He gained fame as the frontman of the alternative rock band Barenaked Ladies from 1988 to 2009.
Now, Steven Page brings his talents to Rams Head in Annapolis, Maryland, on Monday, Aug. 12.
“I’ve actually played that venue two or three times now,” Page told WTOP.
“It’s a great place to play, I love doing shows there and for some reason, I have this weird thing where if I have dreams about having a gig, in my mind I’m imagining playing the Rams Head in Annapolis. I have no idea why. I imagine walking down the street to that gig, then going into their weird backstage area, then going out on stage and playing.”
Born in 1970 in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, he grew up listening to a variety of bands.
“I’m still Beatle-obsessed, I have been since I was probably 7 years old,” Page said. “But as a teenager, I was really into The Smiths, Violent Femmes, Billy Bragg, anything with Paul Weller, so The Jam and The Style Council, they were huge to me as well.”
But his personal hero was Duran Duran founder Stephen Duffy.
“He was my absolute favorite and still is,” Page said.
In 1988, he and his former elementary school schoolmate Ed Robertson would officially form the band Barenaked Ladies. They independently released a cassette tape in 1991.
“We had this five-song cassette that we were distributing ourselves and it became oddly huge in Canada, it went gold, which had never happened,” Page said.
“Record stores started asking for copies of it and it went nuts, so people started talking about our band. We had been turned down by every label in Canada, but a couple people played our tape for Seymour Stein at Sire Records … they came to us and offered to sign us.”
Their debut studio album “Gordon” (1992) topped the Canadian charts thanks to hits like “If I Had $1,000,000” and the Beach Boys tribute “Brian Wilson,” while their second album “Maybe You Should Drive” (1994) started making some inroads on the American charts with songs like “Jane” and “Alternative Girlfriend.”
Still, it was their third album “Born on a Pirate Ship” (1996) that delivered Barenaked Ladies their first U.S. hit single with “The Old Apartment.” By singing, “This is where we used to live,” Page made us think he was regretting a breakup, only to flip our expectations at the end of the song.
“I had been in this apartment in Toronto, it was a third-floor walk-up, and it wasn’t a great place, but you realize when you move out of it into maybe a better place and you’ve stepped up somehow in life,” Page said.
“But you look back at these times, even though they may be difficult times, they are still important memories. I had gotten calls from my old landlord that they had mail for me that was showing up and I thought, ‘I don’t know if I even wanna go and pick it up, there will be someone else’s furniture and I’ll have to see the very vague remnants left of my imprint there and somebody else’s.”
Their fourth album “Stunt” (1998) would prove the biggest of the band’s career, thanks to the No. 1 hit single “One Week” with rapid-fire lyrics delivering pop-culture references and clever turns of phrases: “Like Harrison Ford, I’m getting ‘Frantic.'”
“We didn’t expect as we were putting it together for it to be a huge No. 1 hit single,” Page said.
“We thought it was a fun album track palette cleanser rooted in what we would do in our live show. … I suggested, ‘Why don’t you go home tonight and just improv a bunch of raps?’ [Ed] did that and came back the next day with all of these hilarious improv raps. … I still hear it and think, ‘That’s a weird track.’ I love it.”
The same album also featured the hit song “It’s All Been Done,” which went No. 1 in Canada.
“Initially that was the one that we thought was going to be the first single, then ‘One Week’ became kind of the dark horse,” Page said.
“I think what happened is that Canadians are super judgmental of their own people and they get suspicious of anyone who makes it in the U.S. I think they were taken by surprise by our success because we had built up these pockets of die-hard audiences in the U.S. … so I think they were trying to play catch up by the time ‘It’s All Been Done’ came out.”
Their fifth studio album “Maroon” (2000) featured “Pinch Me” with slower verses between rapid choruses.
“It was a song that had similar elements that people were used to from ‘One Week’ and it had some jokes in it that I think were pretty good jokes, but it was really about depression,” Page said.
“That to me, that kind of sucker punch, is my favorite kind of way to work, where you have these songs about dark things and you can somehow make them feel light in a way or make them perhaps fool you into thinking they’re something different.”
After experimenting with side projects like “The Vanity Project” (2005) and “A Singer Must Die” (2010), Page left Barenaked Ladies to pursue a solo career with the album “Page One” (2010), followed by the two-parter “Heal Thyself: Instinct” (2016) and “Heal Thyself: Discipline” (2018) and most recently “Excelsior” (2022).
“It was 20 years in the same group,” Page said.
“When you start a group when you’re 18 with the same guys and then you’re now all of a sudden almost 40, you’re different people and you have different goals. It just wasn’t really working for us anymore, which was painful. I thought I was going to be in that group forever, and when I wasn’t, it too me a while to figure out who I was and what my goals were, but it’s been 15 years since I left now, so now I’m at a point where I can look back with great memories but happy where I’ve taken my career.”
Today, Page’s music has transcended the radio to television where he sang “Get in Line” on the “King of the Hill” soundtrack and theme song to “The Big Bang Theory” — Bazinga!
“There’s absolutely people who probably didn’t even know who we were except for that one song, so that’s been huge for us,” Page said.
Hear our full conversation on the podcast below:
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