Pretty big news to anyone that’s a fan of Barenaked Ladies (I don’t think I’m the only one on the boards), Steven Page has left the band to pursue his solo career and other endeavors (hopefully not the kind of endeavors that got him arrested last Summer for cocaine possession.)
The band released a statement on their webpage here. Statement reads as follows:
As a longtime fan of the band (going back to 1993) this is pretty disappointing news. I’m glad to see that they’ll continue recording and touring w/o him, but honestly - BNL just isn’t BNL w/o his voice and songwriting talents.
Wow. I’m surprised and disappointed. Not to knock on the other members, but he was my favorite, the guy you think of when you hear the band name. The Vanity Project work he did was okay, but not as fun or good as his BNL work.
I suspect neither BNL nor Page will be better off after this split.
It’s pretty much the end of the band in everything but name; for all the notion that they were a five-man (and then four, and then five again) band, it was always really a Robertson-Page duo with a band behind them.
I was shocked when I saw this on the Toronto Star website a few minutes ago.
I also agree that this will probably not work out well for either Page or the band, he was a major part of their sound and identity.
I caught their live show maybe a half-dozen times when they were just a duo touring the college bar circuit back in the late '80s and the chemistry between them was special. A lot of their act back then was a sort of musical free-form improv type thing with a lot of back and forth between the two.
I don’t see either of them approaching their earlier heights without the other.
I lived in Toronto in 1994-95 when BNL had just released their second album and it seemed they were about to fall into the same category of “huge in Canada but just cannot make it in the States,” something like Spirit of the West or Sloan or Blue Rodeo at the same time. I brought a copy of Gordon back home and a lot of my friends liked, it but I figured the band was going to remain a curiosity in the US. It’s a testament to their awesome live show (which, sadly, I never saw) and dedication that they broke through here.
Sad to see that this is effectively the end of the road for them. But it’s strange that of the four bands mentioned in the last paragraph, BNL fell apart first. I mean, who would have bet money on BNL breaking up before Sloan?
