Some rock hits take time to craft. Others are conjured in short order. Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” took less than an hour. Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll” took 30 minutes. The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” reared its head during a soundcheck. The Beatles’ “Yesterday” came to Paul McCartney in a dream.
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Then there was the Barenaked Ladies’ No. 1 hit “One Week.” Frontman/guitarist Ed Robertson claims the verses took only three and a half minutes of freestyling. Not bad for a song that spent 20 weeks on the Hot 100 singles chart.
“Just Freestyle It!”
Around the time of the song’s release, Robertson explained to Billboard he had written the chorus structure of the songs but struggled to come up with the verses. He got together with co-frontman Steve Page many times and told his bandmate that he had the idea for the song but was unable to figure out the direction to take it.
“And finally, Steve said to me at some point, ‘Just freestyle it! Just do what you do onstage every night. It’s gonna be great,'” Robertson told Billboard, adding, “There were some extra verses and stuff. I just culled it down to what I thought were my favorite lines. But it was written as a freestyle.”
Page sang the chorus that opened the song and detailed a couple in the midst of a lovers spat. The final chorus indicates hope:
It’s been one week since you looked at me
Dropped your arms to the sides and said, ‘I’m sorry’
Five days since I laughed at you and said
‘You just did just what I thought you were gonna do’
Three days since the living room
We realized we’re both to blame but what could we do?
Yesterday, you just smiled at me
‘Cause it’ll still be two days ’til we say we’re sorry
Everything in between, however, was made up of Robertson’s rapid fire, stream-of-consciousness rapping conjured quickly for the song.
A Surprise Choice
Robertson told Stereogum in 2018 he thought the tune would become a bonus track or a b-side, and that it was one of the last songs he submitted to their label Reprise Records. Then their A&R rep Sue Drew said the company wanted the lead single to be “One Week.”
“I thought she was making a dig at me, like this is the stupidest f–king song I ever heard,” Robertson admitted to Stereogum. “Which I would’ve agreed with. I labored over so many songs on that record and tried to make them, you know, super deep and meaningful and soulful and tried to nail them emotionally, and then this totally ridiculous song that I improvised, that makes no sense at all, goes to No. 1.”
He also confessed the lyrics are basically a mash-up of different ideas. “It is a hodgepodge of pop culture references and inside jokes,” Robertson said. “I can tell you where every single line comes from and what it means, but they don’t relate to each other, and they don’t relate to the chorus.”
The song references many different things and people. Among them: Aquaman, Swiss Chalet, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the X-Files’ Smoking Man, Snickers, Akira Kurosawa, and Sailor Moon. Appropriately enough, the video, featuring a band performance interlaced with other vignettes, references Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the main cars from The Dukes of Hazzard and Starsky & Hutch, and motorcycle stuntman Evel Knievel.
An amusing fan theory emerged that “One Week” is about a man who murdered his girlfriend. Robertson debunked that, but it goes to show that even freestyle verses full of non-sequiturs can ignite people’s imaginations.
A Hit Made to Order
By the time the Canadian band scored big with “One Week,” they had recorded four demo tapes and released three studio albums. Barenaked Ladies’ breakthrough hit emerged on their fourth album Stunt in 1998, and it would hit big. The song went to No. 1 in America, No. 3 in Canada, and reached No. 5 in Canada, Iceland, Scotland and the UK—reportedly selling 600,000 copies there. Stunt spent 63 weeks on the Billboard Top 200 albums chart and would eventually sell 4 million copies in the States, hitting No. 3 on the Top 200 and going to No. 9 in Canada.
“One Week” was also nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. The title was also prophetic—the song lasted that exact length of time at No. 1.
Barenaked Ladies had success afterward as well. The follow-up single “It’s All Been Done” hit No. 1 in Canada and made it to No. 44 in America and got substantial radio airplay here. The song “Pinch Me” from their next album, the Platinum-selling Maroon, went to No. 4 in Canada and No. 15 in the U.S. The group has released nine more studio albums since then, recorded the song “Get in Line” for the King of the Hill soundtrack, and scored big again with the theme song to The Big Bang Theory, which ran from 2007 to 2019 and perpetually remains in syndication.
Bakenaked Ladies’ musical big bang started with a simple storyline surrounded by a lot of lyrical improvisation. Not bad for a set of lyrics that were conjured up in little more than the running time of the song.
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