Trans-Canada Highwaymen – Explosive Hits Vol. 1

I’m always a bit surprised when fans of a band don’t follow former band members when they set out on new musical adventures. If someone has given you joy as part of one outfit, it only seems logical to me that they might be able to do it again with another. Barenaked Ladies have 2.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and I think we can all agree that a big chunk of those people (myself included) are mostly listening to music made when Steven Page was the band’s co-frontman. (I wonder if there is still some bad blood there, since you would never know from the band’s Spotify bio that he was ever one of them.) Page on his own, however, has just over 5,500 listeners, and Trans-Canada Highwaymen – his supergroup with Moe Berg of The Pursuit of Happiness, Craig Northey of Odds and Chris Murphy of Sloan – has a mere 3,115 at this writing. And in the case of the latter at least, that means a whole lot of people are missing out on a giant heap of fun.

Now, even the idea of a Canadian supergroup seems pretty un-Canadian to me. Considering the gang’s middling commercial success, they’ll have to do until Drake, The Weeknd and Bieber join forces with whoever they pick to play George. (Sorry, Biebs fans – he’s Ringo in this scenario.) Mendes? Avril? Shania? Buble? My pick is Celine, medical concerns permitting – I’m pretty sure the album would be an unlistenable mess, but what a glorious mess it would be.

This album is wall-to-wall joy, starting with the throwback cover art in homage to those messily bright K-tel collections of the band members’ (and every other Canadian of the era) childhoods. After an entertaining opening track setting out a possibly fake story about how the band even exists, we get nothing but cover versions (my kryponite!) of classic Canadian pop songs of the 1960s and (mostly) 1970s. Part of the fun – assuming you share my definition of that word – was learning about the songs that were unfamiliar to me. But there was plenty I already knew here – many of them from those same K-tel collections – and hearing them in these faithful renditions was both nostalgic and revelatory. I never cared for Lighthouse’s “Pretty Lady”, but something about Berg’s clogged sinus delivery opened me up to its charms. Joni Mitchell’s “Raised on Robbery” is a honky tonk roof raiser, the cheese of Paul Anka’s “(I Believe) There’s Nothing Stronger Than Our Love” becomes less of a threat to your cholesterol level, and I apologise to Larry Evoy and the rest of Edward Bear for not recognizing that “You, Me and Mexico” is, indeed, a classic. And if they hadn’t already won me over completely, they sealed the deal with a high energy and not even slightly ironic take on “Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat” by, in the words of Mr. Pink in “Reservoir Dogs”, “Little Tony DeFranco and the DeFranco family”.

I haven’t had the chance to see them live yet, but I really hope their calendar and mine will align while they still feel like doing this. In concert, the band liberally mixes in tracks from their past bands, and any show where the setlist might include “Brian Wilson”, “She’s So Young”, “The Rest of My Life” and, especially, “Heterosexual Man” is a night that I’ll happily take a chance on. You should, too.