BARENAKED LADIES Band writes song for 'Chicken Little'

The five-piece band will play Monday at Cleveland's Palace Theatre.
By JOHN BENSON
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
Somehow it just makes sense that if the playful Barenaked Ladies (BNL) were to contribute a song to a movie soundtrack, it should be a film titled "Chicken Little."
Written more than a year ago by singer-guitarist Ed Robertson, the recently released movie single "One Little Slip" has garnered this dad of three mounds of family cred on the home front.
"Absolutely," said Robertson, calling from Atlantic City, N.J. "What made it so exciting for my kids is they saw all of that stuff a year ago."
Originally, the Toronto native said he was gun shy about the process, having submitted soundtrack material in the past only to learn it was more of an audition among "essentially every band that had a top 10 hit in the last five years. So I was actually a little nervous but overall it was like a really cool creative process. While we were recording it, we were watching the rough animation of the scene, trying to hit certain moments and punches within the scene to make it work."
Making it work is something the five members of BNL have been doing since the early '90s. But it was roughly a decade ago when the Canadian band started to get noticed among the alternative nation. A few years later, the group had a couple of top 40 hits ("One Week" and "Pinch Me & quot;).
The five-piece band returns to Northeast Ohio for a holiday show Monday at Cleveland's Palace Theatre. While still a draw, the band is now an independent act, having fulfilled its contract with Warner Bros. Records.
Big plans
Excited about this new chapter in the group's career, Robertson said fans will be the ones reaping the rewards. The songwriter said the band has more than 30 songs written and plans to release all of them. This begins with the group's next studio album, due out in fall 2006, and will be followed by EP releases. The impetus for such a schedule came to the band a few years ago.
"I remember we were in a dressing room in Boston one time and Jim [Creeggan] put on a playlist from his iPod of songs we never released and we're all listening and saying, 'Damn, that's really good,'" Robertson said. "And Jim said, 'I think this might be my favorite album of ours.' And it was all songs that never came out."
Inspired by Pearl Jam's concert recording business, BNL now allows fans to buy live material over the Internet at both iTunes and its own www.bnlmusic.com.
And yet another marketing tool for the group is its brand-new Barenaked on a Stick USB Flash Memory drive, which is shipped with 29 BNL studio songs and a handful of live tracks.
In many ways, it's like BNL's version of the popular U2 iPod. "Yeah," Robertson said with laughter, "and it exactly explains the scales of the bands. U2 is a 32-gig band. BNL is 128 Megs."