MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: BARENAKED LADIES - HITS FROM YESTERDAY & THE DAY BEFORE

It just so happens that I saw Steven Page perform last Saturday, at Fredericton's Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival, just the man himself on guitar, along with the fantastic Mr. Fox, Kevin, on cello.  He did a mix of songs from his first solo disc, First Page, and a selection of BNL songs he wrote and sang over the years.  Since I was MC, I was backstage watching on the monitor, and one Green Room chat begin, "Boy, they had a lot of hits."  Yes, they did.  We forget that sometimes.

I think because the biggest hits were and still are played so often, we tend to forget there's a pretty good-sized body of work from the band, and not all of them wacky and fun.  The band could be sneakily subversive, with a backwards solo stuck on, or they could rock out just a bit too much for regular radio, but somehow it got played.  There were puns, but sometimes there was an underlying sadness, and often it was Page with the sensitive stuff.  In a fair world, they wouldn't be thought of only as a comedy-pop band, but rather as a bunch of occasionally jokey big thinkers with killer hooks, a Canuck Crowded House.

So for every If I Had $1,000,000 we all know, there are ones like Too Little Too Late we forget, but that's track that always impresses me when I hear it again.  Same goes for Call And Answer, and It's All Been Done, but I'll happily pass on hearing One Week again for oh, a decade of so.  I notice that song is Ed Robertson's, whereas the others are Page numbers.  Just sayin'.

I have a problem with this best-of, because it pales next to the last one they issued, called Disc One:  All Their Greatest Hits 1991 - 2001.  Unfortunately, the past ten years haven't offered many true hits to add to the canon, and to put a few recent ones on this new collection, some major tracks were left off from the past.  Sacrificed are Be My Yoko Ono, Jane, Enid and their famous cover of Bruce Cockburn's Lovers In A Dangerous Time.  There's no Shoebox or What A Good Boy, either.  What we get are five you couldn't name if I offered you $1,000,000 in Kraft Dinner.  The big grab here is the theme song for the TV show The Big Bang Theory, which has never been on an album before.  Itsounds better in the 30-second burst you get from the screen, although it's not much longer than that.

One benefit to the inclusion of the later tracks is we do get to give another chance to last year's non-Page disc "All In Good Time", with the track You Run Away, where Ed proves in fact he can both write and sing the sensitive, non-goofy pop song.  Is there life left in BNL?  Or are they going to be Canada's R.E.M., hanging on too long? Tough call at this point.