(As published in the Illinois Entertainer, 1996)Since they've sold the U.S. equivalent of over twelve million albums in their native Canada and routinely play to packed hockey arenas there, the four Toronto residents who call themselves Barenaked Ladies no longer get mistaken for libidinous centerfold models by Canadian music fans with no sense of irony.
In the U.S., however, where they haven't sold the U.S. equivalent of twelve-million albums, their provocative moniker can still guarantee that at least a few clueless and drunken sailors will turn up at every gig.
Of course, those sailors will get a much better idea of who Barenaked Ladies are from the band's new Reprise album, Born on a Pirate Ship. Packed with fourteen new songs that capture the band's barbed blend of sophisticated wordplay and razor-sharp hooks particularly well, Pirate Ship is getting an additional boost from The Shoe Box E.P.,
an abundantly generous CD-ROM masquerading as a four-song CD and listing for a mere $7.98, making it the best multi-media rock-and-roll deal available anywhere at the moment.
"The only thing that's out there that's comparable is the Cranberries one," explains Ed Robertson, the guitar-playing Barenaked Lady who along with the lead-singing Steven Page writes or co-writes the majority of the band's material, "and theirs retails for, like, $28.99. It has a lot of stuff as well, but it still doesn't have as much on it as ours. Theirs was done by some company that does CD-ROMs, but we did ours all in-house. It was very hands-on for us. We're all computer geeks anyway, so we loved doing it."
In addition to sound bites of all the songs from their three Reprise albums, The Shoe Box E.P. allows the band's fellow computer geeks to watch several full-length videos (including the excellent "Alternative Girlfriend," which MTV never played), backstage on-the-road hijinx, and live footage taped last summer at Chicago's own Vic Theatre. "Chicago, " says Robertson, "is really good for us."
Make that Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco.
"We haven't gotten a lot of major media support," observes Robertson, "but we're selling out huge places across the U.S. In addition to the Vic, we sell out the House of Blues in L.A. and the Fillmore. We have giant word-of-mouth support in the U.S. We play somewhere, and when we come back a couple of months later, there are twice as many people there, even though we haven't had any radio airplay in between."
It's to America's shame, by the way, that our radio and video stations don't play Barenaked Ladies. After all, most people who've heard Gordon,
the band's early-'90s debut, consider it one of the liveliest folk-pop-rock albums of the decade so far. And although the follow-up, '94's Maybe You Should Drive, met with a generally cooler reception, Pirate Ship should have Barenaked Ladies fans everywhere spending the night before its release on the sidewalks outside record stores. 
In rambunctious numbers like "Stomach Vs. Heart," "Call Me Calmly," and "Shoe Box"--the album's first single--the band enthusiastically displays its commitment to dancing along the fine line between wackiness and sincerity. In slower, tender numbers like "When I Fall," "Same Thing," and "I Live With It," they demonstrate their commitment to slow dancing along that same fine line.
According to Robertson, neither he nor his fellow Ladies worry much about falling.
"We only think about it after the fact, like when we think about what order the songs are going to be in or what the first single is going to be. We don't let it influence the process of writing and recording. But, yeah, the sincere and the wacky is the duality of Barenaked Ladies--and being sincere about being wacky, and about having fun."
Besides the rambunctious numbers, which usually feature Page on lead vocals, and the slower ones, which usually feature Robertson, Pirate Ship introduces a third category of Barenaked Ladies song--the sincerely wacky world-music kind. "Spider in My Room," which was written and sung by the Barenaked bassist Jim Creeggan, not only features the loopiest spider lyrics since John Entwistle's "Boris" ones, but it also features the North-American-Indian chanting of the Stoney Park Pow-Wow Singers. The Shoe Box CD-Rom provides a glimpse of the actual sessions, but Robertson provides the story behind the sessions.
"We met them at the Junos, which are our Grammies. They were inducting Buffy St. Marie into the Canadian Hall of Fame. We were sitting in the front row, and they did this singing that just blew our heads off. They've won several international singing competitions that anyone, including the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir, can enter. The power and the honesty of indigenous music is incredible! We said, 'We have to get those guys involved in something we do.'
"They agreed, and while they were recording in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Jim flew out with the master tapes and went into the studio with them, where he and their lead singer brainstormed the parts. Then they worked it out with the whole group. They actually have a record coming out as well, and they were so inspired by working with us that they wrote a song for their album called 'Barenaked Spider.' "
Nevertheless, at some point those who listen to Born on a Pirate Ship--and especially those who view the Shoe Box video clip that shows Barenaked Ladies performing the Gordon track "Crazy" on a building roof in London--will link Barenaked Ladies not with the Stoney Park Pow-Wow Singers but with a somewhat better-known pop ensemble.
"That was on the roof of the BBC building*," Robertson recalls. "We were the next band to play up there after the Beatles [in Let It Be]. And you know what? It was totally not a big deal. We went to the BBC, and we asked, 'What's up there?' They said, 'That's the roof.' We said, 'That's the roof where the Beatles performed?' They said, 'Yes, and no one has performed up there since.' We asked, 'May we go up there?' And they said, 'I don't see why not.' "
Robertson laughs at the audaciousness of the scene: a fab Canadian four rushing in where none since the Beatles have feared to tread. Yet if anyone has what it takes to follow the Beatles to the top of anything, its Barenaked Ladies. In addition to providing lots of fun with the richest and catchiest music of their career, they're also having lots of fun themselves, as even the briefest samplings of Shoe Box or Pirate Ship will prove. Therefore, the performance atop the BBC building makes perfect sense--not as an act of rock-and-roll sacrilege, but as the perfect symbol of the heights to which a seriously wacky band can rise in these manic times.
_______________________________________________________
*Due to my flat-footedness where Beatles lore was concerned, I didn't realize that the "BBC building" and "Abbey Road Studios" were not the same edifice. My editor, Michael C. Harris, however, was on his toes, but, as we couldn't get back in touch with any of the Barenaked Ladies before the story had to go to press, we--well, I don't remember what we did. We might have even run the story the way I wrote it, simply changing "BBC building" to Apple Studios, in the hopes that Apple Studios is what Robertson had meant to say. To this day, I don't know what building Barenaked Ladies were filmed atop.
Of course, those sailors will get a much better idea of who Barenaked Ladies are from the band's new Reprise album, Born on a Pirate Ship. Packed with fourteen new songs that capture the band's barbed blend of sophisticated wordplay and razor-sharp hooks particularly well, Pirate Ship is getting an additional boost from The Shoe Box E.P.,
an abundantly generous CD-ROM masquerading as a four-song CD and listing for a mere $7.98, making it the best multi-media rock-and-roll deal available anywhere at the moment."The only thing that's out there that's comparable is the Cranberries one," explains Ed Robertson, the guitar-playing Barenaked Lady who along with the lead-singing Steven Page writes or co-writes the majority of the band's material, "and theirs retails for, like, $28.99. It has a lot of stuff as well, but it still doesn't have as much on it as ours. Theirs was done by some company that does CD-ROMs, but we did ours all in-house. It was very hands-on for us. We're all computer geeks anyway, so we loved doing it."
In addition to sound bites of all the songs from their three Reprise albums, The Shoe Box E.P. allows the band's fellow computer geeks to watch several full-length videos (including the excellent "Alternative Girlfriend," which MTV never played), backstage on-the-road hijinx, and live footage taped last summer at Chicago's own Vic Theatre. "Chicago, " says Robertson, "is really good for us."
Make that Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco.
"We haven't gotten a lot of major media support," observes Robertson, "but we're selling out huge places across the U.S. In addition to the Vic, we sell out the House of Blues in L.A. and the Fillmore. We have giant word-of-mouth support in the U.S. We play somewhere, and when we come back a couple of months later, there are twice as many people there, even though we haven't had any radio airplay in between."
It's to America's shame, by the way, that our radio and video stations don't play Barenaked Ladies. After all, most people who've heard Gordon,
the band's early-'90s debut, consider it one of the liveliest folk-pop-rock albums of the decade so far. And although the follow-up, '94's Maybe You Should Drive, met with a generally cooler reception, Pirate Ship should have Barenaked Ladies fans everywhere spending the night before its release on the sidewalks outside record stores. 
In rambunctious numbers like "Stomach Vs. Heart," "Call Me Calmly," and "Shoe Box"--the album's first single--the band enthusiastically displays its commitment to dancing along the fine line between wackiness and sincerity. In slower, tender numbers like "When I Fall," "Same Thing," and "I Live With It," they demonstrate their commitment to slow dancing along that same fine line.
According to Robertson, neither he nor his fellow Ladies worry much about falling.
"We only think about it after the fact, like when we think about what order the songs are going to be in or what the first single is going to be. We don't let it influence the process of writing and recording. But, yeah, the sincere and the wacky is the duality of Barenaked Ladies--and being sincere about being wacky, and about having fun."
Besides the rambunctious numbers, which usually feature Page on lead vocals, and the slower ones, which usually feature Robertson, Pirate Ship introduces a third category of Barenaked Ladies song--the sincerely wacky world-music kind. "Spider in My Room," which was written and sung by the Barenaked bassist Jim Creeggan, not only features the loopiest spider lyrics since John Entwistle's "Boris" ones, but it also features the North-American-Indian chanting of the Stoney Park Pow-Wow Singers. The Shoe Box CD-Rom provides a glimpse of the actual sessions, but Robertson provides the story behind the sessions.
"We met them at the Junos, which are our Grammies. They were inducting Buffy St. Marie into the Canadian Hall of Fame. We were sitting in the front row, and they did this singing that just blew our heads off. They've won several international singing competitions that anyone, including the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir, can enter. The power and the honesty of indigenous music is incredible! We said, 'We have to get those guys involved in something we do.'
"They agreed, and while they were recording in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Jim flew out with the master tapes and went into the studio with them, where he and their lead singer brainstormed the parts. Then they worked it out with the whole group. They actually have a record coming out as well, and they were so inspired by working with us that they wrote a song for their album called 'Barenaked Spider.' "
Nevertheless, at some point those who listen to Born on a Pirate Ship--and especially those who view the Shoe Box video clip that shows Barenaked Ladies performing the Gordon track "Crazy" on a building roof in London--will link Barenaked Ladies not with the Stoney Park Pow-Wow Singers but with a somewhat better-known pop ensemble.
"That was on the roof of the BBC building*," Robertson recalls. "We were the next band to play up there after the Beatles [in Let It Be]. And you know what? It was totally not a big deal. We went to the BBC, and we asked, 'What's up there?' They said, 'That's the roof.' We said, 'That's the roof where the Beatles performed?' They said, 'Yes, and no one has performed up there since.' We asked, 'May we go up there?' And they said, 'I don't see why not.' "
Robertson laughs at the audaciousness of the scene: a fab Canadian four rushing in where none since the Beatles have feared to tread. Yet if anyone has what it takes to follow the Beatles to the top of anything, its Barenaked Ladies. In addition to providing lots of fun with the richest and catchiest music of their career, they're also having lots of fun themselves, as even the briefest samplings of Shoe Box or Pirate Ship will prove. Therefore, the performance atop the BBC building makes perfect sense--not as an act of rock-and-roll sacrilege, but as the perfect symbol of the heights to which a seriously wacky band can rise in these manic times.
_______________________________________________________
*Due to my flat-footedness where Beatles lore was concerned, I didn't realize that the "BBC building" and "Abbey Road Studios" were not the same edifice. My editor, Michael C. Harris, however, was on his toes, but, as we couldn't get back in touch with any of the Barenaked Ladies before the story had to go to press, we--well, I don't remember what we did. We might have even run the story the way I wrote it, simply changing "BBC building" to Apple Studios, in the hopes that Apple Studios is what Robertson had meant to say. To this day, I don't know what building Barenaked Ladies were filmed atop.
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