Melody Monday #1: Barenaked Ladies’ Stunt Was the Soundtrack of My Youth
Welcome to Melody Monday, a new weekly (? doubt) thing here at Titanquisitor. This isn’t going to be an album review in the traditional sense, with track-by-track breakdowns and star ratings. It’s just me talking about an album that mattered to me, why it mattered, and what it was like living with it. Some weeks that’ll mean a classic, some weeks it might mean something more recent, but the through line is going to be albums that stuck with me and shaped how I listen to music. Or they could be ones that should have been good but ended up being complete crap.
As I recently bought a new CD player and got my CD’s out of storage, I couldn’t think of a better album to kick this off than Stunt by Barenaked Ladies, which was the first one CD I listened to after getting them back out.
Stunt came out in 1998, and I was 12. I didn’t have a big CD collection back then. I was a kid, money was tight, and you didn’t just go buy every album that caught your ear. So when a CD did make it into rotation, it got worn out. That’s exactly what happened with Stunt. This thing lived in my Discman, my boombox, wherever I could play it, from 1998 all the way through about 2001. For three years it was in heavy rotation, along with Smash Mouth and Spice Girls (I had weird taste as a kid).
Everybody knows One Week. It was the single, it was the song that introduced a lot of us to Ed Robertson’s rapid fire, half rapped, half sung delivery, and it’s still one of the most recognizable songs of that era. It’s a great song and a perfect way to open the album. Fast, funny, catchy as hell. If you were alive and listening to the radio in 1998, you eventually knew every word, whether you wanted to or not.
Stunt, however, is far more than One Week. As great as that song is, it’s not even the third best song on the album. This album is loaded front to back. There isn’t a weak song on it, and that’s rare for me. A lot albums from that era had two or three singles and then a bunch of filler you skipped past to get to the next good track. Stunt doesn’t have that problem.
My favorite track on the whole album, and still is to this day, is Light Up My Room. I can’t fully explain why that song grabbed me the way it did. It’s not the single, it’s not the one anybody talks about when Barenaked Ladies comes up in conversation, but something about it just clicked with me as a kid and it never let go. That’s the thing about music you fall in love with young. Sometimes there’s no clean explanation for why a song hits you. It just does, and it stays that way for decades.
Some Fantastic is another one that deserves way more credit than it gets. It’s got that same clever, slightly off-center songwriting that Barenaked Ladies built their career on, and it holds up just as well now as it did back then. When You Dream is probably my second favorite track on the record, right behind Light Up My Room. It’s got a different energy, a little more reflective, and it showed the range this band had beyond the goofy uptempo stuff people associate them with. Who Needs Sleep is another standout, one of those tracks that proves this band could write hooks in their sleep, no pun intended.
What made Barenaked Ladies special, and what makes Stunt in particular such a good listen front to back, is that they never took themselves too seriously but they also weren’t a joke band. There’s real songwriting craft under the humor and the wordplay. Ed Robertson and Steven Page traded off vocals and styles in a way that kept the album from ever feeling repetitive, and the whole band had a chemistry that just doesn’t happen often. Or has a chemistry, since they’re still going strong today.
I think about the albums that soundtrack certain stretches of your life, and Stunt is one of those for me in a way almost nothing else is. Middle school, figuring out who you are, all those awkward years between being a kid and being a teenager, that’s the backdrop this album played against for me. When I hear these songs now, I’m not just hearing the music. I’m back there. That’s what a great album does. It becomes a time capsule whether you meant for it to or not.
I don’t throw around the word brilliant much, but Stunt earns it. It’s a well crafted, well performed, front to back great record from a band that never gets quite enough credit for how good they actually are at their craft. If you were around in the late 90s and haven’t spun this one in a while, do yourself a favor and put it back on. If you never gave Barenaked Ladies a real chance, Stunt is exactly where you should start.
That’s Melody Monday number one in the books. Come back next week (lol, hopefully, we’ll see) for another album that mattered.
What album soundtracked your middle school or high school years? Sound off in the comments. Always looking for suggestions on what to cover next.
