When Barenaked Ladies began their career with Gordon, the group won the hearts of many with a simple, laidback and humorous style.
Now, like any savvy business would, the band's new album, Snacktime!, sees the Toronto group targeting that all-important 18 to 35 demographic again with much the same sound and comic timing.
The only difference this time around is that it's more like 18-month-olds to 35-month-olds they're after.
"We've done a few kids' songs over the years, a few one-off songs and stuff," singer Steven Page says, with keyboardist Kevin Hearn seated nearby. "And then the songs like Another Postcard and (If I Had) $1,000,000, fans like them and kids end up latching onto them.
"There are 11 kids in our band right now and pretty soon they won't be kids anymore, so we have to do something for them. We wanted to share it with them so now's the time."
Snacktime!, the band's first children's album released in early May, is a 24-song collection which young and old can appreciate for different reasons. Page says balancing between keeping kids and parents enthused wasn't an easy process.
"I think one of the things we were always aware of was that you just can't talk down to kids," he says. "They're much more sophisticated than a lot of children's records give them credit for being. They love a variety of styles of music, they love to laugh and they love to dance and that was the focus. And it's still us. It's still our same songwriting style and musical sound."
Both Page and Hearn say the band wrote roughly 35 songs over the course of a month last year in Toronto for the record. But getting from start to finish proved to be a bit tougher than anticipated.
"We didn't really want to premeditate what it was too much," Hearn says. "So the first day it was just coming in and sitting in a circle and playing each other songs. Up until that point it was a bit of a mystery but once we did that it all sort of went downhill from there."
"Downhill in a good way," Page adds.
Of the two dozen tracks, songs such as the Johnny Cash-leaning 789 and Eraser come to the fore, as does the Hearn-penned The Canadian Snacktime Trilogy, inspired in part by Gordon Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy. Page says the group felt a bit more freedom to try new things with the record, even if some ideas were basically inside jokes that sort of fell by the wayside.
"Sometimes when we're writing songs we have the opportunity to get really silly but we say, 'Nah, let's stop there,' " he says. "With the kids stuff it's like, 'Don't stop, just keep going.' So songs like I Don't Like or Crazy ABC's are rants and talks, it has the feel of a live show and they're essentially live takes."
The group is taking the summer off to spend time with their children before hitting the studio in the fall for a new studio album to come out in the spring of 2009.
