Relationscapes: Exploring How We Relate, Love, and Belong
MINI EPISODE: What a Good Boy, (with Steven Page)
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Introduction – 0:00
BLAIR HODGES: Welcome to another mini episode of Relationscapes. It's like a short afternoon stroll compared to our regular episodes, those longer and more in-depth journeys across the landscapes of human identity and connection.
I'm your host, Blair Hodges. I'm an independent journalist in Salt Lake City. And today, in this episode, I'm going to share a song with you that played a small part in changing my mind and my heart about gender identity. So please allow me to kind of set the stage here before we get to today's interview.
Back in 1992, a band called Barenaked Ladies released a song called “What A Good Boy” on their debut album, Gordon. I never heard the song back then because I was only 10 years old, I didn't become a BNL fan until high school when they released this smash hit song that everybody from the 90s knows. All you have to do is sing, “It’s been!” and people will know exactly what you're talking about. By the way, let me explain for the youths. Back in the 90s, it was kind of a different time. And you couldn't just stream a band's whole collection of songs. You actually had to buy individual compact discs (or “CDs” as we called them) or you could tape record songs off the radio.
So although I became a Barenaked Ladies fan, I didn't reach into their back catalog and thus I never heard this song. It was on a previous album. And that's why when I heard it for the first time in 2018 and was totally blown away by it, I actually thought it was a new song by Steven Page. He was that night's performer, one of the founding members of Barenaked Ladies, who had set off on a solo career.
“What A Good Boy” is an aching sort of ballad of teenage angst. The way that it explores gender identity hit me really hard at that concert. To be clear, I'm a cisgender guy. I've never really questioned that. I'm comfortable in that identity today. But 2018 was the year that I really started thinking more about gender identity more carefully, especially when it comes to transgender folks.
I was born and raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—in other words, a Mormon.
And that conservative church has very specific and very binary doctrines about men and women, male and female, that those identities are set and eternal and they can't change, and basically that there's no room for trans people, let alone nonbinary people, in the church's current doctrines. By 2018, I had started to consider the possibility that the church was actually wrong about those teachings, that gender and sex were more complicated and more interesting than I had believed.
I met some actual trans people in my life, and I started digging into the best scientific and psychological and philosophical research I could find on the subject. That's actually kind of when the seeds for this podcast were planted. I wanted to better understand gender identity and sexuality and how those things impact our relationships to each other and to the world.
And then a few years after that concert, my oldest child surprised my partner and I when they came out. They said they had long felt uncomfortable with the gender identity we helped put on them from birth. And I was so glad that I had nonbinary and genderqueer folks in my life who helped prepare me to embrace my child and stand alongside them.
One of the pivotal interviews I did on this show was with Eris Young on this show. You can go back. It's one of the earlier episodes I put out about nonbinary identities. And by then I had some nonbinary and genderqueer folks in my life who helped prepare me to understand and to embrace my child and stand alongside them.
It's a really scary time right now for people who don't conform to the gender binary, and trans people more generally. Politicians and activists are passing laws that restrict healthcare and that exclude trans people from basic public access to places like bathrooms and even housing.
Now, it's important to point out that these laws actually impact and endanger people who aren't even trans. But even if trans people were the only ones being hurt by all of this, they still deserve protection, safety, and to be treated according to the dignity that they already possess.
So here's what I know: It's terrifying and lonely to be trans right now. And it's also terrifying and lonely to parent a trans child, knowing what obstacles this country is putting in their way and witnessing so many people doing nothing to push back against the misinformation or to stop the legal abuse. The only guarantee that I can really make to my child right now is that I will never abandon them, no matter what happens, and that we will never stop fighting for their rights.
I became a vocal ally—and I like to say an accomplice—to trans folks before I knew that it would hit so close to home. I really wish more people would do that. That's one of the things I love most about the song we're going to talk about with one of my favorite musical performers of all time, a guy who's not afraid to use his voice and his platform to advocate for marginalized people. Joining us from his home studio in New York, Canadian singer-songwriter Steven Page.
The Protest Singer and Getting Famous – 04:49
BLAIR HODGES: Steven Page, welcome to Relationscapes.
STEVEN PAGE: Nice to be here. Thank you.
BLAIR HODGES: As a songwriter, you've created a fair number of love songs and stuff like that, but you've also used the microphone to address political issues throughout the years, during your time with the Barenaked Ladies, and now in your solo career.
Back in 2018, during the first Trump presidency, you released a political sort of song about writing political sort of songs, a kind of, like, meta protest song. It's called, “Where Do You Stand?
[Clip from “What A Good Boy” by Steven Page: “Where do you stand / Where do you stand / Is that your brand? Bland? / I don't understand you / So afraid to offend / Can’t be everyone’s friend…"]
BLAIR HODGES: You're reflecting on musicians feeling pressure to take a stand on things. Talk about your experience with that.
STEVEN PAGE: Interesting. Well, that song, it came from the musical that I co-wrote with a Canadian playwright named Daniel MacIvor called “Here's What It Takes,” that was supposed to run at the Stratford Festival in Canada, which is Canada's kind of premier theater festival, in 2020. And, of course, COVID made sure that didn't happen, and we've revised it a bunch, and it ended up not getting mounted there. So now we're in the process of, you know, of courting some new producers and so on for it.
But it was an interesting process because it's a musical about, well, about musicians, and I mean, it's based partially—I won't be too coy, but partially on my experience, but also in Daniel's experience as an artist working with close collaborators.
So, you know, I took inspiration of the early days of Barenaked Ladies and so on, but it's about a duo who, they rise together and then they break up. And it's kind of a bit of a postmortem of that and trying to figure out where that goes.
But this takes place a little bit earlier than my time. It takes place in the 1980s, mostly, and there is an LGBTQ theme that runs through it. Daniel, being a gay playwright, brings a lot of his experience into it.
And so part of what happened in that play was, we have one character of this duo who is gay and in the closet, and this is the height of the AIDS epidemic, and there's a point where he is pressured by the people around him or encouraged by others to come out and like, apart from the business side of things—his management and so on, who are nervous about it—they're quite accepting of who he is. And they're like, this is your opportunity to be yourself. But he understood that that's an opportunity to alienate a portion of your audience as well.
And my experience would be, I found, as the Barenaked Lady's popularity grew in the 1990s, late 1990s, there was this point where I would feel like, you know, I was in my late 20s, I was still trying to figure myself out, and I would look in the audience, and as we got more and more popular, I felt like I was no longer seeing my teenage self in the audience anymore.
And that made me sad because I felt like I was always trying to sing for the nerds, for the outcasts, for the kids who didn't fit in. And all of a sudden, now we were singing to the popular kids, we were singing to the jocks, we were singing to the backwards baseball hat.
And, you know, now as an adult who's had adult kids and stuff, I'm like, well, everybody's welcome, you know, as long as you can come and have an open mind and be accepting of the person standing next to you. You know, I was the kid who was lining up all day to get crushed against the stage at a punk rock concert as a teenager with my fellow freaks. And even there, I felt like a soft, tiny, voiceless little nerd.
So I used to think, like, even when we made Gordon, our first record, my ambition as a 21 year old making that record was that we were gonna make kind of like an indie record for the uncool kids. As if, like, indie music wasn't already for the uncool kids. It was already for the outcasts. But I felt like the ones who had no swagger, which was me, you know? [laughter]
But by the time Stunt was popular in the late 90s, just by the merit of being a popular thing, you know, we started as, obviously, a word of mouth kind of indie street-level band and grew and grew and grew our audiences largely in the United States on college campuses.
[Clip of Barenaked Ladies performing “It’s All Been Done” on Late Night with Conan O’Brien]
STEVEN PAGE: And so, you know, think about college radio in the 1980s and early 90s. It was very much, you know, that's where indie music and grunge and all those things kind of blossomed. But then as things translate into MTV—
BLAIR HODGES: You’re getting to the mainstream.
STEVEN PAGE: Yeah. Alternative music became mainstream, there became mainstream corporate-owned alternative music stations, which was amazing for us.
But I felt like, you know, it was—for me, I felt like I wasn't seeing myself in that audience. So I was already thinking, how do I carry these people with me over to my side? The other thing in the 90s was, I felt like we—and when I say “we,” I consider myself a progressive, as somebody on the left, you know, I come from a socialist background in Canada, a democratic socialist background in Canada. So I felt like, you know, especially in the United States, but also in Canada, if I could draw attention to causes I believed in, if I could just—
I felt like we on the left had a great habit of self-sabotage, you know, both in Canada and the U.S. we would make great strides, whether it was in the arts, in music, and in politics, and then somehow allow ourselves to be fully coopted and then overturned.
BLAIR HODGES: I remember the idea of “selling out” was on people’s minds.
STEVEN PAGE: Well, that was it. Selling out was such a big part of my generation's idea. But I think really the thing was, because we saw the danger of it. And we see it now in progressive politics of that kind of radical centrism, as they might call it.
BLAIR HODGES: Yes, reactionary centrists, people who are really more on the right—
STEVEN PAGE: That's right.
BLAIR HODGES: —and they only punch left.
STEVEN PAGE: They only punch left. And that kind of thing makes me crazy because there's this sense of like, oh, well, all we have, we're just gonna reach across the aisle and we'll find the common ground. When there often isn't common ground. Sometimes what we have to do is reach across the aisle and pull people over and show them, like, show them there's common ground.
But it's not like we can ideologically meet. Sometimes people need to be shown where that the common ground is over on my side!
Barenaked for a Cause – 12:08
BLAIR HODGES: This reminds me of A.R. Moxon, a great essayist, I don't know if you've heard of him—
STEVEN PAGE: Sure.
BLAIR HODGES: He says, “Meet me in the middle, says the unjust man, and then takes a step back.”
STEVEN PAGE: [laughs] That's exactly right. And so I've always struggled with that because, of course, I also want to be popular. I want us to make records. I want a tour. I want this. You need that, this to be your job. I watched artists, like, artists who, for me, even as a teenager that were inspiring were people who.
Particularly British artists in the 1980s, you know, I was really inspired by the Red Wedge movement in the 1980s. So people like Paul Weller and Billy Bragg and the Communards and so on, who were doing like a music rock tour in support of the Labour Party, where it's a part of striking miners efforts and so on, that you could still, you could make the music that was emotional and evocative and spiritual and all those things, and also have something grounded in current politics.
BLAIR HODGES: And that's where you were inclined? Was the rest of the band? Early on, when you were putting Gordon together, were you all kind of on the same page, or were there differences in the band? When you're on a solo career, I think it's a little bit easier to do that.
STEVEN PAGE: Yes. You know, I was probably me and Tyler, our drummer, who were the most, kind of, informed about politics. And we loved to talk about that stuff. I was lucky that we were all pretty much on the same page when it came to that stuff. So I think those guys, honestly, they looked to me for kind of the initiative with that stuff. But we also, we listened to each other.
I mean, our first paying gig, if, you know, I wasn't. I think we got 50 bucks was for, like an Earth Day thing. Like, our thing was always about, like, if we could do support an environmental cause or a food bank. Actually, our very first gig was in support of a food bank.
So it was always kind of like social justice stuff was our thing. And even at the height I looked back for a while and thought, oh, there was a point where we got really famous and we got rich. And I thought, did I turn my back?
BLAIR HODGES: “One Week” came out exploded.
[Clip of “One Week” by Barenaked Ladies]
STEVEN PAGE: And I'd worry, you know, because I, you know, bought a nice house and a nice car and concentrated on raising my family and I had young kids and thought, like, is this maybe, is this, am I now, like, part of the bourgeoisie in a sense that I don't want to be? Or am I champagne socialist?
[Clip of “If I Had $1000000” by Barenaked Ladies]
STEVEN PAGE: But I look back now with some perspective and I think, God, no. We did some amazing stuff. Like, we were always doing charity gigs. We were always like, you know, we would. Basically. It's kind of the one for me, one for them kind of thing.
Except the one for them wasn't the studio. Like, John Huston would say that with the movie studios. One that was artistically satisfying, one that was…
BLAIR HODGES: Popcorn.
STEVEN PAGE: Yeah, popcorn. But we were like, we will do one that we'll put in our pocket, and then we'll do one that we put in somebody else's pocket.
The Origins of “What A Good Boy” – 15:29
BLAIR HODGES: This gives great context for Gordon, because the song I want to talk to you about in this episode comes from that album. You were 21 when that was put together. I think you were 22 when it came out.
STEVEN PAGE: That's right.
BLAIR HODGES: There's a song on there called “What a Good Boy.” And I have to confess, I was a big Barenaked Ladies fan, but not at the very beginning. It was when, you know, your later albums came out when I got into the band. So I never actually listened to Gordon at the time.
But I heard you at a live show here in Salt Lake City just a couple years ago, and you played "What A Good Boy,” and I thought it was a Steven Page original. I thought this was like a new song, like “Oh, I haven't heard this. This is some of Steve's new stuff.” And it touched me so much. It was such a powerful song.
Then I was surprised to learn that this goes way back. You wrote this when you were a kid. Do you remember what was going on when this song was written?
STEVEN PAGE: You know, it's a funny thing, because it's a song that, at the time—
Sometimes songs come out of you and you don't fully know what they mean. Like, there's a Leonard Cohen quote that I love, he says, "if I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often." [laughter] You know?
I find that I am often a victim of my own overthinking, in life and in art, you know? I will have a good idea for a song, and the beginning of the song will come out because you have to kind of rely on something in the Ethereum, you know, when I'm going for a walk or I'm driving or whatever else, a bit of melody and a bit of lyric that come together.
And I think, well, what's this song? And then if I spend too much time thinking about what it's about and how to construct it, I often end up with something kind of like, it's almost unmovable. It's, like, really awkward. And you spend all your time rewriting words and making sure that all makes perfect sense.
BLAIR HODGES: Because you already had the meaning and ending in mind?
STEVEN PAGE: That's right.
BLAIR HODGES: One trouble with protest songs is knowing the message you want to give. They can sound blocky and forced.
STEVEN PAGE: That's exactly right. And that's the thing with—So we talk about a song like “Where Do You Stand,” or, you know, I think the few that I've been able to do that feel like they work really well—I mean, “White Noise” off of my third solo album—
BLAIR HODGES: That’s a song against white supremacy.
STEVEN PAGE: Yeah. I mean, it's a song that came out really quickly and I just. You know, it's kind of lite—L I T E—in the sense that it doesn't have a lot of words. But it just has raw emotion and just enough cleverness to lift it out of that. If I had really belabored it and tried to fill it up with facts and things as opposed to winks, then it would have been gross.
[Clip of “White Noise,” by Steven Page: “Apparently, to fix the nation / you gotta run like a corporation / The kind you don't mind burning to the ground / I've had to learn to bite my tongue or you'll send me back where I came from / I'll tell you, as an immigrant and a Jew/ I'd be more than glad to replace you…”]
STEVEN PAGE: So with “What a Good Boy,” like, there's another song on that record, “Brian Wilson,” or I think about a song called “War on Drugs” that's from a later Barenaked Ladies record that I think has a really long life, and they mean a lot to people. With “War on Drugs,” I knew what it was about. It's a song about suicide. But it came out very quickly. Those songs that I just kind of let spill out.
BLAIR HODGES: And this song is one of those?
STEVEN PAGE: “What a Good Boy” is one of those. It kind of, it spilled out.
BLAIR HODGES: Wow.
STEVEN PAGE: I mean, there are bits—I remember the middle section. I remember sitting with Ed Robertson, my partner in Barenaked Ladies. And he came up with the idea for the song’s bridge, only with different lyrics. And it, again, didn't mean anything. And I changed it—
BLAIR HODGES: Is the bridge the part about the hairshirt?
STEVEN PAGE: The bridge is, “I couldn't tell you that I was wrong”—
[Clip from “What A Good Boy” by Steven Page: “I couldn't tell you I was wrong / chickened out, grabbed a pen and a paper / sat down, and I wrote this song / I couldn't tell you that you were right / so instead I looked in the mirror, watched TV, lay awake all night...”]
STEVEN PAGE: So for that part there, I remember he had a line about putting a penny on the tracks. And it didn't—like oh, it's nice. It's a nice image, but it doesn't tell me anything. So I rewrote the words to the “I couldn't tell you that I was wrong” part.
And I knew it was a song about a relationship. It's, you know, saying, “I know that it isn't right, but be with me tonight.” It could sound like just a kind of a come-on, you know, a pickup song or something like that. Or like a “cheating on your partner” kind of song or whatever.
[Clip from “What A Good Boy,” by Steven Page: “Be with me tonight / I know that it isn't right / Be with me tonight…”]
STEVEN PAGE: But I knew it wasn't that. Because the verse where it starts, “When I was born, they looked at me and said, what a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy.” That's what it started with.
[Clip from “What A Good Boy,” by Steven Page: “When I was born they looked at me and said / what a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy / When you were born they looked at you and said / what a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl...”]
Putting Gender Expectations onto Kids Earlier and Earlier – 20:44
STEVEN PAGE: I was probably 20 when I wrote it. I didn't have kids yet, but I guess I was thinking about my parents. Like, my parents were great parents and really did their best for their kids. And I thought, how did they know that, like, you know, even though they were not big on gender norms, on, like, kind of the stereotypes—
BLAIR HODGES: Right, like a big, strong boy and a pretty, smart girl.
STEVEN PAGE: That's right, those things that we say to our kids even before they're able to speak back.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. The line you say, “before we take our first breath.”
STEVEN PAGE: Right.
BLAIR HODGES: These chains are around our neck.
STEVEN PAGE: Yeah. And I felt like even with the best intentions, are we creating gender roles without even knowing it for our kids? That's how I started it.
[Clip from “What A Good Boy,” by Steven Page: “We’ve got these chains hangin’ ‘round our necks / people wanna strangle us with them before we take our first breath / Afraid of change, afraid of staying the same / when temptation comes we just look away...”]
BLAIR HODGES: As I listen to this, I can't help but think about the historical context of the song as it lines up with your life. You were born in 1970, and back then, most parents would have to wait for the actual delivery of the baby to find out the gender or really to like “assign” the assumed sex.
They weren't having gender reveal parties and stuff back then. In the 70s and then more into the 80s, ultrasound technology became more widespread and people would try to find out or assign that sex earlier and earlier, before a baby's even born. Or like the lyric says, “before they take their first breath,” and you know, people are picking out names, they're stocking nurseries with all kinds of gendered stuff, pink and blue.
And so you were growing up right, when a lot of people were trying to lock kids into gender roles probably earlier than ever in history.
STEVEN PAGE: Yeah. I mean, at that point I probably didn't even know about like pre-birth gender reveal stuff. But just that sense of like even the most progressive liberal parenting, especially at that point was reinforcing stereotypes, unknowingly.
BLAIR HODGES: And the binary in general, too.
STEVEN PAGE: That's right. And that's the thing, now that I look at, I think, like, that's the thing. But any of those songs I was talking about that kind of spill out is when my younger self can educate my older self about something, and not know it was doing it! It is so fascinating. And what an amazing gift. Like, I didn't know—people would ask me for years, like, what's this song about?
So we had been signed to Sire Records in the early 90s. Sire Records, headed by Seymour Stein, the legendary label. I mean, it's the label that I grew up wanting to be on.
BLAIR HODGES: It's the dream.
STEVEN PAGE: I watched that Sire symbol spinning around on the vinyl with, you know, whether it was Madonna and KD Lang, the Smiths and Depeche Mode and Talking Heads and Ramones, like all of my favorite artists.
And so the guy who signed all these people, Seymour Stein, he and Howie Klein, who was his kind of second in command, had proposed putting this song on a CD sampler for the debut issue of OUT magazine, the queer magazine that just started in 1992 or ‘93. And it was a CD that would come with it.
And I thought, well, that's interesting. Sure. I mean, why not? I thought, well, it's not really what the song's about, cuz I'm not gay, but I'm happy to, you know, support a gay positive movement. We didn't have the word “ally” necessarily then, but sure, of course.
And then later it was used in a documentary about Stonewall. And it's probably the first I learned about Stonewall again in the early 90s. It ended up kind of becoming used fairly regularly by people or for people who were processing their own gender non-conforming journey in a way that I wasn't aware of. And I kept thinking, well that's not really what the song's about. But I knew it wasn't just about like boy and girl in that kind of classic situation. I wanted to write something that was not that.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, well it seems like you were that kind of kid, where like being the jock and being the strong stereotypical boy wasn't your thing.
STEVEN PAGE: No I wasn’t. I think now, like now that there is language to describe the non-binary potential for gender expression, I don't know what I would have chosen, how I would have chosen to express myself as a teen knowing I would have had a lot of choices as far as the language and the options to express.
I didn't even know, I didn't know there was anything beyond the binary then.
BLAIR HODGES: I didn't know till the last, like, 10 years.
STEVEN PAGE: Right. Well, I don't think I did either. And I think that's, you know, that's the amazing thing to me about the younger generation about how they've been able to teach me about this.
BLAIR HODGES: And how well your song fit into it.
STEVEN PAGE: Oh, amazing. Like that's the most amazing thing is that when I sing it now I realize that's who it's for, is for our gender non-conforming children. Like you know, even whether they like the music or not. I'm singing it for also for fellow parents, for all that kind of stuff. And how it's now helped me understand the richness of gender in a way that I didn't understand before. And that's like a 19- or 20-year-old me telling me that stuff.
"This Name Is the Hairshirt I Wear" – 26:09
BLAIR HODGES: I really love the line about the hairshirt. This is in the chorus where you sing…
[Clip from “What A Good Boy,” by Steven Page: “This name is the hairshirt I wear, and this hairshirt is woven from your brown hair / This song is the cross that I bear, bear with me, bear with me, bear with me / Be with me tonight...”]
BLAIR HODGES: The singer is saying, when I was born they made these assumptions about me being a boy. When you were born they locked you into the identity of a girl. And the person's name is like a hairshirt.
This is a powerful reference from the Bible, a hair shirt. Or some translations call it sackcloth. It's a garment that a person would wear when they are in mourning or grieving or when they're trying to atone for some sort of sin. Hairshirts were woven from coarse rough animal hair like a camel or a goat. These itchy, uncomfortable burdens that were right up against the skin.
And for people who don't fit the gender binary, trans girls, trans boys, non-binary folks, not to mention cisgender boys who don't feel masculine enough or girls who don't feel feminine enough—the fact that names are so highly gendered from birth can be a constant source of dysphoria or irritation. And here the singer is wearing that garment in mourning.
STEVEN PAGE: Well, and yeah, and the idea of our gender identity or our sexuality having to saddle us with shame. I mean, I would like to hope that those are generational shackles that we can lose. I mean, unfortunately, I think politically it's not quite that way. But that's the hope I was feeling five years ago.
The Songwriter Is Dead – 27:52
BLAIR HODGES: And when you'd play it live, I assume people would probably come up—you like to do meet and greets, you talk to your fans. This must be a song people come up and talk to you about.
[Clip from “What A Good Boy,” live version from the album Rock Spectacle (1992)]
STEVEN PAGE: Because it's an older song—it's been around for over 30 years—people have their own vision of a song. And I often don't like to tell people, oh, this is what it's about.
Back when I was younger, I would say, like, no, no, no, you have it wrong.
BLAIR HODGES: The songwriter is dead.
STEVEN PAGE: Yeah, I think now I feel like the songwriter's dead. The song is yours, and it is whatever you want it to be. As long as there's no hate in it!
BLAIR HODGES: Someone suggested it was about a brother and a sister, and I was like, uh…
STEVEN PAGE: Well, it had been suggested to me as well. And I was like, well, maybe, I guess that's not what I was thinking, but I'm not going to stand in the way of that necessarily.
But, you know, it's funny. We're in a time now where everything is upside down and, you know, up is down and down is up. And so it’s like, “You're not the victim. I'm the victim!” is kind of the discourse. I don't want to be messed up in that.
BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, the bully cries foul now.
STEVEN PAGE: That's right. So that's the one thing we were talking earlier about, kind of the protest song and those kinds of things and the risk you take with your audience.
I have people now, like when I try to say something about, I don't know, something fairly innocuous—I try not to engage on social media because I don't think it has any value. Like, people don't care if I'm saying, "go register to vote" now. I think they did when I was 30 and they were 22 or three, and they hadn't voted yet. Now it's dad telling other dads to go register. I think they've already figured out whether they're doing it or not.
But, you know, I might say something like that, and then somebody will write me and say, basically, “I thought you were like me!” Like for example I said, "oh, go get vaccinated" or whatever. It was like, 2022. And people are like, "I thought you were like me. I'm disgusted! I'm never listening to your music again.”
And I always think, like, what? Like, you don't know who I am by now?
I remember once being in Portland, Maine, and I was telling people—Susan Collins’s office was like, two doors down from the venue. I said, “Go there and register your complaint with Susan Collins.” And somebody in the audience is like, “Don't go there!” They were so mad at me! I was like, did you just walk in off the street? And you have no idea what I stand for?
BLAIR HODGES: They must have been older. “Don't Go There” is like a callback to the 90s. [laughs] Don't go there!
STEVEN PAGE: Don't go there! [laughs] Yep.
A Signature Blend of Humor and Pathos – 30:34
BLAIR HODGES: Steven, you've graciously agreed to give us an acoustic performance of the song today. But before we get to that, I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your work for the way that it hits so many different emotions. And this goes back through the Barenaked Ladies catalog, up through your more recent work, how you're able to bring so much humor to your music, but also a lot of earnestness, which I think amplifies the power of those earnest songs, including “What A Good Boy.”
One of the reasons your music's been an important part of my life is because of how you bring the comedy and the tragedy together.
STEVEN PAGE: Thank you. I mean, I think it was one of those things that early in our career and probably throughout our career, it kind of, I think, confused people in a way. Or annoyed people. Like, you know, they couldn't tell what we were, and they wanted to just say we were a joke band. So when we were a "joke band," and then we'd have a song like that, they would go, “Well, that's not real, because you don't do those songs.”
So that was almost like we didn't have permission from critics or music fans or radio stations or whatever else. So sometimes that stuff will get lost.
But then if you lean too hard on that stuff, it's just earnestness—
Like, that's why my favorite material is the stuff that blends the humor and the tragedy at the same time.
BLAIR HODGES: I even see a little bit of that in this song where you say, “I looked in the mirror and then stayed awake and watched TV all night.” It's kinda funny to think of a teenager or a kid going through that, all emotional, but also, it could be a terrible thing someone's experiencing as well. So even in that one part of the song, you can take it either way.
STEVEN PAGE: Sure. I think, you know, that's one of those things, looking back at being a young kid and going, that's amazing that I've had the kind of the clarity as a writer to understand that, like, sometimes we just do whatever behaviors just to shut out overthinking, you know, whatever. It's just watching TV or whatever else or scrolling on our phones now might be the thing.
BLAIR HODGES: Well, one of the behaviors I've used to process things that I'm thinking is by listening to music. And I have to say, Steven, your music's played a big part in that, so I really appreciate your work.
STEVEN PAGE: Thank you.
BLAIR HODGES: With that, I'm pleased to introduce Steven Page performing “What A Good Boy.”
Steven performs “What A Good Boy” – 32:52
When I was born, they looked at me and said
"What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy"
And when you were born, they looked at you and said
"What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl"
We've got these chains hanging around our necks
People wanna strangle us with them before we take our first breath
Afraid of change, afraid of staying the same
When temptation calls, we just look away
This name is the hairshirt I wear
And this hairshirt is woven from your brown hair
This song is the cross that I bear
Bear with me, bear with me, bear with me
Be with me tonight
I know that it isn't right
But be with me tonight
I go to school, I write exams
If I pass, if I fail, if I drop out does anyone give a damn?
And if they do, they'll soon forget
'Cause it won't take much from me to show my life ain't over yet
I wake up scared, I wake up strange
I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever gonna change
I wake up scared, I wake up strange
And everything around me stays the same
It's the hairshirt I wear
And this hairshirt is woven from, it's woven from, your brown hair
This song is the cross that I bear
Bear with me, bear with me, bear with me
Be with me tonight
I know that it isn't right
But be with me tonight
I couldn't tell you that I was wrong
Chickened out, grabbed a pen and a paper, sat down and I wrote this song
I couldn't tell you that you were right
So instead I looked in the mirror, watched TV, laid awake all night
We've got these chains hanging around our necks
People wanna strangle us with them before we take our first breath
Afraid of change, afraid of staying the same
When temptation calls
This name is the hairshirt I wear
And this hairshirt is woven from, woven from your brown hair
This song is the cross that I bear
Bear with me, bear it with me, bury it with me*
Be with me tonight
And when I was born, they looked at me and said
"What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy"
When you were born, they looked at you and said
"What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl"
What a pretty girl, yeah
Source: Musixmatch, *interpolation by BHodges
Songwriters: Ed Robertson / Steven Page
What a Good Boy lyrics © Wb Music Corp., Treat Baker Music Inc., Fresh Baked Goods Inc.
BLAIR HODGES: That's Steven Page playing the song “What A Good Boy” from the Barenaked Ladies album, Gordon. Since launching his solo career in 2009, he's released some great records. My favorites are A Singer Must Die and Heal Thyself, Pt. 1: Instinct. I love those. You can check out his work at stevenpage.com. He's also got a great Patreon setup where he regularly plays online shows.
Steven, thanks so much for letting people know where you stand. And thanks for joining us on Relationscapes.
STEVEN PAGE: Thanks, Blair. Thanks for having me on.
Outro – 37:50
BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to another mini episode of Relationscapes.
I'm gonna recommend a few “Fellow Traveler” episodes you can check out if this topic interests you. I mentioned at the top of my interview with Eris Young. That episode's called “Nonbinary Thinking.” You can also check out my interview with KB Brookins. It's called “Black and Beyond the Binary.”
For more about Mormonism and transgender issues, check out my interview with Lori Lee Hall. It's called “Trans in the Latter Days.” Add my recent interview with George M. Johnson to the list. That one's called “Recovering Queer Black History for Everybody.”
My favorite book for parents of trans kids is called My Child Is Trans, Now What? The author is Ben V. Green, and he joined me to talk about it on Relationscapes. And my episode with Nico Lang called “What the News Isn't Telling you About Trans Teenagers” is worth checking out.
And finally, an episode called “The Challenges of Parenting Trans Kids” with Abi Maxwell. Oh, I should also add one more: Daphna Joel's interview, which is called “The Incredible Brain Science About Sex and Gender.” So add that one to the list as well.
Mates of State provides our theme music. I'm Blair Hodges, an independent journalist in Salt Lake City, and I hope to be with you again soon on another episode of Relationscapes.