Everything to Everyone

Track Listing 1. Celebrity 2. Maybe Katie 3. Another Postcard 4. Next Time 5. For You 6. Shopping 7. Testing 1,2,3 8. Upside Down 9. War on Drugs 10. Aluminum 11. Unfinished 12. Second Best 13. Take It Outside 14. Have You Seen My Love? Details Producer: Ron Aniello Distributor: WEA (Distributor) Recording Type: Studio Recording Mode: Stereo SPAR Code: n/a Album Notes Barenaked Ladies: Kevin Hearn (vocals, acoustic & electric guitar, mandolin, accordion, piano, organ, keyboards, vibraphone, saw); Ed Robertson, Steven Page (vocals, acoustic & electric guitar); Jim Creegan (vocals, double-acoustic bass, electric bass); Tyler Stewart (vocals, drums, percussion). Additional personnel includes: Blue Man Group (percussion). Recorded at Royaltone Studios, North Hollywood, California between April & June 2003.

From its tongue-in-cheek cover art on down, Barenaked Ladies’s Everything to Everyone is a surprisingly tough-minded survey of early 21st-century culture. Often accused of being too clever for their own good, Toronto’s Ladies here provide a good deal of subtlety along with the expected tunefulness and genre-hopping. "Testing 1,2,3" is a complex song about nostalgia, singing in a rock & roll band that’s loved for perhaps narrow reasons, and watching one’s ex-girlfriend find a new lover. "Maybe Katie" presents two different views of the male fear of commitment before dropping a key bit of information about its title subject. And "Shopping" is a fist-in-velvet-glove tune in the tradition of the Housemartins’s "Happy Hour;" could its happy-go-lucky chorus be a skewering of George W. Bush’s pro-commerce response to Sept. 11? At the very least, it demonstrates that these guys fully understand the art and the implications of being all things to all people. --Rickey Wright