), to some plain old rock & roll (the straight-ahead speed-rocker "Shoebox," which was so pure and anxious in its melodic drive, it would've made the Buzzcocks proud.) In between, the audience was treated to BNL's typically atypical interludes, most notably a variety of improvised raps that waxed on about fast food, tax evasion, and e-mail etiquette ("No one understood sarcasm until they invented 'the winking guy.'") It was a kind of nouveau vaudeville: smart, funny, and thoroughly entertaining, especially at show's end, when the band chased each other around the stage, beat-boxing their way through a medley of contemporary hits like "Bittersweet Symphony," "The Boy is Mine," and "It's All About the Benjamins."
Typically, such antics tend to overshadow the band's actual musical prowess, but the BNL were entirely competent and, occasionally, exceptional. Page, who in this age of grumblers and shouters, has what's probably the best throat in rock & roll, delivered his lines with energy and heft. His powerful vocals slammed through rave-ups like "Alcohol" and "The Old Apartment," while maintaining the character and fine-tuned grace that rendered "Jane" one of the loveliest romantic ballads in recent memory.
Unfortunately, the homogenous crowd didn't really seem to get it. "Alcohol," possibly the most scabrous anti-booze song in years ("I loved you more/Than I did the week before/I discovered alcohol"), was met with drunken cheers and raised beer tumblers. It was a party, and parties usually end quickly, the party band going down with them. And that's a shame: Barenaked Ladies boast some great songs and a remarkable stage show, but they've been pigeonholed as inane good-time goofballs. Consequently, those who do frequent the seedier rock establishments will never learn to love the Ladies. And by the time the carpet is vacuumed at the Theater at Madison Square Garden, the high school and frat kids won't care either.
NOAH TARNOW
West Valley View, Avondale, AZ
10/12/94
Canada's Barenaked Ladies head for Desert Sky
But band is neither barenaked, nor ladies
by Vicki Culver
Special to the View
Indeed, it's a little awkward having Toronto's Barenaked Ladies as one of your favorite bands. In the record store: "Yes, I'm looking for the Barenaked Ladies." On the phone, requesting an interview: "I need to speak to the Barenaked Ladies... No, this is not a crank call" In conversation with friends: "Beastie Boys are okay, but I prefer Barenaked Ladies."
But, the Barenaked Ladies - - five fully clothed men who will play October 15 at Desert Sky Pavilion as part of Arizona '94, KZON'S premiere musical fest - - are well worth the embarrassment they create.
Stealing the musical style of the Beatles, the vocal fashion of the Violent Femmes and the stage antics of Mojo Nixon, the Barenaked Ladies are a band of conflicting juxtapositions: trendy, yet cultured; wacky, yet respectable; promising yet obscure.
The Barenaked Ladies, whose name was created by founding members Steven Page and Ed Robertson in the late '80s during a giggling fit that was the result of a boring Bob Dylan concert, began as a duo opening for a traveling comedy troupe. Like a similar 19&Os pop group who has inspired the BNL- - The Proclaimers -- the BNL were two guys, two guitars and a bundle of madcap energy.
"Our intentions were to be musicians, but because it was a comedy show, people were expecting us to be funny," said Ed Robertson, lead guitarist and part-time vocalist, calling from a tour stop in New York. "It gave us this bizarre angle an performing that we have to be entertaining.
Indeed, it is the live energy of the Barenaked Ladies that has fueled their success. In America, faithful touring (they've played five times in Arizona) has garnered then a loyal following, however small. In Canada, however, the band has been known to turn out 20,000-plus at festivals where they are the headlining act.
"My ego is more than satisfied," Robertson said "It used to be if you weren't going anywhere in the U.S., you weren't ' anywhere." The BNL's first record, Gordon, went multi-platinum in Canada, selling more than 800,000 copies. The newest release, Maybe You Should Drive, is faring well although it is too soon to gauge, its success in numbers.
With the help of country cohabitants Crash Test Dummies, Sarah McLachlan, Blue Rodeo and k.d. lang, Robertson said, the music scene in Canada is becoming the rival of its closest Southern neighbor &endash; - Seattle.
"The whole cultural scene in Canada is just starting to open up and it's great to be a part of it," Robertson said. But unlike America's trendy "sounds" (i.e. Seattle, Minneapolis, Athens), the Canadian commonality is less of a "sound" and mare of a "lack of sound," Robertson said. "Canadian music has an eclectic, quirky slant to it," Robertson said "It comes from being the northern neighbor to a work giant and all of the culture that flows over the border." "Canadians take the cultural mosaic approach rather than the melting pot approach like in the U.S."
Despite differences in the way the two countries have embraced the Barenaked Ladies, critics and fans of their music generally react the came, Robertson said. And now that the band has sufficiently conquered its homeland, it's looking toward heavy U.S. and U.K. touring. The exposure seems to be paying off, as Maybe... entered the Billboard heatseeker's chart at number 8.
On local radio, the song "Jane" is being played in semi-heavy rotation, and "A" and "Life, In a Nutshell" are also finding their way onto the airwaves. "Jane", the album's first track, is a melodic ode to a fictitious woman, Jane St. Clair (named after two crossroads in Toronto,) who can't trust men. "Life, In a Nutshell," is an honest, yet pathetic proclamation of a man who lives to please a woman he loves. "A" the quirkiest song on the album, reads like a grade school poem:
"A is far angry, which is what you are at me/A is far adult, which is what I'll never be / A is for algebra, I learned it in school / A is what Fonzie said, cause he was very cool."
With the exception of "A" and '"these Apples," another plea to the romantic senses, Maybe... is a departure from the lyrical content the BNL displayed on Gordon, which gave the modern rock staple, "Be My Yoko Ono," which was both brutal and endearing in its content.
"If I Had $1,000,000 is also a classic, in which Page and Robertson harmonize about all they would purchase as millionaires, including a pet monkey, John Merritt's remains, a fake fur coat and some art ("maybe a Picasso or a Garfunkel").
It is the songs off Gordon which are most likely to be ad-libbed with zany quips and takes on the lyrics during a BNL live show. But that does not take away from the material on the new record, which can't help but conjure up one of Robertson's most despised words - - maturity.
"It was a natural progression by the band to explore different avenues of writing," Robertson said. "The first album is still there; we stand behind it. We've actually put same wit on this album, too; it's just more deeply played."
Robertson said the more serious content on Maybe... takes nothing away from the live show and all that the critics have promised. "All of what we do - - our whole goal on stage - - is to make each other laugh," he said. "We've always done really well live. It's the strength of the band."
Date Unknown
A Night of Bouncy Fun From Barenaked Ladies
NY Times
by Stephen Holden
In its jolly, crowd-pleasing song 'If I Had a Million Dollars,' the Canadian male pop quintet that calls itself Barenaked Ladies lists all the wonderful gifts the money could buy for a special friend. Among them are a fur coat (not real fur, it is stressed), an exotic pet and ultimately love itself. And on Friday evening, when the group played to a packed house, the song became a deliriously happy sing-along shouted by an audience dancing in the aisles.
'If I Had a Million Dollars' is typical of the band's upbeat material in the way it offhandedly weaves pop-cultural references into the lyrics about relationships. Where this song cheerfully challenges the sentiments of the Beatles' 'Can't Buy Me Love,' 'Alternative Girlfriend' compares the relationship to a record that crosses over from an alternative-radio format to the pop mainstream. 'Brian Wilson' enviously imagines the life style of the famously eccentric leader of the Beach Boys.
Although on recordings these and other songs sound like clever folk-rock ditties, at Friday's concert they became propulsively bouncy pop anthems driven by a powerful rhythm section and sung in tight three- and four-part harmonies. Steven Page and Ed Robertson, the band's leaders, engaged in continual horseplay that gave the performance the feel of a smart, spontaneous musical comedy revue.
Susan Werner, who opened the show, is an extremely promising singer and songwriter from Iowa who writes about changing social patterns from a perspective that is clear-eyed and leavened with enough humor to avoid sounding self-pitying or preachy.