The band, even now, can be a polarizing prospect, an unfortunate after-effect of its inescapable 1998 single “One Week,” from the group’s multi-platinum fourth album, Stunt. (For those who haven’t reflexively stopped reading to this point, I promise the band’s overall catalog is far more rewarding and less grating than one of its weakest songs.)
In the wake of that smash hit and the ensuing heightened profile, Barenaked Ladies would go on to make two of the most satisfying pop albums of the last two decades with 2000’s Maroon and 2003’s Everything to Everyone, which marked its 20th anniversary on Oct. 21.
Everyone was, ultimately, the culmination of many things for the band, then led by singer-songwriters Ed Robertson and Steven Page, and rounded out by guitarist-keyboardist Kevin Hearn, drummer Tyler Stewart, and bassist Jim Creeggan. It was conceived in the wake of a year-long hiatus, which the band undertook in the wake of Stunt and Maroon.
This record, produced by Ron Aniello, marked the final major label release of BNL’s career to date, as well as the band’s last (as of this writing) significantly charting single, with “Another Postcard” cracking the top 10 of Billboard’s US Adult Top 40.
Everyone was also the beginning of the end of Page’s time in the band, as he began to slowly separate himself from the group in 2004, ultimately leaving for good in 2009.
“Frankly, the band itself was a five-way democracy and one of the great things about it is that it’s been about the five-way collaboration, but it’s also one of the things that’s made me decide to be a solo artist,” Page told the Associated Press at the time of his departure, which came a year after Page charged with drug possession (the charges were ultimately dropped).
For his part, in later years, Robertson lamented the “broken relationship” with Page and acknowledged the substantial emotional fallout from Page’s departure.
“We did get to a place in our relationship with Steve where we had to go our separate ways, and that was super difficult,” Robertson told Metro in June 2021. “It made me question everything about the band because it just wasn’t that fun anymore.”
But in the early 2000s, fun was still in the air — these 14 songs stand as some of the band’s finest work, an apex they have yet to reach again in the ensuing decades.Becoming preoccupied with the shadows instead of sunshine is an inescapable part of growing up and growing older for musicians. That’s not to say all pop acts become irretrievably consumed with mortality, but only that selling songs about such subject matter is a considerably tricky proposition.
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Contemporary critics, however, would beg to differ: The schtick, by this time, had worn thin — “They haven’t found a new way to say the same old stuff,” as Rolling Stone put it — although the All Music Guide’s MacKenzie Wilson was charmed: “Everyone is probably Barenaked Ladies’ most honest album — always touching, but serious and completely open for the first time in their 15-year career.”
So finely calibrated is the balance between inane and insightful that Everyone can swing from the sublimely stupid, simian-centered “Another Postcard” — itself a shameless recycling of the rap-singing first found on the aforementioned “One Week” — to the harrowing “War on Drugs,” which features Page howling the lyrics “For the very fear that makes you want to die/Is just the same as what keeps you alive/It’s way more trouble than some suicide is worth.” (“Testing 1,2,3” also veers dangerously close to a “One Week”-style presentation.)
What can be obscured by the band’s outwardly peppy, goofy demeanor is the ease with which it can reach past the gloss to showcase startling vulnerability.
Those who think of Barenaked Ladies only as a slap-happy, self-referential collective are missing out on deceptively poignant Everyone tracks like “Next Time” or “For You” (a sweetly folky showcase for Robertson, who, particularly on Maroon and Everyone, is often outshone by Page).
That psychological elasticity is a hallmark of BNL’s first six albums, but there’s something about the way it’s deployed throughout Everyone — perhaps the sustained burst of fame in Stunt’s wake provided a confidence not fully embraced previously — that stands out. The fizzy satire of “Shopping” is as intoxicating as the wry anguish of “Aluminum” and its central metaphor or the tender, achingly romantic closer “Have You Seen My Love?”
For the first time in its career, Barenaked Ladies shared writing duties among its members — perhaps not coincidentally, some of Everyone’s stronger tracks credit Creeggan and Hearn as co-writers — which gives the album a bit more dimension. (The band adhered to this creative process until 2010’s All in Good Time, when an outside writer was again brought in to collaborate.)
The albums following Everyone are a frustratingly mixed bag, with one or two highlights amid the more middling efforts.
As Barenaked Ladies has endured for 35 years, the band has swerved between nostalgia — mounting a regular series of summertime tours with a variety of contemporary acts — and modernity, pressing forward with new projects (the band’s 14th and latest record, In Flight, dropped in mid-September).
Rare is the band that can sustain itself for so long and also maintain rigorous quality control. Given Page’s departure and subsequent pursuit of a solo career (one trafficking in material not too dissimilar from the sort found on Everyone), it’s hard to know whether BNL would have found itself, somewhere along the timeline of its career to date, with another extraordinary record like this one.
Regardless of Page’s membership, some of the Barenaked Ladies’ drift is attributable to age — after all, pop music is indisputably the province of the young. Becoming preoccupied with the shadows instead of sunshine is an inescapable part of growing up and growing older for musicians. That’s not to say all pop acts become irretrievably consumed with mortality, but only that selling songs about such subject matter is a considerably tricky proposition.
That said, if any band was well positioned to navigate that gap between glossy pop melodies and time’s grim realities, it would be Barenaked Ladies. Everything to Everyone stands as an enduring testament to the group’s facility with such tension, an exemplar of pop music’s ability, at its best, to find artistic reward within that dichotomy.
