Barenaked Ladies and Steven Page are friendly, but don’t expect a permanent reunion
Click to viewEarlier this year, Steven Page received a series of texts from Ed Robertson.
They included pictures of old set lists from the Barenaked Ladies, the band the two singer-songwriters formed as a duo in the suburbs of Scarborough, Ont., back in the 1980s and co-fronted for more than 20 years before Page left the fold in 2009.
“It was funny, I look at these set lists from 1990 or something and I can still rhyme off what the order of the first seven songs in the set were,” says Page, in an interview with Postmedia earlier this week from his home in New York City. “Because we did it so much in those days. The idea of calling out a set list and writing it out was so rote for the most part. So to see that, in my own handwriting, 25 to 30 later, was fun.”
Fun always seemed to be ingrained into the DNA of the Barenaked Ladies, one of Canada’s most successful acts that amassed a giant following here and abroad thanks to cheerfully goofy songs such as If I Had $1,000,000 and One Week. Which may be why Page’s departure from the band nearly a decade ago seemed such a shock. The split was, at least by Canadian showbiz standards, mildly scandalous and more than a little acrimonious. The decision to part ways was officially made by “mutual agreement,” but occurred not long after Page’s highly publicized drug bust in New York.
Until recently, he had not been in the same room with the other four members in nine years. On Wednesday, Page will join former bandmates Jim Creeggan, Kevin Hearn, Tyler Stewart and Robertson at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre, for a formal plaque ceremony as part of BNL’s induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. It also marked the launch of Milestones: Barenaked Ladies at the National Music Centre, an exhibition that opens to the public on Thursday and features a treasure trove of artifacts from BNL’s history. Presumably, some of those old set lists will be on hand, as is the acoustic guitar Robertson used in the video for Falling for the First Time and early cassette demos Page made of songs that appeared on 1994’s Maybe You Should Drive and 1996’s Born on a Pirate Ship. For his part, Page enlisted his parents, who were apparently unofficial archivists for the band’s early history, for help unearthing memorabilia for the exhibition.
“I wish I could find perfect books of lyrics, where it’s like: ‘Hey, here’s all the lyrics from the Gordon album,’ ” says Page, referring to the band’s 1992 major label debut. “But it ended up being books that have shopping lists, diary entries, love letters or whatever, and in the middle of it are the lyrics to Old Apartment.”
BNL have continued to tour and release albums since 2009. But Page and his former bandmates have had plenty of opportunities to look back at their colourful history and early days as of late. In March, the five reunited to perform One Week and If I Had $1,000,000 at the Juno Awards in Vancouver to mark their induction into the Hall of Fame. Page said the night was a “blast,” went by very quickly and was “not nearly as weird” as he feared it would be.
“We’re guys who knew each other for a long time,” he says. “There’s baggage and there’s lots of water under the bridge but there’s lots of great shared history and friendship. The biggest thing for me, at Juno time, was meeting everybody’s kids 10 years later. Some of these kids weren’t even born yet when I left and I had never met them. Others are adults now. Having those guys meet my kids as young adults, that was exciting and new and that’s out of the way. And now we’ll go and have some good memories to share and be off on our merry ways after that.”
Creeggan, Hearn, Stewart and Robertson were indeed off on their merry ways after the plaque ceremony, but Page is sticking around. As part of the National Music Centre’s RBC Master in Residence program, he will be spending the next couple of days mentoring a handful of emerging artists that he helped pick. The three-day program will end with a Songwriter’s Circle on May 19.
“I think the focus will be on writing,” says Page. “But, really, whatever anybody wants to pick my brain about or discuss is up for grabs, too.”
As for sharing his own tricks of the trade, he admits he is not the most disciplined of songwriters, which is ironic since his upcoming sixth solo record is called Heal Thyself Pt. 2: Discipline.
“I’m a horrific procrastinator,” Page says. “I basically get ideas when I’m not in a position to be writing, like when I’m driving or travelling or somewhere where I don’t want to be singing into my phone in front of strangers. I get home and think ‘I should be working from 9 until 4 every day, writing.’ Unless I’m co-writing with somebody else, I’m terrible at that. I’ll go downstairs and pull a guitar out and play or I’ll tell myself I’m researching by watching Netflix. It just kind of gestates for quite a long time.”
Still, like BNL, Page has soldiered on and has been productive since 2009. Discipline, due out this summer, is the followup to 2016’s Heal Thyself Pt. 1: Instinct, a collection of candid songs that addressed, among other things, the songwriter’s experiences with mental illness. In 2011, Page went on CBC’s The Current to discuss publicly for the first time his struggles with depression and anxiety. Since then, he has regularly given talks about living with mental illness.
“I think one of the things that people feel when they are struggling is ‘why me?’ or ‘This can’t be real, because my life is good. What do I have to be anxious about or depressed about?’ ” Page says. “Which is not really the way it works. It’s not really about something. I had a lot of those same feelings and thought ‘I got it pretty good here.’ But it didn’t make me immune to depression and anxiety. I’m not all fixed either. It’s a work in progress and I’ve learned to work hard at it and hopefully can give people some inspiration to do that as well.”
As for BNL’s induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, Page says he is proud of the honour and what the band has accomplished. Still, he says a permanent reunion with the other members is not in the cards, although he doesn’t rule out singing with them again at some point.
“It was pleasant enough when we did it last time that my knee-jerk reaction wouldn’t be no,” he says. “But I know that both parties have tons of other stuff on the go. I can’t speak for those guys, I don’t know if they would have any interest in doing anything together. I don’t think anybody wants me to be back in the band full time, myself included. But to do something together, a one-off or whatever, it’s nice to see we’re all grown-ups and could probably do it, especially if the occasion was the right one.”
Milestones: Barenaked Ladies opens May 17 and runs until February 2019 at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre.
Source: http://calgaryherald.com/entertainment/music/former-barenaked-ladies-singer-steven-page-joins-ex-bandmates-in-calgary-for-canadian-music-hall-of-fame-ceremony
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Barenaked Ladies take trip down memory lane at Canadian Music Hall of Fame induction
In a letter dated July 19, 1990 currently on display at the National Music Centre in Calgary, Steven Page wrote to a music festival making his case for why the then-nascent Barenaked Ladies should be made part of the lineup.
“We’re beginning to build quite a nice Toronto following,” he wrote, adding that the band’s last gig had attracted 150 people.
“It’s so hard to read things you wrote when you were, like, 20 or whatever,” said Page, in an interview at Studio Bell, home of the centre, after the official plaque ceremony marking the Barenaked Ladies entry into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. “I was trying to get into the Montreal Buskers Festival, which we didn’t get into.”
Since then, the band has amassed a huge global following with its tuneful and often-comedic songs, sold 15-million records and won multiple Junos in a career that has spanned nearly 30 years. On Wednesday afternoon, the four current members of the band, guitarist-vocalist Ed Robertson, bassist Jim Creeggan, keyboardist Kevin Hearn and drummer Tyler Stewart, were joined by Page, who co-founded the band in the late 1980s and left in 2009.
Earlier this year at the Juno Awards in Vancouver, they became the 51st act to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, which has been permanently housed on the fifth floor of the National Music Centre since 2016. As has become a tradition the last couple of years, the band placed their plaque on the wall alongside those of past inductees such as Rush, Oscar Peterson and Neil Young, displaying a trademark dose of goofiness as all five attempted to squeeze around the small area where the magnetic plaque was placed.
“It’s still hard to get our heads around, I think,” said Robertson about the induction. “One of the first things I said to the guys was ‘We’re the band that makes fun of the bands in the Hall of Fame. How did we end up in the Hall of Fame?’”
The centre has also opened a temporary exhibit called Milestones: Barenaked Ladies, a collection of more than 100 artifacts and pieces of memorabilia from the band’s history, including that early letter from Page to the Montreal Buskers Festival.
From an eight-track recorder and the early demo tapes produced on it, to notebooks of handwritten lyrics by Page and Robertson, to Junos, a Rolling Stone article and a Grammy nomination certificate for 1999’s One Week, the exhibit traces the band’s history from suburban basement duo to one of Canada’s bestselling exports.
“The first thing I had to do was drive to my in-laws house and grab a bunch of Rubbermaid bins that I hadn’t seen in 20-plus years,” said Robertson, who helped put the exhibit together alongside his bandmates and Page. “That was actually really fun, opening up old boxes and bins and pulling out old setlists from the early 1990s and physical photo albums from recording sessions and my old lyric writing books and stuff. Despite how amazing and emotional the Junos was and how cool this whole thing is, going through those boxes was the most emotional and nostalgic thing I did connected with this whole thing.”
For the first time in nearly 10 years, Page joined his former bandmates to perform at the Juno Awards ceremony to play hits If I Had $1,000,000 and One Week. The breakup in 2009 was somewhat messy, but on Wednesday both Page and Robertson spoke warmly of each other and of their memories forming the band as teenage counsellors at a music camp near Toronto. Both were in other bands at the time. Page’s was called Scary Movie Breakfast, while Robertson played in a “super serious” cover band that had 26 Rush songs in its repertoire.
“I had known Ed since I was in Grade 5,” said Page. “He was in Grade 4, so we did not socialize. But when we were at music camp, he walked up to me one day with his guitar on and played a song to me that I had written with another friend of mine. We had been making tapes in our basements. We’d rent a four-track cassette recorder and get a bucket of KFC and make some songs and laugh. Ed heard this and learned the song and sang it to me, so I started singing it with him. First of all, I thought ‘I can make music and someone else will hear it and like it? Awesome.’ But second, our voices just harmonized so perfectly.”
Robertson said the reunion at the Junos in late March was easy, at least musically. “That part of it was like writing a bike,” he said.
The emotions “swirling around it” were difficult, he said, cutting off any speculation about whether it would lead to a permanent reunion with Page.
“All the conversations it brings up, like ‘Oh, so does this mean a reunion . . . ‘” he said. “You don’t do that to divorced parents after they’ve been apart for 10 years.
“It was fun to get together and celebrate all the amazing things we did together,” he added. “But we’re 10 years on from that now. Steve has put out three records, we’ve put out six. We’ve done thousands of shows since then. We’re both, the band and Steve, in a very different place and in a really good place. It was super fun to get back together and reminisce about everything that was great about that first 20 years, but everybody is in a different place right now.”
Still, that doesn’t mean more one-offs won’t happen.
“Never say never, that’s what I say,” said Stewart.
“Well, if we get into another Hall of Fame,” Page said.
Milestones: Barenaked Ladies will be on display at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre, until February of 2019.
Source: http://calgaryherald.com/entertainment/music/barenaked-ladies-take-a-trip-down-memory-lane-at-induction-ceremony-for-canadian-music-hall-of-fame-at-calgarys-national-music-centre
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Barenaked Ladies embraced by Canadian Music Hall of Fame
Ahead of the upcoming 30th anniversary of their first gig together, five members of the Barenaked Ladies appeared together in Calgary on Wednesday as the band took its place in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
“It’s pretty gratifying to know that we’ve contributed something,” said singer and guitarist Steven Page who left the band in 2009.
“To be amongst such distinguished company like Oscar Peterson, Rush and Neil Young, it’s pretty incredible,” added drummer Tyler Stewart.
Barenaked Ladies are the 51st recipient of the honour and the National Music Centre opened an exhibit showcasing the history of the band from Scarborough, Ontario that’s released 15 full length albums .
“It’s a first to walk into a museum and see yourself on the wall and know every moment where those pictures were taken from,” said bassist Jim Creegan. “It was unfamiliar and then immediately familiar.”
Ed Robertson, the band’s lone frontman following Page’s departure, said the flood of memories hit well before Wednesday’s ceremony as he went through old lyric books and set lists. “Opening boxes that hadn’t been opened in 25 years to find all this stuff, that was really fun.”
The hall of fame ceremony comes on the heels of the band’s reunion at The Juno Awards in March in Vancouver where the band was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. When questioned on whether Page would rejoin the band on a more permanent basis, Stewart elected not to speculate.
“We had a great time at the Junos getting back together,” explained Stewart. “It had been almost 10 years. We had fun.“We both have respective things we’re going to do. We’ve going on a tour right away, Steven’s going over to the U.K. right away. We all continue on with our lives but you never know. Maybe one day down the road, mom and dad will get back together and Santa Claus will be real.”
The new exhibition at Studio Bell, called Milestones: Barenaked Ladies, celebrates the 30-year career of the band and runs until February 2019.
October 1, 2018 will be the 30th anniversary of the band’s first concert.
Source: https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/barenaked-ladies-embraced-by-canadian-music-hall-of-fame-1.3933475