Which is to say this is a page of facts about Canada’s favorite oddball rock band, the Barenaked Ladies.
• Former member Steven Page is the second-cousin of ‘90s Canadian reggae-rapper Snow (“Informer”).
• Barenaked Ladies are the first Canadian band to have a Ben & Jerry’s flavor named in their honour. In May 2009, the company debuted “If I Had 1,000,000 Flavours,” a takeoff on their song “If I Had a $1000000.” It’s vanilla and chocolate ice cream, peanut butter cups, chocolate-covered toffee, white chocolate chunks, and chocolate-covered almonds.
• The band’s humorous lyrics and stage rapport almost got them a variety show. In 2005, they made a pilot for Fox called Barenaked Ladies Variety Show. The network opted not to bring it to a full series.
• The Barenaked Ladies wrote the music for and recorded a musical version of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It was produced by the Stratford Festival of Canada in 2005. (Why didn’t they write the lyrics? Because the Shakespeare dialogue was pretty good to begin with.)
• In 2013, Ed Robertson wrote a song with Chris Hadfield, a Canadian musician...and astronaut. To promote music education, Robertson performed the song live in the CBC studios, with Hadfield joining in via satellite from the International Space Station.
• It’s a tradition to throw Kraft Dinner onstage at their concerts.
• The group as a whole cameoed in Dave Foley’s 1997 film The Wrong Guy as singing policemen.
• The band first got popular in the U.S. when Canadian actor Jason Priestly got them a gig playing on an episode of his show, Beverly Hills, 90210.
• One of the band’s biggest hits is “Brian Wilson.” It’s about the depressive, agoraphobic period of the Beach Boys’ singer’s life. In 2000, “Brian Wilson” was covered at a series of concerts by…Brian Wilson.