Kevin Hearn didn’t exactly plan to make a record with The Persuasions — it just sort of fell out of the sky like a doo-wop harmony from Lou Reed’s memorial service. “Our longtime sound man gave me Frankly A Cappella — that’s The Persuasions singing Frank Zappa,” Hearn says. “I fell in love with that record.” Fast-forward a few decades, and there he is, leading Lou’s touring band, bumping into The Persuasions at the Apollo Theater after Lou’s passing. You know, normal Toronto rock star stuff.
Turns out you don’t just run into The Persuasions and keep walking. “Their manager called and said, ‘Hey, they’d love to do more with you,’” Hearn says. So Hearn did what any sensible member of Barenaked Ladies would do: he invited them to crash a Central Park gig. “They showed up backstage and just started singing before soundcheck. It was beautiful. I thought, we’ve got to capture this.”
The idea was to strip down the BNL catalog to campfire mode and let The Persuasions sprinkle in some magic. “We’d been talking about getting back to our roots,” Hearn says. “Songs that would work around a campfire — that was the vibe. So I thought, let’s just expand it: us, The Persuasions, acoustic instruments, live off the floor.”
Naturally, they hammered out the whole thing in two days. “Dave Revels [Persuasions’ lead singer] rehearsed all the songs a cappella. He’d send me voice memos, which was such a joy to get,” Hearn says. “Then they flew to Toronto, we did a charity show at Massey Hall, and right after that — boom — two days in the studio.” You’d think it’d be chaos. Kevin shrugs. “We’d do it once or twice, that was it.”
And no, they didn’t just phone in a hits package. “We never thought of it as that,” he insists. “It was about what worked in that context. Sure, Hello City was on my initial list — but it fell away.” Hearn did sneak in “Don’t Shuffle Me Back to the Bottom of the Deck” from his solo record Cloud Maintenance — a deep cut for the BNL heads. “That one just had to happen,” he says.
When they weren’t harmonizing in the woods, the band quietly made a whole other record. “It’s interesting,” Hearn says, and laughs when pressed for more. “It doesn’t sound like any other record we’ve done. We’re all scratching our heads going, ‘Well, look what we did here.’”
If you’re keeping score: one improbable mashup album, one “interesting” BNL studio record, and Kevin Hearn still drifts wherever the muse and a random sound man’s mixtape might take him. These side projects keep the main gig fresh. Maybe. Or maybe he’s just the last guy who knows it’s okay to sing around the campfire without overthinking it.
Listen to the full interview above and then check out the video below.
