Every year, countries in search of musical glory select artists to represent them on the global stage. If provinces got the same shot, what song would we choose to represent Ontario?
This summer, we’ll find out. In TVO Today’s Ontariovision Song Contest, 16 beloved standards and newer classics will go head to head — and you’ll get the chance to back your favourites.
So kick back, relax, and listen to some trademark Ontario tracks. Voting begins in August, and in September, we’ll reveal the province’s signature song.
Song: “The Old Apartment”
Year: 1996
Album: Born on a Pirate Ship
Artist: Scarborough band Barenaked Ladies, formed in 1988, has included, at various times, Ed Robertson, Steven Page, Andy Creeggan, Jim Creeggan, Kevin Hearn, and Tyler Stewart. The current lineup is Robertson, Jim Creeggan, Hearn, and Stewart. They achieved mainstream success in Canada with the 1992 release of Gordon, which featured "If I Had $1000000" and "Brian Wilson,” and gained increasing popularity south of the border following the release of live album Rock Spectacle, in 1996. “One Week,” from the 1998 album Stunt, spent one week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. “The Old Apartment,” the lead single on their third studio album, Bornon a Pirate Ship, was written by Page and Robertson.
Barenaked Ladies: The Old Apartment
The song that would become Barenaked Ladies’ breakout international hit started from perhaps the most pedestrian feeling imaginable: Steven Page, then one of the lead singers, didn’t want to pick up his mail.
The band’s early success meant that Page could move out of his old apartment and “on to bigger and better things,” he says: “I'd gone from being in this little third-floor walk-up in a house to being able to actually buy a house, which was, you know, bizarre and amazing. And I knew how lucky I was.”
Then he got a phone call from his old landlord, who said there was some mail for him. “And I thought to myself, I don't really want to go there, because I don't want to see what they've done to my little apartment,” he says. “I was proud of this place.”
His reluctance struck him as “a ripe subject to write a song about,” he says. “For me, it's a song about feeling like maybe I had not made an impact on the place I had lived, as if I had never been there. The idea of, once I’ve removed myself from a situation, do I even exist anymore? And then I invented the story of a much more sinister person who was breaking into a place and scaring the hell out of the people who lived there.”
I know we don't live here anymore /
That was his starting point, Page says, but Ed Robertson was responsible for the song’s sound. “It started as a soft acoustic one, almost like a folk ballad. I brought the song to Ed Robertson, my partner in the band, and he said, ‘What if we made it a rock song instead?’ And we just started playing it as if it was a harder-edged rock song, almost like an AC/DC style.”
Although the character in the song — who, he says, was never intended as a stalker terrorizing an ex, a common interpretation from fans — is Page’s invention, the old apartment is a real place in the west end of Toronto. He doesn’t share the address, but, like any good Torontonian, tells me the closest major intersection: “It was at Dundas and Ossington, which, at the time, didn’t have the same cachet that it had 15 years later.”
I ask him what it felt like to have a song explicitly set in Toronto go big in the United States.
(Wikimedia)
“The interesting thing about that song in the U.S. was that it was a hit in individual places. Like, it would be a hit in Detroit, and then it would fall off the charts, and then it would be a hit in Chicago, and then it would fall off the charts,” says Page. “That idea of having these regional hits is such a thing of the past. It doesn't exist anymore. But we were lucky enough to have that. And we had a record company who promoted that song to radio for literally a year, over a year… they would just never, ever do that, especially now.”
At the time, Page says, Barenaked Ladies’ popularity was waning in Canada. “We were working in the U.S. a lot more. So it kind of felt good. We were singing a song that was specifically about where we were from. We always carried with us a sense of, I guess, duty to our home country about being able to wave the flag.”
So why should Ontarians choose “The Old Apartment” as the province’s signature song?
“I don’t know how any other songs are going to be able to compete with either “A Place to Stand, a Place to Grow,” [written for the documentary commissioned by the provincial government for Expo ’67] or “Bobcaygeon,” Page says, laughing. “But, in the meantime, I think anybody who sees a place where they grew up or where they lived when they were first independent, and they can go back and see and barely recognize it — I think that's really the essence of it in a way that we can all relate to. Places move on without us. Sometimes progress is good. Sometimes it's horrible. But it happens without us. And that's a strange feeling.”
I don’t bring up Page’s departure from Barenaked Ladies, not so much because I’m actively trying to avoid the subject but because, in a sense, Page is already addressing it. “I think if we can look back at the good old days knowing that the good old days were full of terrible moments as well as great moments, then we're living a more realistic and poetic life,” he says.
Barenaked Ladies and the Persuasions: The Old Apartment
At least when it comes to “The Old Apartment,” it seems like the strongest emotion that comes through is gratitude. “The fact that people still remember it is an amazing thing for me. I was just out on the road opening for the Who in the U.S., and I played that song, and the audience knew the song,” he says. “And it was so gratifying to me to know that some song that I wrote in my bedroom in 1995 is still resonating with people.”
He says there was a moment the band realized the song was special. “It was amazing when it happened. I remember being in a studio called the Gas Station, in a building in Liberty Village, before Liberty Village was renovated and gentrified. It was just a largely empty warehouse building. And I remember … the whole band kind of realized what [the song] had transformed into something special. And Tyler going out — it had these big windows, and you could see the CN Tower, and we were like, ‘Sunset!’ And he's doing this dance, pointing at the city of Toronto. Kind of as if to say, ‘Hey, check this out. Wait — just you wait.’ And I'll always have that memory of that moment when the feel of the song really came together.”
Ontario Hubs are made possible by the Barry and Laurie Green Family Charitable Trust and Goldie Feldman in Memoriam.
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