The Barenaked Ladies are worth well over $1,000,000 these days.
If that wasn’t already true after their runaway smash hit “One Week”, which reached #1 on the Billboard charts in 1998, it’s certainly been true since BNL wrote the theme tune for The Big Bang Theory, a terrible, terrible TV series which pays out sweet, sweet royalties.
The Barenaked Ladies are also, it needs to be said, no longer the band they were when Steven Page and Ed Robertson penned “If I Had $1000000” for debut album Gordon. Founding keyboardist Andy Creeggan (bassist Jim’s brother) left all the way back in 1995, soon replaced by noted art connoisseur Kevin Hearn. Rather more infamously, cofounder Steven Page departed on semi-acrimonious terms back in 2009, though he briefly rejoined in 2018, on the occasion of BNL’s induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
Fans will, inevitably, debate the merits of the band’s post-Page output – and Page’s post-BNL output – but there’s little doubt that BNL just isn’t the same since they lost their co-founding lead vocalist and songwriter. Page, the poet who combines soulful lyricism with a winking sense of humour, is predominantly responsible for BNL’s more mature fare, like Beach Boys ode “Brian Wilson”, the criminally underrated “War on Drugs” (about suicide, with a shout-out of sorts to the Bloor Viaduct), and perennial CanCon classic “The Old Apartment”.
The Pageless BNL, meanwhile, has put out some fun tunes like “Gonna Walk” (2013, Grinning Streak) – the show opener – and the Scott Pilgrim-riffing “You and Me vs. the World” (2017, Fake Nudes), but each album has also had a glaring hole where the Page ballad would have been. (For what it’s worth, Page’s solo fare has been uniformly fantastic, including the truly brilliant ode to classic rock, “I Can See My House From Here”.)
Hot on the heels of fellow hometown heroes Our Lady Peace, the latest BNL show at Budweiser Stage proved to be something of a mixed bag. There were the expected highlights – a 12,000-strong “If I Had…” singalong is always fun – and some shocking lowlights, the lowest of the low being BNL’s overreliance on horrendous AI-generated imagery.
Let’s start with the big fat digital elephant in the room. It is, frankly, incomprehensible that, at a time of widespread artistic backlash against generative AI, the Barenaked Ladies would double down on AI “art” (the term used very loosely) in their current tour. AI-generated imagery was painfully evident in the show’s video projections, while at least some tour merch was clearly the result of some poor intern’s Midjourney prompts. It’s not the first time BNL has embraced generative AI, though at least last time they were transparent about the fact they were just goofing around like the rest of us.
Setting aside the AI of it all, BNL’s weaknesses were also on display in some other respects, including the forgettable songs off their latest album In Flight and an overreliance on comic bits that, while fitfully amusing, sucked up time that could have been given over to more of their classics, and/or more serious songs. There was also the oddly truncated performance of “Brian Wilson”, which omitted Steven Page’s opening (and thematically important) verse.
On to the good: BNL was in fine form on the classics, which included “The Old Apartment”, “Hello City”, and “Pinch Me” (with its classic, schoolyard-friendly line about hiding out under there). Robertson’s introduction to “Theme From The Big Bang Theory” got a knowing laugh from the audience, the band mock-apologising to everyone “dragged to the show by a BNL diehard” before promising there was at least one recognizable song on the setlist.
Speaking of – the interplay between the band, and between the band and the audience, was just as good as fans would hope, the quartet clearly happy to be goofing around in front of fans, friends, and, in all probability, a lot of family members too. BNL also evidently took the advice from my recent OLP review, where I opined on the power of musical covers in live shows: not only did we get a “War Pigs” tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne, BNL also worked in a Brian Wilson cover (“Love and Mercy”), an AC/DC number (“Highway to Hell”), a Weird Al-like medley of pop songs including “Pink Pony Club”, and, for encore, Bryan Adams’s “Summer of ‘69”. (The latter number augmented with guests from opening acts Fastball and Sugar Ray.)
Heading out from the Budweiser Stage, we were left with mixed feelings about what BNL has become. The energy is still there, and it’s not like their post-Page output has been entirely disappointing – case in point, the fantastic “Four Seconds” off All in Good Time, which got the Budweiser audience up out of their seats – but other aspects of the show left us wanting. Hopefully, next time they perform – this is now two years in a row they’ve done shows in Toronto – there will be less AI, slightly more serious fare.
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The Barenaked Ladies “Last Summer on Earth” Tour continues across North America through September.
