'Stunt' Double

Barenaked Ladies reflect on the 20th anniversary of the album that charmed Weird Al, David Duchovny and 4 million record buyers.

- Zach Schonfeld

IT FEELS LIKE A DIFFERENT universe. In fact, it was the summer of 1998: Bill Clinton was testifying in front of a grand jury about an affair with a White House intern, Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine” was the biggest song in the country, and the movie Armageddon was grossing millions.

Up north, a group of quirky Canadians who called themselves Barenaked Ladies were plotting their world takeover. Ed Robertson and Steven Page had formed the band 10 years earlier in Ontario, and the musicians were already local heroes thanks to their 1992 debut, Gordon, with its signature sing-along, “If I Had $1,000,000.” Two more ildly successful albums were released during the mid-’90s before Stunt pushed the band to a place it never expected to be. The album, which dialed up the hooks and condensed the group’s spirited live shows into 50 minutes of not-too-jokey pop, included the freakishly catchy “One Week,” a rap-rock beast of a single that has become so unavoidably entrenched in the pop consciousness that simply singing the first two words (“It’s been!”) can cause strangers to burst into song.

By the fall of ’98, “One Week” was a No. 1 hit, and Stunt was moving millions of units stateside. “It was weird,” Robertson says 20 years later. “We’re a band that has always seen ourselves as underdogs or the class clowns. It’s still weird when I look back on it.”