The Bills will have more than Josh Allen and a halftime show on hand when they open their new stadium Thursday night. They’ll also be getting a first-of-its-kind anthem moment from a band with plenty of Canadian roots.
Before Buffalo hosts the Lions at the $2.1 billion Highmark Stadium, Barenaked Ladies will perform “O Canada” - the first time the Bills have played the Canadian national anthem before a home game. That’s a familiar tradition for the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres, also owned by Terry Pegula, but it’s new ground for the NFL team.
The choice fits the setting. Buffalo sits right across the Niagara River from Canada, and the franchise has spent years trying to build that fan connection north of the border.
That effort even included games in Toronto during the late 2000s and early 2010s. With U.S.-Canada tensions running high because of trade disputes, the anthem performance feels like a nod to neighbors just across the border.
Barenaked Ladies bring the kind of crossover recognition that makes sense for the spot. The band comes from the Toronto suburbs and broke through in the United States as one of Canada’s best-known musical exports.
Formed in 1988 by Ed Robertson and Steven Page, with Robertson still serving as lead singer, Barenaked Ladies built their name in Canada first before finding a bigger American audience in the late 1990s. Their 1998 album “Stunt” delivered their biggest hit, “One Week,” which remains their most recognizable song.
The name itself came out of a Bob Dylan concert in 1988, according to Page, who told the Los Angeles Times in 1992: "We sat there and talked about all these fake bands we'd like to be in, and started coming up with dumb names for them. I don't know which of us said 'Barenaked Ladies,' but we laughed our heads off," Page said. "It's something we'd say when we were 9 or 10 years old, a phrase we'd forgotten, so it was charming when it popped back up."
The joke stuck, and so did the band’s habit of weaving humor into its music and performances.
Barenaked Ladies were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2018, and they’re still active after releasing a new song earlier this year. The group was formed in Scarborough, Ontario, a northwest suburb of Toronto, and all are Canadian; Robertson and Page are both from Scarborough, and three of the four current members are as well.
As for the songs that made them household names, “One Week” still leads the way. It hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1998 and has been streamed on Spotify more than four times as much as any other Barenaked Ladies song.
“If I Had $1,000,000,” from 1992, remains one of their signature tracks, while 2000’s “Pinch Me” earned a Grammy nomination. More recently, 2013’s “Odds Are” became one of their best-known newer songs, and plenty of fans still know them best as the voices behind the “Big Bang Theory” theme song.
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