Barenaked Ladies Survive Disaster to Make New Album, 'All In Good Time'

To say 2008 was a difficult year for quirky Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies would be something of an understatement.

After releasing the children's album 'Snacktime' in May of that year, singer/guitarist Steven Page was arrested in July for drug possession. That August, singer/guitarist Ed Robertson was involved in a plane crash but walked away unscathed.

The next year, BNL and Page parted ways, but according to Robertson the writing had been on the wall for a while.

"Yeah, it was a long time coming," Robertson tells Spinner during a stop in Toronto promoting the band's new album 'All In Good Time.' "I think people pointed undue attention at Steve's arrest. I crashed a plane, my mom died. It was an incredibly tumultuous year. But those are all just dots in a very complex puzzle.

"The bottom line is we worked together for 20 years and we did a lot of great things together and it was time to part ways and everybody knew it. It was a hard thing to do but it was the right thing to do. We're in a different place now and really happy doing it."

'All In Good Time,' released on March 23, is the band's first post-Page effort. It's also an album Robertson says resulted in a "fairly major energy shift."

"We really perhaps over-thought it and once we started recording it was just like, 'Ahh,'" he says. "I think it was the fact that we were being successful doing something that we were unsure of. We had a lot of trepidation going into it. We didn't know what it was going to be like or how to do it. As soon as we started doing it, it was like, 'Of course, we've been a band for 20 f---ing years. We know what we're doing.'"


Working with producer Michael Phillip Wojewoda -- who also produced the band's 1992 breakthrough album, 'Gordon' -- the group wrote 27 songs, but pared the album down to 14 tracks.

"There are some great songs not on this record just because they don't hang as a body of work with the whole record," Robertson says. "The beauty of the modern industry is that they'll all get out there, they'll be bonus tracks. It's not like you're putting your children on a boat to the New World and waving goodbye to them, which is how it's felt in the past."

The album already has some wind in its sails from the single 'You Run Away,' the first song Robertson wrote for the album which tackles the issues that transpired in 2008.

"It was very cathartic -- a raw, emotional song to write and very healing at the same time," he says. "We've been through so much and it was just a chance to process all of that and shed some of it and work through it. It's great playing these songs now because it feels like I'm celebrating not being there anymore. It's nice to be able to sing about crashing a plane."

And while there are other pop nuggets like 'Every Subway Car' and 'I Have Learned,' perhaps the oddest number is the quirky 'Four Seconds,' sounding like a mash-up between Taco's 'Puttin' On The Ritz' and Gogol Bordello.

"That song just sprang off the pad," Robertson says of the song written with Ian LeFeuvre (Starling, the Hundreds and Thousands). "It's so goofy, we were going for this mixture of my hip-hop improv with a bizarre Eastern European pub song and I just loved the result, it's so ridiculous."

Although there's no word on the next single, Barenaked Ladies will tour Canada and the US this spring. The band has about 50 or 60 shows under their belt as a four-piece, but Robertson is still eager to see how a proper tour goes.

"It's an interesting stage for us. Having parted ways with Steve, we have this body of material that we're totally solid about but we also have 20 years of material that we have reinvented as a four-piece," he says. "We've really got to be on our toes because nothing is going through the motions anymore -- everybody is taking on new parts, new vocals and new roles so it's a fun challenge."