September 25, 2025 • 30 mins
It’s beeeeennnn… one week since the last episode of Encore, and now here we are with another one. Our 79th episode in total - yes we counted.
Now, in music, novelty acts don’t tend to last very long. In fact, the average best before date of a novelty act lasts only about as long as a box of Kraft Dinner, sometimes less. Back when Barenaked Ladies first emerged from the depths of Scarborough, they were widely considered a novelty act, largely because they mixed such a heavy dose of comedy into their genre-bending music.
Unlike so many official or unofficial novelty acts, Barenaked Ladies have resonated with millions and millions of music lovers for more than 35 years now. What started out as a bunch of guys singing jokey songs about becoming millionaires and being back in grade 9, developed into one of Canada’s most beloved and successful musical acts in that time span. They’ve had #1 hits all over the world, one of the best-selling independent releases in Canadian history, and made Prince’s favourite album of 1998… maybe.
This is the story of Barenaked Ladies' One Week - with newly unearthed audio from BNL!
Written by Cam Lindsay for iHeartRadio.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Attention, the makers of Encore are not responsible for this
song being stuck in your head until further notice. I'm
Ruby Carr and this is the story of Bare Naked
Ladies one week. You know the songs just making people
feel something.
Pleasure to work on this song with her, but do
you know the history to struggle making any kind of record?
I don't always have the direction or concept. This is Encore,
(00:24):
an in-depth look at the stories behind the music. Here's
Iart Radio's Ruby Carr.
It's been one week since the last episode of Encore,
and now here we are with another one, our seventy-ninth
episode in total. Yes, we counted. Now in music, novelty acts,
(00:45):
they don't tend to last very long. In fact, the
average best before date on a novelty act lasts only
about as long as.
Box of craft dinner sometimes less back when Barenaked Ladies
first emerged from the depths of Scarborough they were widely
considered a novelty act largely because they make such a
heavy dose of comedy into their genre bending music and
(01:06):
yes some of that music involved Kraft dinner we're gonna
get to that later.
Originally the band considered themselves to be a novelty act.
Singer Stephen Page would tell Now magazine, we started out
not really confident in ourselves as musicians. We wanted to
be a novelty act. The idea was to make ourselves
laugh and make the audience laugh, so we dress up
(01:27):
in weird matching outfits. Some people do keep those misconceptions
that we're a novelty act, but not those who keep
coming back to the shows.
spoke more about the idea of being a novelty act
during an interview with much music. Is it bad to
be considered a novelty act if you're still selling records
and if you still have fans that appreciate your music? Well,
because you know, novelty, it means it's like it's new,
(01:47):
it's fresh, novel. I used to have to try and
justify that all the time. I don't think we're really
a novelty band, but we certainly have had novelty hits.
a million dollars is a novelty song. One week is
a novelty song in a certain way, but I think
they're ones that have
Some resonance. Unlike so many official or unofficial novelty acts,
barrenaked ladies have resonated with millions and millions of music
(02:08):
lovers for more than 35 years now. What started out
as a bunch of guys singing jokey songs about becoming
millionaires and being back in grade 9 developed into one
of Canada's most beloved and successful musical acts in that
time span.
They've had number one hits all over the world, one
of the best selling independent releases in Canadian history, and
(02:31):
made Prince's favorite album of 1999. Maybe. Well, no one
actually knows, but still, there's a convincing rumor he was
a fan. Before Bare Naked Ladies had any fans, they
were a duo formed in 1988 by Stephen Page and
Ed Robertson, a couple of teen.
who attended Churchill Heights High School in Scarborough, Ontario. The
(02:53):
two began hanging out at Scarborough School's music camp, where
they were both camp counselors eventually singing and performing together.
On an episode of VH1's Behind the Music, Stephen would
say one thing that impressed me about Ed was as
soon as I started singing with him, he had a
perfect ear for harmony so the two of us could
sing together easily.
(03:14):
Stephen and Ed decided to officially form their own band
and come up with the attention grabbing name while attending
a Bob Dylan concert at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto. Stephen
would tell the Los Angeles Times, the concert was terrible,
so boring that we sat there and.
About all these fake bands we'd like to be in
and started coming up with dumb names for them. I
(03:35):
don't know which of us said bare naked ladies, but
we laughed our heads off. It's something we'd say when
we were 9 or 10 years old, a phrase we'd forgotten,
so it was charming when it popped back up.
Naturally they would get asked about the name for years.
It would even ignite a controversy, so more on that
in a bit. But the guys always had fun explaining
(03:56):
it when they were asked. Here's a clip of them
discussing it with much music. The name is, is just
to imply sort of youth.
naivety and it's a kids' term and then adults rarely
use it, so we wanted to capture that youthful. Actually
it's a baking term, OK, and actually it's a term
coined by Count Dracula, the 1930s. It's my mom's name,
(04:17):
so we named the band after her.
Well, that's very profound. Thank you very much. What do
you think about it? You didn't say nothing. No, I
just passed that one on to everybody else, didn't I?
I always thought we were called alias, so I didn't
even think about it. The duo's first gig together was
a benefit for the Second Harvest Food Bank outside of
Toronto City Hall on October 1, 1988.
(04:38):
Because they didn't have many songs, Barenaked Ladies spent a
lot of their performance improvising and coming up with music
on the spot while interacting with the crowd. They impressed
the booking agent of the Horseshoe Tavern so much he
offered them their first official gig that.
Same week they began playing more shows which featured one
set of their own songs and another with covers and requests.
(05:02):
Before the end of 1988, Bare Naked Ladies released their
first cassette called, wait for it, Buck Naked Naturally.
It wasn't until they were invited to tour across Canada
with comedy music troupe Corky and the Juice Pigs that
Stephen and Ed got a taste of what it was
like to be a proper band.
They both abandoned their post-secondary educations at York University to
(05:24):
concentrate full time on bare naked ladies, and yes, I
know how that sounds. At the final show of their
tour in Toronto, they were joined by Andy and Jim Creegan,
friends from camp who played drums and bass. Not long after,
Bare Naked Ladies doubled in size to a quartet.
Your bios as you call music acoustic hip hop. We've
(05:44):
been looking for a lot of names for it and
uh we called it boss of country, uh, you know,
thrash folk, um, but acoustic hip hop. We call, we
call it Chinese folk music for a long time. Well,
that's because we're doing a lot of Chinese folk music
at the time. But yeah, we go through phases, so
hip hop, I think we, you know, we, we do
a lot of, a lot of sampling. We don't have, uh.
We don't have electronic equipment to do that. We just
(06:05):
do a lot of stuff off each other's bodies and stuff.
That was Barenaked Ladies explaining to much music just what
kind of music they made as they became a four piece,
their sound began to develop and become virtually any kind
of genre they wanted it to pop, country, folk, hip hop, polka,
you name it, they did it.
The foursome recorded another cassette with the laughable title of
(06:27):
Bare Naked Lunch, a play on the William Burroughs book
Naked Lunch. But just six months after joining the band,
Andy Creegan left for a student exchange program with Canada
World Youth, so the band found themselves without a drummer.
Enter Tyler Stewart, who Stephen Ed and Jim met at
the Waterloo Busker Festival in the summer of 1990.
(06:50):
At first, the guys weren't sure about Tyler's rock style
of drumming, but eventually they accepted his offer to join
the band. Barenaked Ladies would close out in 1990 by
winning Best band slash musical Group at the YTV Achievement
Awards that recognized young Canadian talent.
Soon after, a pivotal moment occurred before one of their
(07:10):
gigs at the Rivoli in Toronto, the band walked down
the street and squeezed into the speaker's corner booth. Do
you remember that outside of the city TV Much Music
building where anyone off the street could record a video
and voice their opinion. It was basically a precursor to
TikTok kind of. Uh, the guy sang a song called
Be My Yoko Ono, and for the cost of a loony,
(07:32):
that's a $1 coin to a.
When listening outside of Canada, Bare Naked Ladies recorded what
would unintentionally become their first music video. It got them
some airplay on Much Music and even won them a
prize on the weekly Speakers' Corner TV show. Here they
are talking about it on Much Music. I don't know
if that's how we got famous, but it certainly helped.
I don't know if we're famous yet either, but either way,
(07:54):
it was a good, it was $1 well spent because
it got plenty times was our dollar, wasn't it? I
think it was Tim's dollar.
I think it was Ed's friend's dollar. That's right. That's true.
When Andy returned from his trip, he rejoined the band
on percussion and keyboards. After gaining some attention from their
Speaker's Corner video, the band recorded a new cassette they
could take down to Austin, Texas with them for their
(08:16):
appearance at South by Southwest. They simply called it Bare
Naked Ladies, but the tape's yellow cover featured an illustration
of a sandwich, so it earned it the nickname of
the Yellow Tape and Sandwich EP.
Songs from the tape began receiving airplay on local radio,
and the cassette began selling copies in the thousands, even
(08:37):
charting in Canada and outselling every artist from Michael Jackson
to U2 at stores. Here they are talking to much
music about the yellow sandwich tape. It was a strange
thing for us.
Because we started selling it off the stage at our gigs,
like most bands do when they're starting out and they're
playing gigs in their hometown and people want to take
5 songs home with them or whatever. And next thing
(08:58):
we knew we were getting calls from record stores, and
next thing we knew after that it it sold 50,000 copies.
I mean, now it's up about 85,000 or something. So
it was the first independent to ever do that, the
first cassette to ever do that.
And it went like top 20 in Canada, so. Lots
of records there and we weren't trying for it honest. It's,
it's kind of exciting in the way that a lot
of independent fans now are saying, well, hey, we can
(09:20):
do it too. naked ladies can do it then, or
we can blow them out of the water, you know,
so I mean. The cassette eventually went gold in Canada,
an unheard of achievement for an independent release. Its popularity
helped Barenaked Ladies win the Discovery to disc contests, winning
them a whopping $100,000.
Brand they could put towards studio time. Not long after
(09:42):
they were asked to contribute a cover for a tribute
album to Bruce Coburn, a Canadian artist they all loved.
They recorded a poignant rendition of Coburn's Lovers in a
Dangerous Time, which demonstrated that barrenaked ladies weren't just looking
for laughs. They also made a video for the song,
their first true music video, which went into rotation on
Much Music. The next big step was to record an
(10:05):
album and find a label to release it.
But before that could happen, bare naked ladies would ignite
some controversy over their name.
The band was scheduled to perform at a concert outside
of Toronto City Hall in Nathan Phillips Square on New
Year's Eve 1991, but they were removed when the mayor's
office argued the name Bare Naked Ladies was offensive. Suddenly
(10:27):
they were making the news, but it wasn't about the music.
One Toronto star.
The headline read Naked Ladies banned. In the article, events
coordinator Donna Proudman said, We do have a policy against
the objectification of women or any other sector of the community.
If your mother or my mother saw a headline saying
City of Toronto presents bare naked ladies, they'd be concerned,
(10:49):
even though they gained a lot of publicity over the incident,
Stephen Page told the New Music that they didn't want
any of it.
Yeah, but that's that's an easy thing for people to say,
oh well, you know, you couldn't have bought that publicity
you got, and it's true we couldn't have bought it,
but why would we have wanted to buy it? I
mean by that kind of publicity, it was, it was
good for us in the sense that lots of people
stuck up, stuck up for us, but it was stuck
(11:12):
up for us. The thing is stuck up for me.
It was, it was a little bit distressing to see
people my age or, or older or younger saying, oh,
it's feminists like the mayor of Toronto, or, you know,
it's feminists who are ruin, ruining stuff. I think in
a lot of ways it brought out the worst in people.
That's not what, it's not, that's not the defense we wanted.
We didn't want people to blame it on feminism, uh,
(11:33):
because that wasn't the problem. I think that they just
misunderstood what the band was all about, and that's where
the problem happened in, in, in City Hall.
In the end, Barenaked Ladies would overcome the negative attention. Eventually,
Toronto Mayor June Rowlands would invite them to play a
different event, but the ladies, they politely declined. They had
better things to worry about like making their debut album
(11:55):
for their brand new label, Sire Records, home to artists
like Madonna, The Cure, and The Smiths.
With 1000 in their pockets, Bare Naked Ladies went to
the studio in Moin Heights, Quebec with producer engineer Michael
Philip Voivoda, who had previously worked with Canadian indie legends
such as Change of Heart, Dough Boys, and Riostatic.
(12:17):
Now I don't think anyone was really wondering, but yes,
the band did record some of the music in the
nude uh for a while this was even a thing,
and the producer was also in his birthday suit. I
don't know. I don't get it either. They named the
album Gordon. Why Gordon? Well, here is Steven explaining why
(12:38):
they chose such a random name to the new music.
No, we, we called it because Gordon from Sesame Street's
a cool guy, I think. I think that's when I
think of Gordon, I think of Gordon from Sesame Street.
So I think like for, for me, that is why
I named it after. I don't know who you named
it after. It was the decision we made though was, uh,
was that what's the name it because so many people's
(12:59):
title problems and the titles have so much meaning that, uh,
we decided to give a name and it just kind
of be there.
A number of songs from the early cassettes were re-recorded
and polished, including fan favorites like Brian Wilson and If
I Had a Million Dollars. Now about that song, it
would be released as one of the singles from the
album and become one of their signature songs, I mean,
(13:20):
even to this day, but it's one line in particular
that stood out to their Canadian fans. If I had
a million dollars, we wouldn't have to eat Kraft dinner,
but we would eat raft dinner, of course we would,
we'd just eat more.
That line inspired many fans to start throwing boxes of
Kraft dinner on stage. At first, the band thought it
was funny and cute, but eventually the novelty, there's that
(13:43):
word again, wore off. Ed would tell CBC it became
a problem. We actually had to put out a message like,
we get the joke, we love it, but please put
your craft dinner in the bin and we will donate
it to the food bank. I mean, I got hit
in the face, Stephen got hit in the nuts, and
it became a point in the show we dreaded.
Apparently some people opened up the packets and would throw
(14:05):
it on stage so the cheese powder would go everywhere,
which is so gross. I don't even like to think
about it like think of the smell. Anyway, when it
was released on July 28th, 1992, Gordon was an instant hit,
and I mean that. It sold 80,000 copies in Canada
just in its 1st 24 hours of.
Release alone. It would stay atop of the Canadian charts
(14:27):
for 8 consecutive weeks and eventually go on to sell
more than 1 million copies. Here are some bare naked
ladies celebrating having the number one record in Canada with
the new music. We have a number one record in Canada.
We're number one. We're number one. No, it's not like
that at all.
But we did, um, our manager brought us into his
(14:50):
hotel room today to tell us the news and gave
us all those big number one Styrofoam things. We put
them on waved them. With all that said, Gordon may
actually be remembered most for its album cover. It's well.
Let's hear what the band had to say about it.
In an interview with the National Post, Tyler confessed, it's
absolutely the worst album cover in the history of music.
(15:12):
It's like some crappy font with photos of us wrapped
around it. We're all looking overly cute and earnest. It's
just terrible. I actually think he was a little harsh.
I kinda like it.
Despite being the biggest thing since bag milk in Canada,
Gordon was not a hit whatsoever in America. Maybe they
had the album cover to blame. I don't know, but
(15:33):
it did find fans, including some folks at the Fox network.
They commissioned the band to make a video to promote
racial harmony and acceptance of diversity. It seems a little
hard to believe now, but that is actually true. That
is a thing that happened. Bare naked lady.
We looking to keep the momentum going and began to
work on their second album, but this time they approached
(15:54):
things differently. Recording with Katie Lange's close collaborator Ben Mink,
the band moved away from Gordon's goofy nature. Stephen and
Ed divided the songwriting instead of collaborating like they normally did.
They were both suffering from depression. This led to more
of an introspective serious tone to the songs.
(16:15):
Ed would later tell Noisy, I was just less engaged
in general and I think the band was quite fractured
at the time. I think the overnight and runaway success
of the first record had put us into a very
strange place when it came to make the difficult sophomore album.
And I'd had some difficult times. My older brother had
passed away in a motorcycle accident and it was just
a very tough time for me. I wasn't ready to
(16:37):
go and make another record and then the band wasn't
communicating well. The studio process was difficult, so many things
conspired to make that record a really difficult process for me,
and as a result it's hard for me to attach
to the songs on that record.
Released on August 16, 1994, Maybe You Should Drive showed
off a different, more mature side to Bare Naked Ladies
(17:00):
on the strength of singles like Alternative Girlfriend and Jane,
it had some success in Canada, going two times gold,
but it also failed to make much of a dent
in the US market.
It wasn't just the sound of the band that changed,
so did the personnel. Andy, who was ready to leave
during the recording process, finally decided that he was done
as a bare naked lady, instead deciding to pursue a
(17:23):
degree in music studies at McGill University. The band was
back to being a quartet, but not for long.
After Andy Creegan left the band, Barenaked Ladies jumped right
into making their next album. They went back to working
with Gordon producer Michael Philip Voivoda and tried to inject
more fun into the recording process. Once again they found
(17:44):
the silliness and bond through music that helped form the
band in the first place, and they instilled it into
the songs and the album title Born on a Pirate ship.
Weird name for an album, right? Well, if you imitate
the kid on the cover and pull on the sides
of your mouth, you'll get it. I was going on
a horror. I don't know if that super worked, but
(18:04):
you know, those silly ladies. For the band, it was
an attempt to take some of the pressure off that
they had felt making the previous album. Ed would tell
Vice in making Born on a Pirate ship we had
resigned ourselves to like.
OK, we're not going to be this successful pop band.
We're too weird and quirky, and we take too many
left turns in everything we do. Unlike the albums before it,
(18:25):
Pirate ship wasn't a hit with their fans. In fact,
their Canadian audience was shrinking. Steven would tell McLean's, we
went from selling out 4 nights at Toronto's Massey Hall
to not being able to sell out a single night.
It's a hard thing.
Get used to especially in your hometown, so the band
made a drastic move dumping their manager and hiring a
(18:46):
new one in Terry McBride who had achieved success with
one of his former clients, Sarah McLachlan. McBride immediately began
focusing on the band cracking America because often with music
what America likes Canada likes, especially when it comes to
their own artists.
And wouldn't you know it, they finally scored a modest
(19:06):
hit in the US with their song The Old Apartment.
A lot of that had to do with the band
making friends with Beverly Hills 90,210 star and fellow Canadian
Jason Priestley. Not only did he direct the music video,
he also invited them to make an appearance on the
popular TV show to play the song at the Peach
Pit After Dark, a hip.
Club where teens could hang and see cool bands you remember.
(19:30):
Bare Naked Ladies became a five piece again when Tyler
invited his friend Kevin Hearne to join the band, basically
taking over the role Andy left, building their audience in
the US now. They also recorded a live album called
Rock Specta which, surprise surprise, scored another hit for the
band with their live version of.
Brian Wilson, a song that had been in their repertoire
(19:52):
since the early days. Fun fact, Brian Wilson himself loved
the song so much he even recorded a version of it.
Trying to capitalize on their US success, Ba Naked Ladies
went back into the studio to make another record. Stephen
called up one of his idols, English singer-songwriter Stephen Duffy,
to collaborate on some songs with him.
(20:12):
He would tell the Halifax Herald, we hope to make
a good all-purpose summer kind of record, the kind you
just put on and like. I think that's what everybody
tries to do, but I think we really tried. I
don't think we recorded it with a sense of making
something that would do something commercially from the record company's
point of view, but Rock Specta was designed to act
as a bridge between Born on a Pirate ship and
(20:34):
this record, and it did that way better than we
ever expected, and boy.
Boy, did it ever turn out better than they expected.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
What can the BNL fans expect off this one? Are
you able to say anything about this one? Yeah, sure.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
It's a 13 absolutely perfect songs. It's a great record.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
We're really happy with it.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I think I think in some ways it's it's our
strongest record. Um, there's some great songs and great performances.
First single song called One Week. That was Stephen Page
telling much music about Bareaked Lady's 4th album.
Stunt the single one Week recaptured the giddy playful nature
of the band's earlier work, combining Steven's booming melodies in
the chorus with Ed's comedic freestyle rapping. Both singers presented
(21:19):
highly memorable moments. How many times have you heard someone mimic?
It's been, not to mention all of the pop cultural
reference points in Ed's rap. So let's see Swiss chalet, X-Files.
Harrison Ford, Sailor Moon, LeAnn Rhimes, to name a few.
Ed would tell Much Music that these were all things
(21:40):
that were coming to mind while he was freestyling in
the studio. Where the heck did all those lines come from?
Is that a stream of conscious thing that you're seeing?
It was, it was uh that was written as a
freestyle rap off the top of my head. Did you
mention wasabi, Leann Rhymes, it's all in there. Digging digging
the sushi lately, digging Leann rhymes lately? OK. I feel
it's important to tell you that.
(22:00):
Rhymes loved the idea of being name dropped in the song,
though she was a little confused at first. Ed would
tell Anna me in one week I sing the lyric,
Big like Leanne Rhimes, and she burst into our dressing
room at a festival once and said, What do you
mean big like Leanne Rhymes? I replied, big like popular
and she said, Oh, I thought y'all was saying I
(22:21):
was fat. In an interview with Newsweek, Ed said he
needed to improvise because he just couldn't finish the song.
I had the structure of the choruses and the idea
of this relationship breakup. I kept trying to write these
rap verses, and they were always crappy. Stephen Page suggested,
Why don't you just freestyle them? The stuff you freestyle
every night on stage is better than the stuff you're
(22:42):
trying to write. I improvised 4 verses literally in a
minute and a half, then I edited the 4 verses
into 2. Then I sent in the demo, which was
just an acoustic guitar, a drum loop, and me singing
the song.
Ed used his family's high 8 camcorder and tripod to
film himself freestyling for a few minutes, then transcribed the
words and edited them. In fact, you can find some
(23:05):
of the best couplets that didn't make the cut in
the liner notes for stunt.
As we've come to expect from the songs we feature
in Encore, one week was the final song Bare Naked
Ladies submitted for stunt, and at first they didn't think
it would make the final cut always, right? Initially they
figured it would just be a bonus track or B-side,
(23:26):
but their label Sire loved the song and informed the
band that one week was going to be the lead
single from the album.
One week came out in the summer of 1998, and yes,
it really did become the song of that summer. In
no time, it was a global hit, reaching number 3
in Canada but topping the Hot 100 in the US,
(23:46):
making their first ever number one hit, and confirming that yes.
Bare naked ladies had broken America. True to its name though,
one week topped the Hot 100 for exactly 1 week.
In an interview with Song Facts, Ed joked, I maybe
should have called it 58 weeks, but the title was
more prophetic than I could have hoped.
(24:08):
Of course when it came to performing the song, being
able to replicate it live on stage presented a challenge.
Ed told The Guardian it took us ages to figure
out how to play it live because it's sneakily complicated.
We eventually realized we'd have to trigger all the keyboard
layers and subsonic parts to make it sound more like
the record, but the lyrics, he admitted, were rather easy
(24:31):
to perform, which he likened to playing Tetris, just fitting
them in together with no spaces.
For the music video, they hired Mick G, who had
directed videos for The Offspring, Smash Mouth, and Sugar Ray.
The video featured references to everything from Chitty Chitty Bang
Bang and Evel Knievel to the Dukes of Hazzard and
Starsky and Hutch. It was almost impossible to turn on
(24:54):
much music or MTV in the summer of '98 without
seeing it multiple times a day. One week was everywhere
for months.
And yes, it didn't take long for the goat, Weird
Al Yankovic to parody it, which he did with a
song he called Jerry Springer. Stunt, the album was released
on July 7th, 1998, and it immediately changed everything for
(25:17):
Bare Naked Ladies with the.
of one week. The album entered the Billboard charts at #3,
the biggest chart debut for the band ever. Hackett only
reached number 9 in Canada, but the album went 4
times platinum in both countries and has sold close to
5 million copies to date.
Both the album and the single's success had a lot
(25:38):
of people assuming Bare Naked Ladies came out of nowhere.
Here they are addressing that to much music. Yeah, are
some people perceiving the band as an overnight success down there? I,
I think that's happening a bit, but generally I think
there is the knowledge that we've been slugging it out
for a long time. I think more than any people
are surprised at the level of success now. This this
(26:00):
is our 5th record and uh and.
For this album to enter the chart, the Billboard chart
at #3, like it did, people kind of went.
Including us, including us. When it came to awards season,
the success of one Week and stunt translated into multiple
wins for the band. While they didn't win a Grammy
(26:20):
or MTV Video Music Award, the song earned Bare Naked
Ladies their first ever nominations for Best Pop Performance by
a duo or group and Best Art Direction respectively. At
the 1999 Juno Awards, however, they cleaned up, winning for
Best Group, Best Pop Album.
And of course, best single. One week also won them
(26:41):
two Billboard Music Awards for Best Clip Alternative Modern Rock
and something called the Maximum Vision Award. But the biggest
accolade of all came from the legendary Prince, who is
said to have called Stunt his favorite album of 1998. OK,
I know it seems unlikely. So here is Ed explaining
that to much music. What happened was in an interview
(27:04):
we did one time, we were just, we were just talking.
Nonsense. And Steve said, Steve said, oh, Prince is a
huge fan actually. He, he loves Bare Naked Ladies. I said, Well, uh,
in the words of our good friend Prince, stunt, the
album of 1998. That's right. And I said, yeah, the
artist formerly known as Prince is not a big fan,
but Prince loves us. And we were joking around like that,
and next thing you know, it was quoted everywhere that
(27:25):
Prince said that Prince thought it was the best album.
The funniest part though is we heard that Prince thought
it was the best album of 1998, and we were
all really excited. We didn't realize it was us that
said it.
So magic of TV. We, we encourage, we encourage the
artist formerly known as Prince to have a listen. He
may like it. After years of hard work, bare naked
(27:46):
ladies were finally global superstars, especially in the US, where
they had somehow eclipsed even their popularity at home in Canada.
But after 11 years, what do you think that really
brought you over the top as far as the international
market and specifically the American market is concerned?
What pushed it over the top? Um, I don't know, um,
(28:07):
there was this crazy little single called One Week.
That is the most obnoxious thing I've ever heard you say.
Any Canadian over a certain age knows bare naked ladies
were not any of the following a novelty act, a
one hit wonder, or an overnight sensation. They had been
a national treasure and a constant hit maker in Canada
(28:29):
both before and after one week made them a household.
In other parts of the world, but it's pretty remarkable
to witness the impact the song had on their career.
They are one of only 29 Canadian artists to have
a number one in the US. Heck, even Noel Gallagher
of Oasis knows one week. Though according to a run-in
he had with Ed, Noel might actually think it's called China, China,
(28:52):
Chinese Chicken.
Why it became such a massive hit when it did
had a lot to do with timing. Ed told Exclaim.
The energy was huge, the lyrics were timely, the challenge
of catching them all became a thing. The song became
ubiquitous with that time period. I think it just really
captured a strange band in a wild moment. People were
up for it.
(29:14):
The band have always expressed their gratitude for the song's success.
Ed told NME, I've never understood artists who have a
difficult relationship with their hit songs. When it became a
worldwide number one song, it was great because it was
indicative of what the band does live. It's fun and
super high energy. There was a time when, yes, we
got a little bored of playing it live, so we
(29:35):
just did it differently, like we did it as a
bluegrass song for 18 months before returning to the rock version.
It's also worth noting that when Stephen Page departed the
band in 2009 for reasons I won't get into, Kevin
took over singing his parts with Tyler adding some harmonies.
In the years since its release, One Week has appeared
(29:56):
in a Mitsubishi Lancer commercial on the soundtrack to Digimon.
Movie in the films American Pie, Cruel Intentions, and 10
Things I Hate About You, and most recently in a
hilarious episode of What We Do in the Shadows, where
it's a life anthem at a wellness center for a
group of reformed vampires. They even performed the song on
(30:17):
an episode of The West Wing.
Perhaps the weirdest thing to come from the song's massive
success is a strange unproven theory that emerged on Reddit,
claiming one week was written about a man who kills
his girlfriend with a golf club. Ed would debunk the theory,
calling it.
Hilarious but inaccurate. I'm Ruby Carr. Thanks for listening to
(30:38):
me talk about one week. Join me one week from
now for another new episode of Encore, new episodes every Thursday.
Encore is an iHeart Radio Canada podcast. Download the free
iHeart Radio app and subscribe. Thank you. Thank you so
much for coming.
Attention, the makers of Encore are not responsible for this
song being stuck in your head until further notice. I'm
Ruby Carr and this is the story of Bare Naked
Ladies one week. You know the songs just making people
feel something.
Pleasure to work on this song with her, but do
you know the history to struggle making any kind of record?
I don't always have the direction or concept. This is Encore,
(00:24):
an in-depth look at the stories behind the music. Here's
Iart Radio's Ruby Carr.
It's been one week since the last episode of Encore,
and now here we are with another one, our seventy-ninth
episode in total. Yes, we counted. Now in music, novelty acts,
(00:45):
they don't tend to last very long. In fact, the
average best before date on a novelty act lasts only
about as long as.
Box of craft dinner sometimes less back when Barenaked Ladies
first emerged from the depths of Scarborough they were widely
considered a novelty act largely because they make such a
heavy dose of comedy into their genre bending music and
(01:06):
yes some of that music involved Kraft dinner we're gonna
get to that later.
Originally the band considered themselves to be a novelty act.
Singer Stephen Page would tell Now magazine, we started out
not really confident in ourselves as musicians. We wanted to
be a novelty act. The idea was to make ourselves
laugh and make the audience laugh, so we dress up
(01:27):
in weird matching outfits. Some people do keep those misconceptions
that we're a novelty act, but not those who keep
coming back to the shows.
spoke more about the idea of being a novelty act
during an interview with much music. Is it bad to
be considered a novelty act if you're still selling records
and if you still have fans that appreciate your music? Well,
because you know, novelty, it means it's like it's new,
(01:47):
it's fresh, novel. I used to have to try and
justify that all the time. I don't think we're really
a novelty band, but we certainly have had novelty hits.
a million dollars is a novelty song. One week is
a novelty song in a certain way, but I think
they're ones that have
Some resonance. Unlike so many official or unofficial novelty acts,
barrenaked ladies have resonated with millions and millions of music
(02:08):
lovers for more than 35 years now. What started out
as a bunch of guys singing jokey songs about becoming
millionaires and being back in grade 9 developed into one
of Canada's most beloved and successful musical acts in that
time span.
They've had number one hits all over the world, one
of the best selling independent releases in Canadian history, and
(02:31):
made Prince's favorite album of 1999. Maybe. Well, no one
actually knows, but still, there's a convincing rumor he was
a fan. Before Bare Naked Ladies had any fans, they
were a duo formed in 1988 by Stephen Page and
Ed Robertson, a couple of teen.
who attended Churchill Heights High School in Scarborough, Ontario. The
(02:53):
two began hanging out at Scarborough School's music camp, where
they were both camp counselors eventually singing and performing together.
On an episode of VH1's Behind the Music, Stephen would
say one thing that impressed me about Ed was as
soon as I started singing with him, he had a
perfect ear for harmony so the two of us could
sing together easily.
(03:14):
Stephen and Ed decided to officially form their own band
and come up with the attention grabbing name while attending
a Bob Dylan concert at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto. Stephen
would tell the Los Angeles Times, the concert was terrible,
so boring that we sat there and.
About all these fake bands we'd like to be in
and started coming up with dumb names for them. I
(03:35):
don't know which of us said bare naked ladies, but
we laughed our heads off. It's something we'd say when
we were 9 or 10 years old, a phrase we'd forgotten,
so it was charming when it popped back up.
Naturally they would get asked about the name for years.
It would even ignite a controversy, so more on that
in a bit. But the guys always had fun explaining
(03:56):
it when they were asked. Here's a clip of them
discussing it with much music. The name is, is just
to imply sort of youth.
naivety and it's a kids' term and then adults rarely
use it, so we wanted to capture that youthful. Actually
it's a baking term, OK, and actually it's a term
coined by Count Dracula, the 1930s. It's my mom's name,
(04:17):
so we named the band after her.
Well, that's very profound. Thank you very much. What do
you think about it? You didn't say nothing. No, I
just passed that one on to everybody else, didn't I?
I always thought we were called alias, so I didn't
even think about it. The duo's first gig together was
a benefit for the Second Harvest Food Bank outside of
Toronto City Hall on October 1, 1988.
(04:38):
Because they didn't have many songs, Barenaked Ladies spent a
lot of their performance improvising and coming up with music
on the spot while interacting with the crowd. They impressed
the booking agent of the Horseshoe Tavern so much he
offered them their first official gig that.
Same week they began playing more shows which featured one
set of their own songs and another with covers and requests.
(05:02):
Before the end of 1988, Bare Naked Ladies released their
first cassette called, wait for it, Buck Naked Naturally.
It wasn't until they were invited to tour across Canada
with comedy music troupe Corky and the Juice Pigs that
Stephen and Ed got a taste of what it was
like to be a proper band.
They both abandoned their post-secondary educations at York University to
(05:24):
concentrate full time on bare naked ladies, and yes, I
know how that sounds. At the final show of their
tour in Toronto, they were joined by Andy and Jim Creegan,
friends from camp who played drums and bass. Not long after,
Bare Naked Ladies doubled in size to a quartet.
Your bios as you call music acoustic hip hop. We've
(05:44):
been looking for a lot of names for it and
uh we called it boss of country, uh, you know,
thrash folk, um, but acoustic hip hop. We call, we
call it Chinese folk music for a long time. Well,
that's because we're doing a lot of Chinese folk music
at the time. But yeah, we go through phases, so
hip hop, I think we, you know, we, we do
a lot of, a lot of sampling. We don't have, uh.
We don't have electronic equipment to do that. We just
(06:05):
do a lot of stuff off each other's bodies and stuff.
That was Barenaked Ladies explaining to much music just what
kind of music they made as they became a four piece,
their sound began to develop and become virtually any kind
of genre they wanted it to pop, country, folk, hip hop, polka,
you name it, they did it.
The foursome recorded another cassette with the laughable title of
(06:27):
Bare Naked Lunch, a play on the William Burroughs book
Naked Lunch. But just six months after joining the band,
Andy Creegan left for a student exchange program with Canada
World Youth, so the band found themselves without a drummer.
Enter Tyler Stewart, who Stephen Ed and Jim met at
the Waterloo Busker Festival in the summer of 1990.
(06:50):
At first, the guys weren't sure about Tyler's rock style
of drumming, but eventually they accepted his offer to join
the band. Barenaked Ladies would close out in 1990 by
winning Best band slash musical Group at the YTV Achievement
Awards that recognized young Canadian talent.
Soon after, a pivotal moment occurred before one of their
(07:10):
gigs at the Rivoli in Toronto, the band walked down
the street and squeezed into the speaker's corner booth. Do
you remember that outside of the city TV Much Music
building where anyone off the street could record a video
and voice their opinion. It was basically a precursor to
TikTok kind of. Uh, the guy sang a song called
Be My Yoko Ono, and for the cost of a loony,
(07:32):
that's a $1 coin to a.
When listening outside of Canada, Bare Naked Ladies recorded what
would unintentionally become their first music video. It got them
some airplay on Much Music and even won them a
prize on the weekly Speakers' Corner TV show. Here they
are talking about it on Much Music. I don't know
if that's how we got famous, but it certainly helped.
I don't know if we're famous yet either, but either way,
(07:54):
it was a good, it was $1 well spent because
it got plenty times was our dollar, wasn't it? I
think it was Tim's dollar.
I think it was Ed's friend's dollar. That's right. That's true.
When Andy returned from his trip, he rejoined the band
on percussion and keyboards. After gaining some attention from their
Speaker's Corner video, the band recorded a new cassette they
could take down to Austin, Texas with them for their
(08:16):
appearance at South by Southwest. They simply called it Bare
Naked Ladies, but the tape's yellow cover featured an illustration
of a sandwich, so it earned it the nickname of
the Yellow Tape and Sandwich EP.
Songs from the tape began receiving airplay on local radio,
and the cassette began selling copies in the thousands, even
(08:37):
charting in Canada and outselling every artist from Michael Jackson
to U2 at stores. Here they are talking to much
music about the yellow sandwich tape. It was a strange
thing for us.
Because we started selling it off the stage at our gigs,
like most bands do when they're starting out and they're
playing gigs in their hometown and people want to take
5 songs home with them or whatever. And next thing
(08:58):
we knew we were getting calls from record stores, and
next thing we knew after that it it sold 50,000 copies.
I mean, now it's up about 85,000 or something. So
it was the first independent to ever do that, the
first cassette to ever do that.
And it went like top 20 in Canada, so. Lots
of records there and we weren't trying for it honest. It's,
it's kind of exciting in the way that a lot
of independent fans now are saying, well, hey, we can
(09:20):
do it too. naked ladies can do it then, or
we can blow them out of the water, you know,
so I mean. The cassette eventually went gold in Canada,
an unheard of achievement for an independent release. Its popularity
helped Barenaked Ladies win the Discovery to disc contests, winning
them a whopping $100,000.
Brand they could put towards studio time. Not long after
(09:42):
they were asked to contribute a cover for a tribute
album to Bruce Coburn, a Canadian artist they all loved.
They recorded a poignant rendition of Coburn's Lovers in a
Dangerous Time, which demonstrated that barrenaked ladies weren't just looking
for laughs. They also made a video for the song,
their first true music video, which went into rotation on
Much Music. The next big step was to record an
(10:05):
album and find a label to release it.
But before that could happen, bare naked ladies would ignite
some controversy over their name.
The band was scheduled to perform at a concert outside
of Toronto City Hall in Nathan Phillips Square on New
Year's Eve 1991, but they were removed when the mayor's
office argued the name Bare Naked Ladies was offensive. Suddenly
(10:27):
they were making the news, but it wasn't about the music.
One Toronto star.
The headline read Naked Ladies banned. In the article, events
coordinator Donna Proudman said, We do have a policy against
the objectification of women or any other sector of the community.
If your mother or my mother saw a headline saying
City of Toronto presents bare naked ladies, they'd be concerned,
(10:49):
even though they gained a lot of publicity over the incident,
Stephen Page told the New Music that they didn't want
any of it.
Yeah, but that's that's an easy thing for people to say,
oh well, you know, you couldn't have bought that publicity
you got, and it's true we couldn't have bought it,
but why would we have wanted to buy it? I
mean by that kind of publicity, it was, it was
good for us in the sense that lots of people
stuck up, stuck up for us, but it was stuck
(11:12):
up for us. The thing is stuck up for me.
It was, it was a little bit distressing to see
people my age or, or older or younger saying, oh,
it's feminists like the mayor of Toronto, or, you know,
it's feminists who are ruin, ruining stuff. I think in
a lot of ways it brought out the worst in people.
That's not what, it's not, that's not the defense we wanted.
We didn't want people to blame it on feminism, uh,
(11:33):
because that wasn't the problem. I think that they just
misunderstood what the band was all about, and that's where
the problem happened in, in, in City Hall.
In the end, Barenaked Ladies would overcome the negative attention. Eventually,
Toronto Mayor June Rowlands would invite them to play a
different event, but the ladies, they politely declined. They had
better things to worry about like making their debut album
(11:55):
for their brand new label, Sire Records, home to artists
like Madonna, The Cure, and The Smiths.
With 1000 in their pockets, Bare Naked Ladies went to
the studio in Moin Heights, Quebec with producer engineer Michael
Philip Voivoda, who had previously worked with Canadian indie legends
such as Change of Heart, Dough Boys, and Riostatic.
(12:17):
Now I don't think anyone was really wondering, but yes,
the band did record some of the music in the
nude uh for a while this was even a thing,
and the producer was also in his birthday suit. I
don't know. I don't get it either. They named the
album Gordon. Why Gordon? Well, here is Steven explaining why
(12:38):
they chose such a random name to the new music.
No, we, we called it because Gordon from Sesame Street's
a cool guy, I think. I think that's when I
think of Gordon, I think of Gordon from Sesame Street.
So I think like for, for me, that is why
I named it after. I don't know who you named
it after. It was the decision we made though was, uh,
was that what's the name it because so many people's
(12:59):
title problems and the titles have so much meaning that, uh,
we decided to give a name and it just kind
of be there.
A number of songs from the early cassettes were re-recorded
and polished, including fan favorites like Brian Wilson and If
I Had a Million Dollars. Now about that song, it
would be released as one of the singles from the
album and become one of their signature songs, I mean,
(13:20):
even to this day, but it's one line in particular
that stood out to their Canadian fans. If I had
a million dollars, we wouldn't have to eat Kraft dinner,
but we would eat raft dinner, of course we would,
we'd just eat more.
That line inspired many fans to start throwing boxes of
Kraft dinner on stage. At first, the band thought it
was funny and cute, but eventually the novelty, there's that
(13:43):
word again, wore off. Ed would tell CBC it became
a problem. We actually had to put out a message like,
we get the joke, we love it, but please put
your craft dinner in the bin and we will donate
it to the food bank. I mean, I got hit
in the face, Stephen got hit in the nuts, and
it became a point in the show we dreaded.
Apparently some people opened up the packets and would throw
(14:05):
it on stage so the cheese powder would go everywhere,
which is so gross. I don't even like to think
about it like think of the smell. Anyway, when it
was released on July 28th, 1992, Gordon was an instant hit,
and I mean that. It sold 80,000 copies in Canada
just in its 1st 24 hours of.
Release alone. It would stay atop of the Canadian charts
(14:27):
for 8 consecutive weeks and eventually go on to sell
more than 1 million copies. Here are some bare naked
ladies celebrating having the number one record in Canada with
the new music. We have a number one record in Canada.
We're number one. We're number one. No, it's not like
that at all.
But we did, um, our manager brought us into his
(14:50):
hotel room today to tell us the news and gave
us all those big number one Styrofoam things. We put
them on waved them. With all that said, Gordon may
actually be remembered most for its album cover. It's well.
Let's hear what the band had to say about it.
In an interview with the National Post, Tyler confessed, it's
absolutely the worst album cover in the history of music.
(15:12):
It's like some crappy font with photos of us wrapped
around it. We're all looking overly cute and earnest. It's
just terrible. I actually think he was a little harsh.
I kinda like it.
Despite being the biggest thing since bag milk in Canada,
Gordon was not a hit whatsoever in America. Maybe they
had the album cover to blame. I don't know, but
(15:33):
it did find fans, including some folks at the Fox network.
They commissioned the band to make a video to promote
racial harmony and acceptance of diversity. It seems a little
hard to believe now, but that is actually true. That
is a thing that happened. Bare naked lady.
We looking to keep the momentum going and began to
work on their second album, but this time they approached
(15:54):
things differently. Recording with Katie Lange's close collaborator Ben Mink,
the band moved away from Gordon's goofy nature. Stephen and
Ed divided the songwriting instead of collaborating like they normally did.
They were both suffering from depression. This led to more
of an introspective serious tone to the songs.
(16:15):
Ed would later tell Noisy, I was just less engaged
in general and I think the band was quite fractured
at the time. I think the overnight and runaway success
of the first record had put us into a very
strange place when it came to make the difficult sophomore album.
And I'd had some difficult times. My older brother had
passed away in a motorcycle accident and it was just
a very tough time for me. I wasn't ready to
(16:37):
go and make another record and then the band wasn't
communicating well. The studio process was difficult, so many things
conspired to make that record a really difficult process for me,
and as a result it's hard for me to attach
to the songs on that record.
Released on August 16, 1994, Maybe You Should Drive showed
off a different, more mature side to Bare Naked Ladies
(17:00):
on the strength of singles like Alternative Girlfriend and Jane,
it had some success in Canada, going two times gold,
but it also failed to make much of a dent
in the US market.
It wasn't just the sound of the band that changed,
so did the personnel. Andy, who was ready to leave
during the recording process, finally decided that he was done
as a bare naked lady, instead deciding to pursue a
(17:23):
degree in music studies at McGill University. The band was
back to being a quartet, but not for long.
After Andy Creegan left the band, Barenaked Ladies jumped right
into making their next album. They went back to working
with Gordon producer Michael Philip Voivoda and tried to inject
more fun into the recording process. Once again they found
(17:44):
the silliness and bond through music that helped form the
band in the first place, and they instilled it into
the songs and the album title Born on a Pirate ship.
Weird name for an album, right? Well, if you imitate
the kid on the cover and pull on the sides
of your mouth, you'll get it. I was going on
a horror. I don't know if that super worked, but
(18:04):
you know, those silly ladies. For the band, it was
an attempt to take some of the pressure off that
they had felt making the previous album. Ed would tell
Vice in making Born on a Pirate ship we had
resigned ourselves to like.
OK, we're not going to be this successful pop band.
We're too weird and quirky, and we take too many
left turns in everything we do. Unlike the albums before it,
(18:25):
Pirate ship wasn't a hit with their fans. In fact,
their Canadian audience was shrinking. Steven would tell McLean's, we
went from selling out 4 nights at Toronto's Massey Hall
to not being able to sell out a single night.
It's a hard thing.
Get used to especially in your hometown, so the band
made a drastic move dumping their manager and hiring a
(18:46):
new one in Terry McBride who had achieved success with
one of his former clients, Sarah McLachlan. McBride immediately began
focusing on the band cracking America because often with music
what America likes Canada likes, especially when it comes to
their own artists.
And wouldn't you know it, they finally scored a modest
(19:06):
hit in the US with their song The Old Apartment.
A lot of that had to do with the band
making friends with Beverly Hills 90,210 star and fellow Canadian
Jason Priestley. Not only did he direct the music video,
he also invited them to make an appearance on the
popular TV show to play the song at the Peach
Pit After Dark, a hip.
Club where teens could hang and see cool bands you remember.
(19:30):
Bare Naked Ladies became a five piece again when Tyler
invited his friend Kevin Hearne to join the band, basically
taking over the role Andy left, building their audience in
the US now. They also recorded a live album called
Rock Specta which, surprise surprise, scored another hit for the
band with their live version of.
Brian Wilson, a song that had been in their repertoire
(19:52):
since the early days. Fun fact, Brian Wilson himself loved
the song so much he even recorded a version of it.
Trying to capitalize on their US success, Ba Naked Ladies
went back into the studio to make another record. Stephen
called up one of his idols, English singer-songwriter Stephen Duffy,
to collaborate on some songs with him.
(20:12):
He would tell the Halifax Herald, we hope to make
a good all-purpose summer kind of record, the kind you
just put on and like. I think that's what everybody
tries to do, but I think we really tried. I
don't think we recorded it with a sense of making
something that would do something commercially from the record company's
point of view, but Rock Specta was designed to act
as a bridge between Born on a Pirate ship and
(20:34):
this record, and it did that way better than we
ever expected, and boy.
Boy, did it ever turn out better than they expected.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
What can the BNL fans expect off this one? Are
you able to say anything about this one? Yeah, sure.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
It's a 13 absolutely perfect songs. It's a great record.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
We're really happy with it.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
I think I think in some ways it's it's our
strongest record. Um, there's some great songs and great performances.
First single song called One Week. That was Stephen Page
telling much music about Bareaked Lady's 4th album.
Stunt the single one Week recaptured the giddy playful nature
of the band's earlier work, combining Steven's booming melodies in
the chorus with Ed's comedic freestyle rapping. Both singers presented
(21:19):
highly memorable moments. How many times have you heard someone mimic?
It's been, not to mention all of the pop cultural
reference points in Ed's rap. So let's see Swiss chalet, X-Files.
Harrison Ford, Sailor Moon, LeAnn Rhimes, to name a few.
Ed would tell Much Music that these were all things
(21:40):
that were coming to mind while he was freestyling in
the studio. Where the heck did all those lines come from?
Is that a stream of conscious thing that you're seeing?
It was, it was uh that was written as a
freestyle rap off the top of my head. Did you
mention wasabi, Leann Rhymes, it's all in there. Digging digging
the sushi lately, digging Leann rhymes lately? OK. I feel
it's important to tell you that.
(22:00):
Rhymes loved the idea of being name dropped in the song,
though she was a little confused at first. Ed would
tell Anna me in one week I sing the lyric,
Big like Leanne Rhimes, and she burst into our dressing
room at a festival once and said, What do you
mean big like Leanne Rhymes? I replied, big like popular
and she said, Oh, I thought y'all was saying I
(22:21):
was fat. In an interview with Newsweek, Ed said he
needed to improvise because he just couldn't finish the song.
I had the structure of the choruses and the idea
of this relationship breakup. I kept trying to write these
rap verses, and they were always crappy. Stephen Page suggested,
Why don't you just freestyle them? The stuff you freestyle
every night on stage is better than the stuff you're
(22:42):
trying to write. I improvised 4 verses literally in a
minute and a half, then I edited the 4 verses
into 2. Then I sent in the demo, which was
just an acoustic guitar, a drum loop, and me singing
the song.
Ed used his family's high 8 camcorder and tripod to
film himself freestyling for a few minutes, then transcribed the
words and edited them. In fact, you can find some
(23:05):
of the best couplets that didn't make the cut in
the liner notes for stunt.
As we've come to expect from the songs we feature
in Encore, one week was the final song Bare Naked
Ladies submitted for stunt, and at first they didn't think
it would make the final cut always, right? Initially they
figured it would just be a bonus track or B-side,
(23:26):
but their label Sire loved the song and informed the
band that one week was going to be the lead
single from the album.
One week came out in the summer of 1998, and yes,
it really did become the song of that summer. In
no time, it was a global hit, reaching number 3
in Canada but topping the Hot 100 in the US,
(23:46):
making their first ever number one hit, and confirming that yes.
Bare naked ladies had broken America. True to its name though,
one week topped the Hot 100 for exactly 1 week.
In an interview with Song Facts, Ed joked, I maybe
should have called it 58 weeks, but the title was
more prophetic than I could have hoped.
(24:08):
Of course when it came to performing the song, being
able to replicate it live on stage presented a challenge.
Ed told The Guardian it took us ages to figure
out how to play it live because it's sneakily complicated.
We eventually realized we'd have to trigger all the keyboard
layers and subsonic parts to make it sound more like
the record, but the lyrics, he admitted, were rather easy
(24:31):
to perform, which he likened to playing Tetris, just fitting
them in together with no spaces.
For the music video, they hired Mick G, who had
directed videos for The Offspring, Smash Mouth, and Sugar Ray.
The video featured references to everything from Chitty Chitty Bang
Bang and Evel Knievel to the Dukes of Hazzard and
Starsky and Hutch. It was almost impossible to turn on
(24:54):
much music or MTV in the summer of '98 without
seeing it multiple times a day. One week was everywhere
for months.
And yes, it didn't take long for the goat, Weird
Al Yankovic to parody it, which he did with a
song he called Jerry Springer. Stunt, the album was released
on July 7th, 1998, and it immediately changed everything for
(25:17):
Bare Naked Ladies with the.
of one week. The album entered the Billboard charts at #3,
the biggest chart debut for the band ever. Hackett only
reached number 9 in Canada, but the album went 4
times platinum in both countries and has sold close to
5 million copies to date.
Both the album and the single's success had a lot
(25:38):
of people assuming Bare Naked Ladies came out of nowhere.
Here they are addressing that to much music. Yeah, are
some people perceiving the band as an overnight success down there? I,
I think that's happening a bit, but generally I think
there is the knowledge that we've been slugging it out
for a long time. I think more than any people
are surprised at the level of success now. This this
(26:00):
is our 5th record and uh and.
For this album to enter the chart, the Billboard chart
at #3, like it did, people kind of went.
Including us, including us. When it came to awards season,
the success of one Week and stunt translated into multiple
wins for the band. While they didn't win a Grammy
(26:20):
or MTV Video Music Award, the song earned Bare Naked
Ladies their first ever nominations for Best Pop Performance by
a duo or group and Best Art Direction respectively. At
the 1999 Juno Awards, however, they cleaned up, winning for
Best Group, Best Pop Album.
And of course, best single. One week also won them
(26:41):
two Billboard Music Awards for Best Clip Alternative Modern Rock
and something called the Maximum Vision Award. But the biggest
accolade of all came from the legendary Prince, who is
said to have called Stunt his favorite album of 1998. OK,
I know it seems unlikely. So here is Ed explaining
that to much music. What happened was in an interview
(27:04):
we did one time, we were just, we were just talking.
Nonsense. And Steve said, Steve said, oh, Prince is a
huge fan actually. He, he loves Bare Naked Ladies. I said, Well, uh,
in the words of our good friend Prince, stunt, the
album of 1998. That's right. And I said, yeah, the
artist formerly known as Prince is not a big fan,
but Prince loves us. And we were joking around like that,
and next thing you know, it was quoted everywhere that
(27:25):
Prince said that Prince thought it was the best album.
The funniest part though is we heard that Prince thought
it was the best album of 1998, and we were
all really excited. We didn't realize it was us that
said it.
So magic of TV. We, we encourage, we encourage the
artist formerly known as Prince to have a listen. He
may like it. After years of hard work, bare naked
(27:46):
ladies were finally global superstars, especially in the US, where
they had somehow eclipsed even their popularity at home in Canada.
But after 11 years, what do you think that really
brought you over the top as far as the international
market and specifically the American market is concerned?
What pushed it over the top? Um, I don't know, um,
(28:07):
there was this crazy little single called One Week.
That is the most obnoxious thing I've ever heard you say.
Any Canadian over a certain age knows bare naked ladies
were not any of the following a novelty act, a
one hit wonder, or an overnight sensation. They had been
a national treasure and a constant hit maker in Canada
(28:29):
both before and after one week made them a household.
In other parts of the world, but it's pretty remarkable
to witness the impact the song had on their career.
They are one of only 29 Canadian artists to have
a number one in the US. Heck, even Noel Gallagher
of Oasis knows one week. Though according to a run-in
he had with Ed, Noel might actually think it's called China, China,
(28:52):
Chinese Chicken.
Why it became such a massive hit when it did
had a lot to do with timing. Ed told Exclaim.
The energy was huge, the lyrics were timely, the challenge
of catching them all became a thing. The song became
ubiquitous with that time period. I think it just really
captured a strange band in a wild moment. People were
up for it.
(29:14):
The band have always expressed their gratitude for the song's success.
Ed told NME, I've never understood artists who have a
difficult relationship with their hit songs. When it became a
worldwide number one song, it was great because it was
indicative of what the band does live. It's fun and
super high energy. There was a time when, yes, we
got a little bored of playing it live, so we
(29:35):
just did it differently, like we did it as a
bluegrass song for 18 months before returning to the rock version.
It's also worth noting that when Stephen Page departed the
band in 2009 for reasons I won't get into, Kevin
took over singing his parts with Tyler adding some harmonies.
In the years since its release, One Week has appeared
(29:56):
in a Mitsubishi Lancer commercial on the soundtrack to Digimon.
Movie in the films American Pie, Cruel Intentions, and 10
Things I Hate About You, and most recently in a
hilarious episode of What We Do in the Shadows, where
it's a life anthem at a wellness center for a
group of reformed vampires. They even performed the song on
(30:17):
an episode of The West Wing.
Perhaps the weirdest thing to come from the song's massive
success is a strange unproven theory that emerged on Reddit,
claiming one week was written about a man who kills
his girlfriend with a golf club. Ed would debunk the theory,
calling it.
Hilarious but inaccurate. I'm Ruby Carr. Thanks for listening to
(30:38):
me talk about one week. Join me one week from
now for another new episode of Encore, new episodes every Thursday.
Encore is an iHeart Radio Canada podcast. Download the free
iHeart Radio app and subscribe. Thank you. Thank you so
much for coming.
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