A Scarborough duo that grew into one of Canada's best-selling bands

Barenaked Ladies

Ed Robertson and Steven Page started busking together in Scarborough in the late 1980s, and Barenaked Ladies went on to write the theme song for The Big Bang Theory decades later.

Toronto skyline, 2012 — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Barenaked Ladies formed in the Toronto area in the late 1980s, when Ed Robertson and Steven Page, who had met at a summer camp, began busking together around Scarborough and downtown Toronto. A self-released cassette sold well enough locally to draw major-label interest, and the band's 1992 debut EP and subsequent albums built a large Canadian following well before their commercial breakthrough in the United States with the 1998 single "One Week," which topped the Billboard Hot 100.

A long second act

The band continued recording and touring for decades, including after Steven Page's departure in 2009, and became widely known to a new generation for writing and performing the theme song to the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, which ran from 2007 to 2019. Barenaked Ladies remain one of the best-selling Canadian bands of their era, with a catalogue that spans alternative rock hits, children's music and soundtrack work.

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