Steven Page, Ed Robertson talk pop culture, music in 1991
Barenaked Ladies frontmen explain how their Scarborough origins affected their work
If you listened to radio in the early 1990s, you will know some of the songs written by the Barenaked Ladies: If I Had $1,000,000, Enid and Brian Wilson, to name just three.
Their songs were catchy and often featured playful lyrics — like what the songwriters would do with a $1-million windfall.
Ralph Benmergui, one of the hosts of CBC's Midday, saw something more complex going on with their music.
In 1991, he asked two of the band's best-known members — songwriters Ed Robertson and Steven Page — if perhaps, their music was rooted in a folk tradition.
"I listened to the album and I hear lots of funny stuff and lots of, you know, good lyrics that are good jokes, good twists," Benmergui says in the interview, which can be viewed at the top of this page.
"But then I hear the way you do the vocals and it strikes me that you take a lot of pride in this — that you like singing, you like your voices and in another time and in another place, you would have just been folkies and happy that way, playing in coffee shops."
'No room for that'
The two BNL singers mull over the question, but ultimately shoot down the premise.
Robertson suggests there wouldn't have been a market for that in their suburban hometown.
"Well, maybe if we hadn't grown up in Scarborough, but there's just no room for that kind of [music]," he tells Benmergui.
And Page points out they're a product of the decade they grew up in.
"So much of what we grew up in was pop culture and that's for us, such a '70s and '80s thing — this big explosion of more McDonald's on every street corner," he says.
"That's the atmosphere we grew up in and that's what we ended up being interested in and making fun of. A lot of our music comes from knowing about those things, but without ever thinking about it until quite recently."
The band would go on to have a long and successful career, though Page would eventually part ways with BNL.
In 2018, the Barenaked Ladies were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, along with Page.