Steven Page-Founder of Barenaked Ladies

takin- a walk Steven Page-Founder of Barenaked Ladies for Bonus Friday.mp3

Buss Knight [00:00:01] I’m Buzz Knight, the host of Taking a Walk Music History on Foot today. Our guest is the Grammy winning founder of Bare Naked Ladies. He’s bringing his wit and wisdom to City Winery in Boston on May 2nd. You know, his classic songs like Brian Wilson If I Had $1,000,000. What a good boy. It’s all been done. And so many more with the band. He sold over 15 million albums. His voice is one of the most enduring voices of our generation. We’ll talk with Stephen Page next on Taking a Walk. Well, Steven, thanks for being on. Taking a walk. Do you recall how you got hooked on music?

Steven Page [00:00:50] Well, you know, there was always music in my house growing up. My parents listened to a lot of music. My dad was actually a drummer, kind of a jazz drummer he grew up being, but played, you know, played in a wedding band and that kind of thing. You know, occasionally New Year’s Eve, those kinds of shows. When I was a kid. And so I would always, you know, I’d hear him practicing. His drums would be set up. But I think the thing that really made me want to make music was I mean, I was obsessed with the Beatles as a kid who wasn’t in a lot of ways. But I remember once listening to I think it was paperback writer, and it had one of those tinkling, all those little tape recorders, portable tape recorders before before the Walkman with no single earphone that would go into the the headphone jack. And the earphone came slightly unplugged. And the the signal, I guess, went out of phase and all of a sudden I could hear like the bass guitar by itself. And I realized that that kind of mass of music that I was hearing that just sounded this kind of like I didn’t know what it was. I knew I loved the sound of it, but I didn’t realize I could identify individual people playing individual parts, and all of a sudden I could do that. And I went, Oh, oh, that’s what I want to do. I want to make one of those parts that goes into this kind of mysterious mass of music.

Buss Knight [00:02:12] And do you remember the first time you performed in front of an audience?

Steven Page [00:02:17] Well, I was in the school musical of Wizard of Oz when I was seven, and I have no recollection of my dad says that he remembers watching me. You know, it’s just whatever one of the whatever the Lollipop league or something like that. But I remember my dad saying that when I walked on stage, I was very shy and really quiet kid. And all of a sudden going on stage and watching my face kind of light up and kind of become this different person. I think he felt like then that was the thing that that that showed him that was I was a was meant for the stage.

Buss Knight [00:02:53] Well, besides your dad and the Beatles, who you mentioned, who were some of those other early inspirations?

Steven Page [00:03:01] Well, you know, choral singing, I sang in a choir all the way through high school. There’s kind of all city choir of 100 students from Scarborough, Ontario, where I grew up. And it was, you know, certainly not the coolest thing to be part of, you know, not not the kind of thing I’d go to school the next day and tell my friends about. But for those 3 hours of rehearsal every Wednesday afternoon, it was the most amazing sensation to be singing with these other people and making this noise. That is, you can’t make by yourself, you know, you can’t just do this thing by yourself. All of a sudden your voices are combining and you’re stressed and you’re striving for something that is beautiful. And maybe you can’t, as a teenager, express that desire to make something beautiful. So then you just do it. And because I wasn’t a sports kid, right, Like I didn’t play sports, I didn’t really follow sports, so I didn’t have any idea what it was like to be on a team trying to make something great and be excellent and singing in a choir did that for me. So that was a big thing. But also I became kind of addicted to too, collecting music by the time I was maybe 15, where I had started to understand that, like buying a new album could provide me with a whole set of new feelings, like where place to go, if I wanted to feel a certain way, if I wanted to either be comforted or if I wanted to enhance the feeling that I had, or if I wanted to obliterate a feeling that I had, I could put on a different album. And so every day I would just spend time buying albums. I remember my mom yelling at me for spending all my money on records, so I started buying cassettes because they’d fit in my coat pocket, and then she would know I’d be coming home with records. So that. Time when I was, you know, 15, 16 and I was buying. Whether it was just anything I could find in the in the in the cut out bins, like where were the deleted. End of end of run records were that were to 99 and it could be the talking heads or could be dexs midnight runners or it could be Japan. I would just become completely obsessed with that stuff.

Buss Knight [00:05:23] And what was your first concert that you went to?

Steven Page [00:05:27] Because my parents were musical and I actually actually ran a folk festival, the Mariposa Folk Festival, in Toronto when I was really young. I would go to that, but I guess the first concert that I went to without my parents would have been Queen at Maple Leaf Gardens, 1981.

Buss Knight [00:05:46] I think I have goosebumps. How amazing was it?

Steven Page [00:05:53] It was great. It was amazing. Yeah, it was. It was it was kind of mind blowing, just knowing that I was in the same room as those guys. And those are records that I really had gotten to know so well. But, you know, the shows that really kind of like, really changed the way I looked at. I remember being a little bit younger, my parents taking my brother and I to go see Harry Chapman and the way he talked to that audience and connected with them to me had such a huge influence and impact. And then later, when I was a teenager, going to see artists like Billy Bragg would be a great example. Another person who was like socially conscious, great sense of humor, and a real sense of connection to that evening’s audience. So he would always he’d be in Toronto and he’d be talking about Toronto politics or something. You think, How does this guy from England know about what’s going on here? But that really affected me and I think it really influenced how I relate to audiences even to this day.

Buss Knight [00:06:56] So besides musicians who taught you and influenced you on storytelling, who else shaped you in terms of your storytelling?

Steven Page [00:07:08] You know, I think there are certain there are certainly people in in comedy that I admire comedians who could make you feel more than just kind of like just more than just cheap laughs. I mean, I love a good, cheap laugh, don’t get me wrong. I mean, I love I love slapstick and I like a good bit of cheap comedy. But I think people who really make you think connect. So whether that’s Richard Pryor or or somebody like. Another songwriter, but would be would be Randy Newman, where there’s a sense of kind of comedy and storytelling that is has multiple, multiple layers, I guess. And that’s that’s always been a big a big thing for me.

Buss Knight [00:07:58] So Boston is a very special place for you. Can you talk about what Boston means to you as you’ll be coming to City Winery?

Steven Page [00:08:07] Yeah, sure. I mean, we used to when I was in the Barenaked Ladies. I mean, we played Boston so many times and the Boston area. I remember, you know, playing at the Berklee School of Music and Somerville Theater and. Like, you know, smaller places even before that, like Paradise Rock Club and stuff in the early days. And then it just slowly but surely through the the mid to late nineties, it just kept kind of growing and growing and in a way that was outsize to the rest of the United States, where every time we’d come back to the Boston area, we’d play a bigger, bigger place. I remember playing at what I don’t know is it’s still called Harbor Lights. It’s not still called Harbor lights, is it. Yeah, it’s got to have, it’s got to have some dot com whatever it is now. Crypto crypto lights. But you know, I remember playing down there and kind of like a feeling that it was just on the on the verge of something huge like it You just feel this excitement in the audience. There was always this great connection, just a sense of something really special every time we played there. I mean, we, we did have, we had a record company guy, Andrew Govatsos, those who work for Reprise, our record company, who worked harder and better than just about anybody else I knew. And I mean, we just loved him so much and he loved us and we kind of do anything for each other. So we had this kind of like sense anytime we came through town that we were going to do something amazing. So then when when Stunt came out in 1998, our album stunt, remember we were in New York City playing I think it was the Today show that morning, and we had a a record release in Boston. That day was the day the album came out and we were going to come up. It was originally supposed to be at Newbury Comics, and then they said, Well, let’s do it somewhere bigger because it’s gonna be a bigger, a bigger audience. So we’ll do it at City Hall Plaza. And so we we decided, okay, that’s fine, we’ll do this at City Hall Plaza. We got in the bus in New York City in the morning and drive up. And as we’re pulling into Boston, the traffic is ridiculous. Like there’s just it’s at a standstill and we’re like, what’s going on? Why is this so insane? And they. Andrew has turned to us and said, You’re what’s going on? Everybody was heading into City Hall Plaza and we go in and set up there and we were set up essentially for what would have been like an in-store performance we would normally, but the collection of instruments we would bring into a record store to play. We set up in front of what ended up being like 35,000 people, people in the parking garages all around us, on the rooftops, in every window. And we stayed. We played and it was, you know, the biggest audience we’d ever played for. And we stayed and signed autographs until late that night, probably nine or ten that night we signed autographs until the last person was signed for. And that kind of that kind of sealed the deal for the special relationship with Boston.

Buss Knight [00:11:21] Yeah. And you were like practically, almost like the house band for a while with the BMX. That’s right.

Steven Page [00:11:29] So, yeah, but, you know, they were there were multiple radio stations that were. I mean, that was one thing was quite often there’d be an artist that like only one station would play and there are multiple stations, the river, etc. that played us in Boston all at the same time. We had this great, great relationship. We were lucky to have that kind of across the board.

Buss Knight [00:11:49] And it’s still a great relationship to this to this day. And you know, it still means a lot. So can you describe the joy of performing after, you know, COVID and just coming back to life? How special is it for an artist?

Steven Page [00:12:07] It’s really I mean, in the summer of 2021, when things started to open up the first time, it was like it was the most kind of moving and weird thing. I remember my first show back was in New Jersey and it was in a park. It was a free show in a park. And, you know, thousands of people showed up for this thing and it poured rain so bad that they had to turn the P.A. off because I think we’re going to start, you know, blowing up. So I did this show completely acoustic in the pouring rain for this audience who just stuck around. And we were so hungry for for live music. I think now what happened in the in the year and a half since then is that everybody in the world went out to try to make up all the dates that they missed during COVID and that we came. The competition out there is so strong that it’s really hard to tell whether a show is going to like either be wildly sold out or completely empty. It’s it’s really unpredictable out there right now. And I don’t I don’t know the full explanation. I think people have a lot of choice right now and they’re trying to figure out how to spend their concert dollars. So if they decide they’re coming to spend it on me, it seems like everybody else is coming to spend it on me. If they’re coming to see something else through their town, then I might be the one who suffers.

Buss Knight [00:13:32] So talk about your current band mates. Who are they? And talk about the art of collaborating?

Steven Page [00:13:38] Sure. I, I travel with the Stephen Paige Trio, which is myself and Craig Northe on guitar. Some people may know him from his his own band, The Odds, who are one of the great Canadian rock and roll bands. And he’s just a fantastic songwriter on his own, But he’s also does some some writing with me. And then I have Kevin Fox playing cello. I’ve known both these guys for over 20 years, both Canadian guys who I’ve just I’ve always really admired and we’ve played together as a trio now for, I guess, about eight years, and I can’t imagine it any other way. We’ve become really close friends and just, you know, we have that kind of sixth sense that really good collaborators and that developing where you don’t have to say what you want or need. Most of the time you can really predict the other person’s movements and not in a way that feels like that they are hackneyed, but just in the sense that like we’re just really tuned into each other’s. I guess I’m going to say vibrations. Yep, I just said it. Vibrations.

Buss Knight [00:14:46] It’s okay to say it. So what’s your writing process? Do you write every day?

Steven Page [00:14:54] I don’t. Every day. I think I should write every day. But then I don’t. Then I go. Then I. I have a C. I’m. I’m actually surrounded by about four different notebooks right now with bits of little songs. And then I’m writing things into my notes app in my phone, and then I’m writing stuff into my pages app on my computer. So I have like scraps of stuff everywhere and voice memos. And then it’s the matter of getting back to them and kind of finishing songs. That’s the part I’m not good at starting songs. I’m very good at finishing them. It takes a little bit more concentration and. Dedication. For instance, I’m working on a new record right now, a follow up to the Vanity Project, which is a record I did with the English singer songwriter Stephen Duffy. I did that about 20 years ago and we’re doing a follow up now, and I know I have some lyrics to finish and every day I get to the studio and think, Let’s finish those lyrics, and then I find something else to do. So it’ll get done, it’ll all get done. But that’s, you know, sometimes you really have to force yourself.

Buss Knight [00:15:55] So in closing, can you just describe how special music is and why it’s so important to us?

Steven Page [00:16:03] Well, music, even if it doesn’t have lyrics. But I mean, music is a way for all of us to express the things we can’t express on our own. You know, I think when I’m writing a song, it’s a gift. I try and make it a gift to somebody out there, somebody that I don’t know and may never know who doesn’t even know. They need that song to help them process how they’re feeling about something. Because the greatest pieces of music for me have taken me by surprise when I think. I didn’t think anybody else had thought about that. Or even just instrumentally. It takes you to another place. Like I was saying earlier, it’s a matter of like, does it comfort you or does it enhance a good feeling or does it help you concentrate on why you’re feeling a certain way, or does it help you cover up the bad feelings? Like those are all valuable things and music more than I think, just about any other. Art form has that has that power?

Buss Knight [00:17:13] Well, I can’t wait for everyone to see. You May 2nd at City Winery. Boston is a special place for you, Stephen Page. And thank you for the joy and the music that you continue to give us.

Steven Page [00:17:25] My pleasure. Great to talk to you. Taking a Walk.

Buss Knight [00:17:28] With Buzz Night is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts.

Buss Knight [00:17:32] Or wherever you get your podcasts.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.