Barenaked Ladies Back To Being Indie, By Choice

Once an indie musician, always an indie musician. At least that's the philosophy prescribed by Toronto's Barenaked Ladies.

BNL began their musical career with entrepreneurial spirit. Their homespun The Yellow Tape was released independently in 1991 and became the first indie cassette to achieve platinum status in Canada by selling more than 100,000 copies. Since then, the band have sold 14 million records, received numerous awards and been part of the large Warner roster for many years.

Despite these successes, BNL are returning to their D.I.Y. roots for their first album of new, original material in three years.

Barenaked Ladies Are Me, recorded at band co-founder Steven Page's farm northeast of Toronto, hits the streets on Sept. 12 in a variety of formats via the group's own Desperation Records label.

"We've seen the main structure of the music business struggling to keep up with the way things are changing," Page says. "As much as they have the wealth of a great back catalogue and a big staff and all those kind of things, it's pretty easy for an artist to get lost, even established artists like us, in the shuffle of that kind of stuff and left behind.

"At this point, our contract with Warner had expired, so we forged a new trail. Warner is just helping us a lot in Canada, but we have staked a new way of doing it. For us, it is about trying to figure out what fans want. How do they want their stuff delivered? How do they want to interact with the band and the music, and being able to offer that to them with far fewer impediments?"

While Barenaked Ladies Are Me will arrive in record stores as a 13-song CD, the disc will concurrently be offered in two different digital formats the same day. One features the same tracks from the CD version, plus two bonus tracks, while the other is a 27-song digital package called Barenaked Ladies Are Me: Deluxe Edition. They can be downloaded from iTunes or the band's website.

After taking guidance from fans, BNL have taken their D.I.Y. approach one step further by letting listeners arrange and mix the tracks themselves.

"A few other bands have done it before," Page says. "I think Nine Inch Nails did it a couple of years ago.

"That's how we make the music. We use computer recording programs like ProTools and GarageBand and realized that that is how people are making music now, and the line between amateur and professional is so blurred that we are willing to embrace that."

For Barenaked Ladies Are Me, the band enlisted the help of engineer Susan Rogers, who produced Stunt — their biggest selling album outside of Canada.

"She had actually retired after that record and went off to university to get a degree in animal psychology," Page says. "She was in the United States, and now she is at McGill doing her doctorate, so we said, 'Do you want to commute and help us make a record?'

"She is an amazing engineer. She worked with Prince for years and recorded some of his biggest records. She is also great person. We had her come out for a few weeks. After that we did the rest of it ourselves with a young guy named Paul Forbes. He records every show of ours live. He's a young ProTools whiz and is super organized. Then, we brought [Bob] Clearmountain on board to mix it."

The video for the album's second single, "Wind It Up," will also get fans into the action by giving them the opportunity to show off their air-guitar skills.

"What we have done is have people post themselves 'air-guitaring' to this song on YouTube, and then we will take their videos from YouTube and make our video from it," explains Page.

"That is what is really exciting right now. There has always been such a division between the tools that professionals use and the tools that amateurs, aficionados or fans use, and often that was something that was there as a wall between these two groups. I think those days of that wall between the creator and the consumer have to end."

The downloading and file-sharing issue is a debate that record companies, lawyers and musicians alike have been battling for several years now, with many artists advocating against the practice. But Page feels that it does more good than harm.

"If our fans like to share music, I'm not going to stand in their way. I would like to be able to sell as much music as I can and make a living off of it, but if I'm always trying to put a wall between how they like their music delivered and how they actually do get it, they are not going to get it anymore. I would rather that people listen to the music than not, because I know that means they will come back for more — either come back and buy the CD or the concert ticket or whatever else.

"As technology changes, right now sharing is free. But maybe there is a time in the future when sharing is paid. Maybe it is part of your phone bill or your cable bill or whatever else, and I would like to be on the beginning of that curve."

BNL will start touring the U.S. in October and a full Canadian tour is slated for February.