Growing up, Steven Page says he spent countless hours adoring and admiring the Beatles’ iconic 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Now Page and a few other notable Canadian singers are putting their own imaginative spin on the album courtesy of Toronto’s Art of Time Ensemble.
“It’s not your standard Beatles cover show,” Page says of the concert, set for Jan. 21 at the Sony Centre. “They have some really top notch contemporary composers who are doing the arrangements for Art of Time, but at the same time the vocal parts are all exactly verbatim from the Beatles record.”
In addition to performing with the Art of Time Ensemble, Page will be playing with a full symphony backing him up — the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony — along with Craig Northey of the band Odds, Andy Maize of Skydiggers and Glen Phillips of Toad the Wet Sprocket.
“This is going to be exciting and daunting at the same time, because it’s huge,” Page says. “I don’t know how, but I’m not going to be just smiling my head off while singing with them.”
Page, best known for his years with the Barenaked Ladies, forged a friendship with Art of Time’s artistic director Andrew Burashko in 2008 celebrating the 40th anniversary of the album Abbey Road. But Page says the approach has changed.
“When Andrew decided to do Sgt. Pepper’s, he wanted to have four guys onstage the whole night,” Page says. “The camaraderie of having four guys onstage for the whole show, I think it makes the whole thing feel more present and in a certain way a more fitting tribute to the original band.”
Although the wall of sound finale from “A Day in the Life” should be epic, Page mentions “With a Little Help From My Friends” and “She’s Leaving Home” as personal faves.
Page is also set to release a solo album in February, and he’s doing the music for Macbeth at the Stratford Festival as well as a few Sgt. Pepper’s dates across Canada and the United States.
“For us, a lot of the fun is surprising them, giving them a challenge without it being an adversarial one,” he says.