Steven Page On Building A Community 'Live From Home'

l – Steven Page
Steven Page has performed more than 50 “Live From Home” livestreams via Zoom, and built a community around it.

Steven Page, former frontman and founder of beloved Canadian Gen X and nerd-rock staple Barenaked Ladies, recently completed his 50th “Live From Home” livestream show and, in the process, discovered himself and his community in a new, more personal way.

Rather than livestreaming via Facebook, Instagram or any of the other one-way services in which an artist plays to a camera into an ephemeral cybersphere with little or no interaction with his audience, he chose to play his shows via Zoom.

Before the COVID pandemic shut down touring, Page was on the road with his Steven Page Trio, having left BNL in 2009 with a legacy of decade-defining songs like “One Week,” “If I Had $1,000,000,” “Brian Wilson” (which defined meta when Brian Wilson covered it) and “The Old Apartment.”

While live shows and touring appear on the horizon, Page tells Pollstar that the Zoom experience has been like nothing he ever expected.

Pollstar: When the pandemic shut down touring, livestreaming quickly became the go-to means of performing. What did you think about livestreaming early on?

Steven Page: A year ago, when we started, we were getting 1,000 at a show because people were just in a panic. They weren’t used to being home all the time. They were aching for connection.

It boggles my mind sometimes that people come week after week. Even if it was my favorite artist, I don’t know how often I could log in to that, but with these folks, it’s so much more. It’s about me kind of facilitating a social event for everybody; that’s what it’s morphed into.

It’s a club that’s not exclusive or prohibitive or anything else. It’s welcoming. And that’s the fun part for me. We’ll get as many good gags as we can and as many little video bits as I can think of and get finished in time.

How did you incorporate tech so seamlessly into the show?

When I was trying to add other videos to my setup, I literally had my iPad set up on a mic stand that I would swing in front of the camera and I’d stand next to the iPad. But the video was basically my iPad with my friends on it. And I realized I should probably spend some time learning some more technology and digging into that kind of broadcast software.

How has the shutdown and subsequent “Live From Home” series affected your career and the way you view the fans who tune in?

When I left Barenaked Ladies 12 years ago, I didn’t care where my career was going to go, whether I was going to be a big solo artist, or whether I was going to be writing for other people or even writing musicals. I was playing kind of under the radar, lots of performing arts centers around smaller markets in Canada.

I don’t think you’re going to stay in the business unless you have that real hunger. And that’s what makes you sleep on people’s floors and whatever else you need to do in order to get to your show the next day. I started to treasure the connections I had with other people’s lives over the years. “If I Had $1,000,000,” the song I wrote when I was 18 with (BNL co-founder) Ed Robertson, is somehow like a campfire song to its own people, and not about me at all.

And then when [touring] stopped, you thought, “What good am I?” And I think lots of artists around the world thought, “Well, what am I? What do I do now?” I got so lucky, because I realized it’s not really about me 100 percent. I’m just the facilitator for all these other relationships that have happened in these live shows. When the audio goes down for 10 minutes and I have to restart my computer, if I come back and everybody is still in the meeting waiting for me, I must be doing something right.

It seems you are now part of a community of people that would not have existed before, thanks to the Zoom format.

That’s right. Using the software I’m using, it would be a lot easier if I just streamed it right to YouTube or Vimeo or something like that, where people can watch it on a high quality stream and it’s a little more reliable. With Zoom, you don’t have to have your camera on but, if you do, there’s a few screens you can scroll through and see people who are letting you into their lives, into their kitchen or their living room or their back yard or wherever they are, and they chat. And I love that, too. It’s “Come be part of my Saturday.” Then I watched these people develop these friendships over the course of the year. And that’s the greatest reward of the whole thing.

In your blog, you say you believe that some sort of streaming or virtual performance is going to stay with us long after touring returns. What happens with this new community then?

I’ve been thinking often about how you keep that going in the future. I have a Patreon now, as do millions of other people. One of the things people were asking was, “Can I watch these shows after they’re over if I miss it?” It felt like putting them on YouTube or whatever out of context wasn’t the greatest way for people to stumble on these shows. They can go [to Patreon] and there’s other rewards to being a member. But I thought it would be cool if, when I go back on the road, I could stream shows and make that part of the Patreon world as well. I hope we don’t see it disappear because this is a new way of making people feel a part of a touring artist’s show.

What’s your plan going forward? Are you and your team ready to fire up the machine again?

I’m fully ready to go. I’m ready to mask up and get in my car and drive wherever I can and do solo shows. We have shows that we booked for last year that got pushed to this year. We still don’t know if it can happen in some markets, but outdoor shows seem like they’re an easier possibility this summer. But they’ll be solo. My band, the Steven Page Trio, they’re all up in Canada. If they were fully vaccinated by then, then they’d still have to deal with the Canadian quarantine rules after they get home, which is 14 days of being quarantined. That can be expensive if they have other gigs. So let’s see what happens in the fall. But there’s still a lot of fingers crossed for some solo shows in the summer.