Barenaked in the Gardens

Although I've been to numerous Barenaked Ladies concerts over the years, I regretted not seeing them last summer when they came to Red Rocks for one of the first stops on their Grinning Streak tour. I had to make up for it last night when they returned to play at a botanic gardens on my side of town.

The band has been making music for more than 25 years now, and they clearly still have fun doing it. As always, a Barenaked Ladies concert is a fun, bouncy event with lots of banter with the crowd, improvisations, and playfulness.

As always, their set list included their most well known songs: One Week, the theme from The Big Bang Theory, The Old Apartment, If I Had $1000000, and others. But it included a few more unusual selections too. I thought they'd stopped performing Brian Wilson after Steven Page's departure from the band, but it was back in the mix last night. And in something like half a dozen shows, I'd never heard them play the goofy and nostalgic Grade 9 until now.

Interestingly, their set didn't include a single song from their previous album, All in Good Time. Band leader Ed Robertson has said in interviews that that album came at a dark time for the band, and certainly it produced some of their more melancholy music. Perhaps they've decided the album doesn't fit with the stage presence they want to convey. Or perhaps it simply didn't sell enough copies for them to put any of its songs into the rotation.

What did return to the set was other bands' songs. For a time, Barenaked Ladies would usually wrap up their main set with a goofy medley of pop music. They were back at it last night in a big way, mashing up everything from Wrecking Ball and Royals to Take a Walk on the Wild Side. That wasn't even counting their earlier smatterings of Moondance and the theme from Mork and Mindy (a Colorado audience "sucking up," they acknowledged). And then their was their encore, when they swapped instruments and drummer Tyler Stewart took center stage; after their usual performance of their own song Alcohol, they went on to play Violent Femmes' Blister in the Sun and Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love in their entirety.

Along the way, they were having fun with a snappily dressed man in the audience, taunting everyone into singing along lest they be branded "racist," making the now-obligatory observations about legal marijuana in Colorado (but with a humorously Canadian viewpoint), and just generally having fun. They even brought out Robertson's two teenage sons to join them on a song, leading the rest of the band to joke that their jobs might be in jeopardy.

All this time together, and they still put on a fun show. Next time they return to Denver, I don't plan on missing it.