Today in Tedium: As many of our regular readers are probably aware, both Ernie and I are massive fans of Canadian folk rock band, Barenaked Ladies. Throughout my youth, teenage years, and early adulthood, their music provided a significant part of the soundtrack of my life. I loved everything the band released and held them in high esteem alongside the likes of “Weird Al” Yankovic and They Might Be Giants. The first BNL song I ever heard was “The Old Apartment,” which I found on one of those CD samplers of relatively new/not yet known records (it also contained “Peaches” by PUSA and “Quiche Lorraine” by the B-52s; I don’t remember where I acquired it). A recent article in Stereogum, part of writer Tom Breihan’s exhaustive look back at every number-one song in Billboard history, took an unbelievably harsh approach, a level of hatred rarely seen outside the Nickelback commentary genre. The takedown, to be blunt, tackled me, and I still have the rugburns on both my knees. As a result, we felt like the time for rebuttal from actual BNL fans was in order. So put on your favorite BNL record (editor’s note: this one is a good choice) and get ready for a blast from the past as we talk about the late ’90s radio hit, “One Week.” — David @ Tedium
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one
The number of weeks the song, “One Week” stayed on the Billboard Hot 100 when it came out. There’s a fun bit of coincidence to that, especially since the song actually stayed on the charts for some time, peaking at #1 on 10/17/1998. (As we’ve covered in the past, this was partly due to a quirk in how the Billboard chart was calculated at the time.) The band would chart several more times over the next decade, demonstrating their enduring appeal beyond their biggest hit at the time.
Get back together, come back and see me.
One Week was an unlikely hit at an unlikely time
There was a time in the early-to-mid ’90s when most of us had no idea who Barneaked Ladies were. Although incredibly popular in their native Canada, the band simply wasn’t getting the recognition they deserved in the old USA. It wasn’t until they had a minor hit with a song from their live record, Rock Spectacle that folks in the U.S. began to take notice. In his 2022 appearance on Cory Wong’s Wong Notes, he talked about going from playing in front of crowds to suddenly being big in the US.
Per Robertson, they went from being an afternoon slot on Blues Traveler’s H.O.R.D.E. tour to being megastars in the United States almost overnight.
As Robertson puts it, Gordon was huge in Canada, but “it barely made a dent in America.” BNL would play massive, record breaking shows in Canada but “couldn’t get arrested in the U.S.,” as Robertson tells Wong. He believes Rock Spectacle ended up putting them on the map in the US, which eventually led to “One Week.”
Now, we’re not here to tell you about the history of the band, but those early years provide some important context for all the strange things that had to happen for “One Week” to become a signature hit.
So what led to the song becoming such a mega hit? It has a lot to do with Sue Drew at Reprise Records. Drew was head of A&R at the time. As an oral history in The Guardian puts it, when Stunt was nearing completion, sound engineers David Leonard and Sue Rogers brought some mixes to Drew. She loved the record as it was coming together. That’s when Leonard and Rogers told her about “One Week,” which Drew believed would be a hit because it was charming and different.
Robertson thought it would probably just be relegated to a B-side originally. But the song ended up becoming their lead single because Drew saw significant potential in it—and she really hit the mark on that one!
So after swapping out the demo’s drum loop with some fine drumming and layering some complex guitars on the chorus, they had the basis of what became a legendary tune. The process in and of itself is amazing and more than just a footnote in rock history.
The band enjoyed the song immensely (and let’s be honest, it shows during their live performances). Drummer Tyler Stewart told Rolling Stone back in 1998 that the band loved it “right off the bat.” He told them:
We thought it was great, just hilarious. I’d heard stuff like that before from Ed, ‘cause every night onstage he busts out improvised raps that are quite similar to that. That’s the idea of the song.
What started out as a serious song ended up becoming an improvised tour de force that put the band on the map.
The verse and the chorus have absolutely nothing to do with each other—and that’s part of what makes the song great. Growing up with BNL as part of the soundtrack to my life inspired me to play more guitar, keep things fun, and was largely responsible for a certain song about pineapple pizza actually getting recorded and released a few years ago.
And it all began with improvisation, too. How does that not make it a solid tune that belongs in the cultural zeitgeist?
“Why don’t you just freestyle it, like you do in every show? The freestyles you do off the top of your head are better than the stuff you’re trying to write.”
— Steven Page, founding member (and former singer/guitarist) of BNL, advising Ed Robertson to just do what comes naturally—improvising fun rap lyrics. In an interview with Billboard around the release of Grinning Streak, Robertson discussed having difficulty making his pre-written rap lines sound good. So Page told him to improvise, and the rest is history.
Live versions of “One Week” are the best versions
There’s nothing quite like listening to a Barenaked Ladies live show. Whether it’s their original incarnation featuring Steven Page or the current four-person group consisting of Ed Robertson, Jim Creeggan, Kevin Hearn, and Tyler Stewart, a BNL show is a fun, enlightening, and transformative experience.
“One Week” is a staple of their concerts, which is made twice as much fun when you realize it’s essentially a studio version of one of Ed Robertson’s impromptu raps that he always performed in concert.
In concert, the band likes to experiment with the way they perform the tune. In some of the BNL Plays Everywhere For Everyone shows, it takes on notes of bluegrass. In their performance on Farm Aid in 1999, the song is a pretty straightforward version, similar to the album (but with more prominent and lush guitar and organ). Other shows feature a bit more improv here and there.
And then there was that time they played it as a very harmonious duet during one of their online “bathroom sessions.” That was over 15 years ago, by the way. Either way, the band has a ton of fun playing the song on stage. The live performances of the have changed considerably since Steven Page left the band in 2009—but they’re different in a good way. Personally, I love the song regardless of the iteration and never get tired of it.
Robertson told Newsweek in 2018 how different the band has become since Page’s departure. In regard to “One Week,” Kevin Hearn and Tyler Stewart sing Page’s parts in the chorus. They continue to evolve the song live and it looks like it’s going to live on in our collective imaginations for a long time to come.
Plus, it’s fun to play on the guitar if you’re into that sort of thing.
2018
The year Steven Page briefly reunited with the band when they were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Guess which song they played during the show? Yep, you guessed it. Since his departure from the band, Page has remained active in music, with some material that’s well worth checking out. Page does some phenomenal online concerts from time to time that are worth checking out—including a recent Zoom concert featuring his performance of the entire friggin’ Gordon album! (Editor’s note: True story—I went to a Steven Page concert on Zoom in April of 2020. It was great.)
(via Discogs)
“One Week” is the Seinfeld of late ’90s folk rock
In a 2018 interview with Stereogum—yes, the same publication that inspired this piece—Ed Robertson discusses how Stunt was one of the first times the record label, Reprise Records, was really actively involved in the band’s career. When the label saw the potential of a song like the live version of “The Old Apartment” hitting the Top 40, they got excited, deciding to work more in depth with the band.
One of the things that we sincerely disagreed with in that original article was the assertion that the song is like those throwaway gags on Family Guy. If anything, the song is more like an episode of Seinfeld, where some fun and interesting things happen, but it’s ultimately about nothing much at all.
If anything, “One Week” is the Seinfeld of pop music and a great deal of the song was improvised. It’s basically a catchy song about nothing. And that’s kind of what makes it great. Robertson—you know, the guy who wrote the song—agrees. He told Stereogum in that same interview, “It is a hodgepodge of pop culture references and inside jokes. I can tell you where every single line comes from and what it means, but they don’t relate to each other, and they don’t relate to the chorus.”
The rest of the band seems to concur. In 2013, Kevin Hearn told Billboard that “lyrically, it sort of mirrors a lot of things that were in our lives at the time.”
Ed Robertson had a unique take on the song, saying “It’s like Busta Rhymes mixed with an actual flu pandemic …”
He further breaks down that the “your brain stops ticking” line is loose reference to an avian flu pandemic that was going on at the time. How is that not a stroke of sheer genius?
Since then, it’s appeared in so many movies and TV shows it’s hard to keep count. But one thing remains certain: the song and its accompanying music video are still a ton of fun after all this time.
Not bad for something Ed wrote in a few minutes. Sometimes a joke or a fluke can become much larger than itself and enter our pop cultural imagination.
And that’s precisely what “One Week” did. Sure, it can seem a little dorky at first, but it’s supposed to be.
The song is so much more than a mere “ostentatiously clever birthday-party routine.” It’s fun. It’s silly. It has staying power. And sometimes it’s okay to just enjoy a little bit of goofiness in your life. The song is certainly not “a plague on humanity.” It’s something that brings many people considerable joy (which is increasingly important in our somewhat dreary world). That’s nothing to be ashamed of or scoff at. I’m out even sure what constitutes “shallow and bankrupt fun” in that author’s mind, but “One Week” was a gateway for other people to finally get a chance to enjoy the wonderful, irreverent, and playful world of Barenaked Ladies on a grander scale.
Plenty of musicians look to BNL for inspiration. They have high profile fans like Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. There are even people who saw the band when they were kids who still enjoy them today. Tyler Stewart talked about it in a 2015 interview with The Aquarian:
We have our fans that have grown up with us that are now in their late 20s, early 30s, and then we have their parents, or their kids! Sometimes you can see a face in the crowd that you think, “Wow, I remember when you were 12 at our shows on someone’s shoulders, and now you’re all grown up here with your own kids!” It’s pretty surreal, but we’re lucky enough to have both.
Oh, and let’s not forget the plethora of parodies and unique performances the song ultimately spawned. If nothing else, the song is a testament to just how much fun—instead of being self-centered or gloomy—music can be at times.
It’s simultaneously art and nonsense, which gives it an enduring appeal that is sure to last for another 25 years (or at least a week or two after we all stop talking about it).
“[Reed] set up his guitar and he started playing and he said ‘OK Kevin, if I play this and asked you to play a melody on top, what would you do?’ He did that over and over, different ideas coming at me from different angles.”
— Kevin Hearn, discussing the experience of auditioning for his childhood hero Lou Reed (another Tedium fixation) in 1999. How they came together was a sweet story, and one that happened while “One Week” was taking over the world. Hearn was diagnosed with leukemia right around the time the music video for “One Week” was filmed, and he spent months in the hospital as his bandmates toured the world amid major success. During this period, Reed sent a note to Hearn, who the Velvet Underground pioneer knew was a huge fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of Reed’s work. After Hearn recovered, he was given the chance to audition for Reed, and got the job, later becoming Reed’s bandleader while remaining a member of BNL. Upon Reed’s death in 2013, Hearn told the CBC, “It’s strange, I’m grieving both my musical hero and a dear, dear friend at the same time.” Hearn was also quite close with another notable elder statesman of rock, Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip, playing on his famed solo album Coke Machine Glow.
Fantastic Parody Versions of a Very Funny Song
In my previous issue of Tedium, I ended up mentioning a certain radio personality a lot. It made sense, given the subject matter. But Ernie pointed out that I find ways to work him into a great deal of my work. He’s not wrong. Just in case you missed the thread, I replied, “it’s a signature of sorts.”
I’m sure if we did a content analysis of my work, there would be plenty of mentions of this particular disc jockey. I’m certain if you listened to his show over the past 20 years, you’ve likely heard several parodies or bizarre versions of “One Week.”
Thanks to the magic of the internet and unique comedy shows, there are even more ways to be exposed to parody songs. For one reason or another—maybe it’s the driving rhythm, the quick flow, or just the sheer joy of the song—there are many parodies and unique performances of the song out there. There are a few that truly stand out and some others that are worth hearing at least once.
“Jerry Springer,” ”Weird Al” Yankovic
Anyone who was around in the 1990s undoubtedly remembers The Jerry Springer Show and “Weird Al.” Heck, we’ve been Al fans for years (I’ve got the concert ticket stubs to prove it). So imagine my surprise when the Al made a parody of another one of my favorite band’s songs. Much the humor in the song plays directly into the craziness that was the Jerry Springer Show around the time and is as irreverent as Al typically gets. Per Nathan Rabin, Al uses words and phrases in the song you thought he never would. (from reading the article, Rabin doesn’t seem to be a fan of “One Week” and we can respect that).
BNL made a pre-“One Week” appearance on The Weird Al Show and have a genuine reverence for Al’s work. Robertson referred to him as a “nice dude” and a “really good musician.” He’s not wrong. Al is pretty amazing—I got to see him back to back live last month—and his parody is still funny years after the talk show that inspired has lapsed into irrelevance.
“Five Years,” Tom Smith
For fans of the best science fiction series ever—Babylon 5 (sorry, Ernie)—there’s a song out there that sums up everything nicely while being catchy at the same time.
When you want to catch up on the complex narrative of Babylon 5, sung to the same melody as “One Week,” look no further than singer songwriter Tom Smith. Well known in the world of filk and funny music in general, Smith is a hilarious, smart, and entertaining presence.
Smith—a big fan of both the show and BNL—decided to write a song about B5 as a “One Week” parody. As he explains on his Bandcamp page:
This is basically a lot of the highlights of the series, set to the tune of BNL’s breakthrough hit, “One Week”. If you’re still confused, ask around online. You’ll find someone who will happily regale you about either or both for just HOURS.
It’s a fun song, worth hearing multiple times (we recommend buying Tom’s CD) — even if you’re not much of a Babylon 5 fan.
“One Week Parody,” College Humor
Hailing from January, 2009, this parody of the song manages to be funny and meta at the same time. It’s essentially about how the catchy nature of the song makes it kind of annoying sometimes and how much the singer is tired of hearing it for a decade later. But unlike the article that shall not be named, this one’s tongue in cheek and funny. It’s well-written and follows the meter of the original perfectly. It captures friendly and benevolent criticism of the song because it’s supposed to be funny (I do miss College Humor sometimes).
Parts of the parody refer to the original song as a bunch of nonsense—which isn’t entirely wrong—and it treats the original with a measure of respect that some parodies fail to do. Besides, Ed Robertson would probably laugh about it and agree to an extent.
And then there’s this clip from What We Do In The Shadows, when Nandor sings a few seconds of the song that we just had to include this one on the list.
There are probably many more parodies and cover versions to come (the pandemic already inspired at least one) and the song will likely continue to inspire musically inclined folks well into the future.
“I was a pop culture nerd before it was kind of easy to be one. The fact that I have all these tools at my disposal to make me even more nerdy is a lot of fun. It feels like I’m tapping into that zeitgeist. Even songs like ‘One Week’ with its myriad of situational-up-to-the-week pop culture references. I thought that was cool and I’m always kind of playing.”
— Ed Robertson, talking to musician Cory Wong about playing lyrical Tetris with his work. He goes on to discuss how he loves to rhyme and fit all the pieces together in crafting each and every song.
BNL released a new album in 2021 called Detour De Force. Let’s just say it’s a fantastic record from start to finish. As for BNL, they’ve certainly been around a while but their work seems far from finished.
Sure, the band might have been responsible for the theme song to my least favorite show, but that does nothing to diminish them in my eyes. The band has consistently released new albums, did a cool virtual Christmas concert last year, were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2018, and consistently releases new material.
In 2020—during their series of “selfie cam jams”—the band performed an enthusiastic version of the tune with a very interesting guitar solo. It’s worth checking out, whether you’re a fan or not.
In 2022, they went back on tour (finally!) and Ed Robertson worked with Rush’s Lifeson and Geddy Lee to create the Rush pinball machine from Stern Pinball. For us, the song isn’t a product of its time, but a classic meant to last for the ages.
So what do you think? Is “One Week” the pinnacle of BNL’s career, over hyped nonsense, or just a fun way to spend 2:49 before diving into the rest of the Stunt album on an unreasonably warm summer’s day? Perhaps it’s all of those and none of them at once. Whatever the case, we still love BNL and will be listening to them for a long time to come. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to listen to the final show from the Barenaked Ladies Play Everywhere For Everyone tour (yes, the album grew on me since we wrote about virtual crate digging a few years ago). But that’s a story for another time.
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Find this one an interesting read? Share it with a pal! And thanks again to David for writing another great piece.
