Barenaked Ladies

Barenaked Ladies Are: Experienced.
Having toughed it out for over 15 years, this five-piece Toronto based band has witnessed births, marriages, deaths and near-death experiences in addition to their prodigious professional accomplishments. They are also a top concert attraction and musicianship has been one of the band’s founding principles ever since they started out, in their teens, at a Summer Music Camp in Ontario, Canada.

Barenaked Ladies Are: Prolific.
Their very first recorded output, “The Yellow Tape” was a self-produced, home-marketed five-song cassette, which went Gold in Canada setting their native recording industry on its ear and triggering a do-it-yourself “indie” revolution in the 90’s. Over the next decade and a half, BNL have amassed an impressive catalogue, from their precocious debut Gordon and career making live album Rock Spectacle to their multi-platinum breakthrough Stunt and its follow-up Maroon. Mixing socially conscious observations with crafty lyrics, BNL have racked up memorable hits like “Pinch Me,” “If I Had A Million Dollars,” “Brian Wilson,” “The Old Apartment,” “Too Little Too Late,” “Falling For The First Time” and the Billboard Number One Hit, “One Week.”

Barenaked Ladies Are: Pleased to announce the simultaneous release of multi-platform versions of Barenaked Ladies Are Me on September 12, 2006 through their own label, Desperation Records.

Barenaked Ladies Are: Bridging the digital divide.
While a conventional 13-song CD will be available in stores, BNL are also pleased to be able to offer their music directly to their fans online. One package features the 13 songs from the physical CD plus 2 bonus songs. In addition, they will offer fans a 27-song digital package, Barenaked Ladies Are Me: Deluxe Edition. Also planned is a physical USB flash memory stick complete with all 29 new songs and special bonus content.

Additionally, Barenaked Ladies Are Men, a CD comprised of songs not on the physical Barenaked Ladies Are Me CD, will be released in early 2007.

Barenaked Ladies Are: All grown up.
While they’ve retained their boyish sense of fun over the years, the musical and lyrical themes on Barenaked Ladies Are Me demonstrate a maturity you’d expect from five guys with young families who have played together, like, forever. Like all of us, sometimes they don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“For us,” says Page, “with the events going on in the world and our country's unfortunate slide to the right of the spectrum, it was inevitable that we carried on with some of the political themes we explored on Everything To Everyone (2003). But for me now, it was truly about making those situations personal.”

Barenaked Ladies Are Me, their most melodic and accessible album since Stunt, is also the band’s most cohesive and holistic set of songs. More than ever, they wrote together, jammed together and lived together, raising each other’s standards and blurring the lines of who wrote what.

Although some of the material had been kicking around, in various forms, for a while, Page and Robertson met up at Page’s house in the spring of 2005 to begin writing songs specifically for the new album. While admittedly, they didn’t write many songs in this initial session, the two did manage to come away with three of their personal favorites from Barenaked Ladies Are Me: “Home,” “Rule the World With Love” and “Wind It Up”.

After a summer life break, the two reunited in the fall, this time at Robertson’s cottage, for another concentrated writing session.

“We spent 4 or 5 days there,” says Robertson, “and finished 13 or 15 songs. It was a really productive and creative time. We wrote "The New Sad" together in what seemed like about 45 minutes, but was probably a few hours. Steve had brought a bunch of partial songs, and I had too. We finished them all together. Jim's track, and Kev's 4 were written by them alone.”

“Meanwhile across town,” says Page, “Kevin was writing about a dozen songs per day.”

Secluded in what he calls a “little cabin” deep in the forests of Northern Ontario, Hearn was indeed enjoying a rather prolific period. Beside the songs he brings to Barenaked Ladies Are Me, Hearn completed a whole other solo work to be released separately.

By the time the band reconvened at a Toronto rehearsal hall in the fall of 2005, they had around 35 songs to learn, arrange and rehearse, which they eventually pared down to only 29.

“I can’t believe the sheer volume of songs we had,” Stewart recalls.
“We cleaned out all of the cupboards with this CD,” adds Hearn.

In showing their new songs to the group, Page and Robertson abandoned their previous method of making elaborate multi-track demos, a process which Page admits was sometimes a little limiting to the other guys.

“This time,” says Page; “Ed and I did very simple acoustic guitar and vocal ideas in GarageBand to allow for other members to be as creative as they could be and to put their own per