Tea and cake with the Barenaked Ladies
Time: 15:30 06 May 2004
Place: London, UK

THE INTERVIEW

Live CDs
Live CDs from the US and UK tour are available to buy online (or download as mp3s) from nettwerk.com.

Did the Peepshow tour and the reaction that you’ve had to the older songs encourage you to record the live shows and sell them online?
Steve: We recorded all the Peepshows too and just didn’t know what to do with them at the time. But when we staged this tour we were a little more prepared to set it up and get the stuff sold online.
Well, actually we were barely more prepared, we were totally doing it on the fly!
Ed: We’re still figuring it out.
Steve: We’ve been learning how to do it along the way. Cos there are companies that will do it for you. But they charge an arm and a leg. And, it’s not like we sell hundreds of thousands of copies. They sell.. all right.
Ed: Tens of copies!
Steve: We knew there was an appetite for these live recordings and I think people deserved a decent recording of it. Something that we could be proud of that we could release. We realised we had the equipment..
Ed: These things, they’re not just a board tape. It’s mixed for a listener, separately from the whole show.

But I understand that can’t happen over here…?
Ed: It is happening, yeah.
Steve: The first two shows [Bristol and Southampton] were screwed up. We couldn’t get them recorded. But the rest of it, yeah we brought the whole pro-tools over. The only difference is we didn’t bring someone to mix it, so we’re sending the stuff home, they’ll be online probably next week.
And we’ll do some stuff with it. You know, we’ll probably put out some best ofs and Peepshow stuff and compile it in different ways. [yaaay!!]

Is that something that you’ve got a direct input over?
Ed: Yeah, this is our thing.
Shaun: As opposed to record company.?
Steve: Yeah, this is totally separate from our record company. We’re doing it ourselves, you know, with their cooperation.
[At which point, could they not have just confirmed the Reprise split rumours?!
But no. *sigh* And we didn’t hear the rumours in time to ask!]
Nic: It’s good. We all love it. And thanks for releasing the UK shows - you know I thought you would leave it at the US ones.
Steve: Well, I think there’s an appetite even for American fans to hear the UK shows – they know we enjoy coming over here to play
Ed: I’m looking forward to hearing some of those shows actually.

US single release - For You
Steve: We took For You from Glasgow show and mixed it down the other night for a radio edit or something, they were looking for a version. I think they’re going to start working For You on American radio so we wanted a live version as well.
Ed: The management sent us three versions recorded on the American tour, one from Grand Forks, one from Calgary and one from Dallas. They just sent us the mp3s and said we need a live version.
They’re going to release For You as a single over there and they said they wanted to include a live version, so pick one of these three. And we were like, “Last night in Glasgow was better than all those three”, so Steve and Jim mixed it in Aberdeen. Just spent the day mixing it and we sent it off to them.
It’s great to be in a position to be able to make use of the performances that you do.
Nic: I didn’t realise you were so closely involved with that, actually. I think I assumed it was a management thing.
Steve: I designed the cover artwork. Just gave them an idea – they were floundering around with ideas that nobody liked and it was really… well, it was something we foisted on Nettwerk. They’ve been helpful and I think, since, enthusiastic, but (to begin with) it felt like people who manage bands were duplicating CDs all night until they’ve got the previous day’s orders sorted out.
Nic: There's a sweat-shop going on out the back!
Ed: Totally!
[Note: This paragraph has caused some confusion. To clarify Steve designed the cover artwork for the Live CDs.]

Everything to Everyone

Themes:
So, as we mentioned, Everything to Everyone finally got released over here last week. How would you describe the theme of the album?
Ed: It’s got a lot to do with expectations. Both personal expectations and external expectations. And I think there’s a theme running through it about trying to please people and trying to displease people.
Steve: I think there’s a sense of belonging, or trying to find a sense of belonging. Whether or not to go it alone or whether or not to seek community and what happens when you reject that. I think that’s obviously about ourselves and it’s also about the current state of world affairs.
Ed: There’s also another thread running through it, that has to do with chimpanzees…
Steve: Yep. Through all the songs except for 13 of them.
Ed: It’s kind of a blight on the tapestry.
[Mobile phone rings]
Steve sings (Nokia tune) “That’s a phone there ringing”
Steve: I left my phone in here
Ed sings“That’s your cellphone, that’s your cellphone, that’s your cellphone ringing!”

Writing the album:
I understand the writing process for this album was different to the others. Did it feel really different to you while you were doing it? Did it affect the whole process?
Steve: Yeah. It was tough. Cos we’re used to just not having to consult anybody, frankly. Except for each other. And so even if Jim or Kev would bring an idea in, then Ed and I would take it back to my place and work on it for a few days, and we’d take it back and say “Here’s the song”. And it’s kind of not how they imagined it, they still imagined there’d be consultation… well, there was but we’re not used to haggling over lyrics…
Ed: Especially... Jim brought in this really sweet song called “Long While” and it had this great chorus (sings) “It’s gonna be a long while, it’s gonna be a long, long while” and Steve and I wrote a song about descendants haggling over an old guy’s stuff before he dies and they all can’t wait till he kicks the bucket so they can get all his stuff. [LMAO – I’d love to hear this song!]
And Jim had this (unsure face) “That’s… really… good”. (laughs) I think, you know it was a great song. But we felt, I think in a lot of ways, this extra weight of responsibility that they were entrusting us with their songs and we had to write lyrics to them.

Band dynamics:
So how come you decided to change things and write it that way this time instead of the way you’d always done it before?
Ed: Jim and Kevin had just gotten increasingly… frustrated, I guess, with not having their musical voice as part of the band voice, and I think over the years that had just been dictated by schedule more than anything. And convenience… and comfort. When we had time to write it was just a short time and we would do what we’d gotta do.
Steve: Well and they would do solo records and Ed and I would just say, well, there’s your opportunity to do your songs, we don’t have solo records, this is our opportunity to do ours.
But that ends up relegating them to side-men, which is never how we look at those guys. We really look at them as our partners. We knew we had to kind of step up to the plate and allow them to really be our partners.
Ed: They’re great writers too, and they have really strong voices and a lot to offer, so on the one hand we looked on it as just a wealth of more ideas and why not take advantage of that?
But then it was hard to adapt to, because we had our songs that we wanted to finish and all of a sudden we had all these other songs that we felt responsible to turn into these great songs.

Did you discuss this amongst yourselves, the two of you, before you threw it open to them?
Steve and Ed: Yeah.
Steve: We discuss everything amongst ourselves first and then take it to the band.
(laughing)
Ed: (still laughing) There are so many dynamics in a band situation and I think we’re unique in the world of rock bands in that we actually do talk stuff over.
Steve: People always tell us we are unique for that. We always are confounded by that. People who work with us who work with lots of other artists say “nobody else talks things over like you guys do”. I guess that’s how you last 15 years!

Next album:
Will you follow the same writing pattern for the next album?
Steve: I think we’ll be faster than we were with the last one. I suspect if Jim and Kev come up with ideas they’ll probably be closer to completion than they were this time around. But we’ll be open to ideas.
Ed: I think certainly we’ve opened up a new door. And we’re in that hallway now. It just makes sense for us to proceed that way. I think we got a lot of great songs out of it, and I think the learning curve was the lead up to the last record. So I think we can work that way now.

Didn’t you have more time to spend on the last record?
Ed: Yeah. And that was the growing pains of the new way of working and of writing.
Steve: We knew we weren’t in any rush at that point.

This was the first album for a while that didn’t have any Stephen Duffy/Steven Page songs on – are there going to be any more Page/Duffy songs?
Steve: We’ve written a whole bunch of stuff. We haven’t done much with them. They’re kind of on hold right now. But I always enjoy writing with him.

Click here to continue to Part Three