Barenaked Ladies – Disc One: All Their Greatest Hits (1991-2001)

I pulled this CD off the pile and thought ‘yeah, well, this won’t take long. Everybody knows all of these songs anyway, so I can just whip something off and be done with it.’

As it turns out, this is not the case.

I have a loooong history with BNL. It goes back to Gordon, and a couple of crazy guys we knew in high school who played it for the rest of us kids who weren’t as hip as they were. They also spent stupidly high amounts of money on Oakley sunglasses, but that’s not likely related.

But it was because of them that I was a first-day buyer for Maybe You Should Drive, and went back and got Gordon straight away. I also own three Mint (M) copies of the band’s indie, yellow cassette they made in their basement. Am I a geek?

I was with them for a long time, even stood in line for a first-day release autographed copy of Stunt at 333 Yonge’s HMV, yet they lost me after Maroon. Why? I don’t blame them, not one bit. They do what they do. But my personal musical tastes had changed, dramatically, and they weren’t so much a part of my musical landscape after that. And Steven Page left, at some point. Whatever the reasons, it wasn’t the same without him.

I still love them. They’re like old friends. I toss on those old records and am transported back, and even now when I listen to them it inspires me to go and do something similar for myself, write some crazy songs and put them out there and see what happens… yeah. It hasn’t happened yet. But it might! Just you wait and see!

So, this disc. It collects a metric shit-ton of amazing tunes up to 2001. I’m a big, big fan of the early stuff, so a hits set like this is both a) right in my wheelhouse and b) redundant, since I know all the records inside and out. There’s lots of stuff that should’ve been included, but that’s true of every hits set. I do not envy anyone whose job it is to cull through a collection and make up a 1CD set of a band’s entire discography. I’d rather clean toilets. In bus stations. On the night shift. Without proper supplies.

So if I own the records, do I need this disc? Not really, except there’s a couple of new (at the time) tracks. It’s Only Me (The Wizard of Magicland) is a lifting pop/rock/new wave gem that could double as a TV show theme. And then there’s Thanks That Was Fun, a mid-tempo loper. The rhyming lyrics feel forced and something to be endured, to me, but the rest is really pretty great.

Also cool is the inclusion of a King Of The Hill soundtrack song (Get In Line), and the band’s cover of Lovers In A Dangerous Time, which had previously only ever been found on the tribute CD to Bruce Cockburn. On this CD, Brian Wilson and What a Good Boy (with its original outro, left off the album) are both from the Rock Spectacle live album. The rest are album tracks and they’re all solid fucking gold.

The liner notes are annotated by Steven Page himself, so you know they’re funny.

In Sum:

This was a total flashback listen for me. It was also absolutely and completely enjoyable. I do (usually) complain about live tracks on hits sets (I fucking hate it), but here it hardly matters, because we all know these songs in our hearts and minds anyway. It’s a snapshot of a period of my life, and I’ll proudly hang it in my locker.