Toronto Mike'd: The Official Toronto Mike Podcast - Steven Page: Toronto Mike'd #1236

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

In this 1236th episode of Toronto Mike'd, Mike catches up with Steven Page and discuss the role of the late Seymour Stein in Barenaked Ladies landing a US record deal. Toronto Mike'd is proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery, Palma Pasta, the Yes We Are Open podcast from Moneris, The Moment Lab, Ridley Funeral Home and Electronic Products Recycling Association.

This is episode 1236. That's 1236. And I would like to dedicate this episode to FOTM Hall of Famer Mark Weisblatt. Mark Weisblatt visited my basement for, I would say, three hours every month for years. And in early 2023, he politely told me he was going to pause his appearances, but he also told me that he would be back. So I look forward to the return of Mark Weisblatt. I loved my conversations with him, and I'm dedicating episode 1236 to him, because if everything had lined up the way I wanted it to, he would have been my guest for 1236. I'm from Toronto where you wanna get the city love I'm a Toronto Mike, you wanna get the city love My city love me back, for my city love

Welcome to episode 1236 of Toronto Mike Proudly brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery A fiercely independent craft brewery who believes in supporting communities, good times, and brewing amazing beer. Order online for free local home delivery in the GTA. Palma Pasta. Enjoy the taste of fresh, homemade Italian pasta and entrees from Palma Pasta in Mississauga and Oakville. Season four of Yes, We Are Open. The award-winning podcast from Moneris.

Electronic Products Recycling Association. Committing to our planet's future means properly recycling our electronics of the past. The Moment Lab. Brand marketing and strategy. PR, advertising and production. You need The Moment Lab. And Ridley Funeral Home, pillars of the community since 1921. On April 2nd, 2023, Seymour Stein passed away at the age of 80. Most of the obituaries you'll read online focus on how he co-founded Sire Records

and was vice president of Warner Brothers Records, signing such bands as The Talking Heads, The Ramones, The Pretenders, and Madonna. I like to look at everything through the lens of a Gen Xer living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. So my interest in Seymour Stein is more about him signing Katie Lang, and to bring it even closer to home, a quote, fine bunch of talented young men with a great sense of humor. These talented young men were a little band out of Scarborough, discussed often on this podcast, the Barenaked Ladies. Joining me today to talk about the late Seymour Stein and to dive into the details as to how he signed the Barenaked Ladies to a U.S. record deal, is founding member Stephen Page.

Welcome back to Toronto, Mike Steve. Nice to be here. Good to see you, Mike. Where do we find you today, Stephen? I am in my studio in Syracuse, New York. Just kind of getting ready for my live stream on Saturday. Give us a little update. I actually had Moe Berg on the program last week and I meant to get an update on the TransCanada Highwaymen, but can you give us a

really quick update off the top on the various Stephen Page projects and what the current status is? Sure. I put out an album in the fall called Excelsior uh available everywhere come to stephenpage.com if you want a vinyl copy um and uh i've been touring that on and off but i've been doing these live streams like since april of 2020 and we had the 100th show a couple weeks ago uh so to this or So this Saturday will be the 103rd Stephen Page Live From Home show.

So basically I do them on Saturday afternoons when I'm home, and people still show up to these things. It's amazing. So it's a chance for me to do stuff I wouldn't normally do on stage. It's not the same show every week. It's a real challenge for me that way.

So I've been working on that uh got some shows coming up in the uh in the northeast of the u.s uh end of the month um show in north tonawanda which for us toronto kids you know it's like you know that's whatever buffalo tv it's just one of those towns that we hear well herb weinstein would let us know where those fires were exactly you know or which we know the different malls or whatever in the buffalo area it's so weird living in upstate new york and like getting kind of like you know tops friendly markets and those things that we end up seeing those ads for have you ever bumped into steve tasker i remember steve tasker was always hosting like a Buffalo Bills talk show on, on these stations. I have not.

I do remember once years ago, getting to meet promo, the robot promo, the robot from WKBW. He's not from the commander Tom show. Is he? Okay. I see.

I remember commander Tom when he had the Sunday morning show because the other stations had like religious programming and the cartoons were gone. But if you went to Commander Tom, you'd get your David and Goliath, you know, Davey and Goliath. How old were you when you figured out that David and Goliath was like Jesus in disguise? Pretty old, like embarrassingly old for... Yeah, I felt betrayed.

I don't know, Davey. Yeah, I had no idea and then at some point it's like, oh, you know, the Church of Latter-day Saints or whatever, and then it all clicked. You know how that scene in the movie where you start to it all clicks in, it all starts to make sense. It's like, oh my God, you have these flashbacks

of things that were said. And then you realize they were all laughing at you all along. So true. I was going to say about come see us if you're in the area and you want to come see us at the Riviera Theatre in North Tonawanda on April 29th. That's the closest we're playing to Toronto. And then that's with the trio.

So that's me, Craig Northey from The Odds, and Kevin Fox. And that's just a blast for me. As far as the highwaymen go, we do have some stuff up our sleeves that I'm not supposed to tell you about yet no one's listening steven but we have we have done some recording and there will be something coming out hopefully towards the end of the end of this year um it's done we're just going to sort out deals and day and you know when we can do live dates and stuff but for those who don't know that's me cra Craig Northey from The Odds,

Moe Berg from Pursuit of Happiness, and Chris Murphy from Sloan. All of you FOTMs, by the way. Excellent. Good. I'm glad you got nice to get us, when we get this thing together and released, get us all together in the same place.

I would do that in a heartbeat. You just say where, I'll just set up and I'll be there. I was going to ask, because I got a tweet, I think it was yesterday, somebody said, I just said I was talking to you today, and somebody, I believe somebody from Buffalo, New York, said, are you kicking out the jams of Steve and Paige? And I said, no, we're not kicking out the jams because we're going to be talking about Seymour Stein.

But I was thinking, I don't want to waste that via Zoom, you know what I mean? Like, at some point, we have to be in the same room and we can kick out these jams properly. That's a deal. We'll do it. Okay. I recorded that, Stephen. It's binding. It's binding. Okay, so can you take us back?

What do you remember about the first time you met Seymour Stein? Well, I was terrified probably more than anything else because he was like he was the big New York record guy. I grew up looking at Sire records spinning probably more than anything else because he was like he was the big um the big new york record guy i grew up looking at sire records spinning on my turntable like you'd mentioned katie lang but before that talking heads uh in in north america you had things like depeche mode and

uh the smiths and echo and the bunnyman um and then there were things like obviously madonna pretenders all those records that were you know i grew up obsessing over so to me that was a that sire that yellow sire label with the with the kind of yin and yang s and the top was like a mark of quality and so when we heard that sire records was interested which happened i guess there's a couple different people who i think took the idea of signing us to seymour stein we had a manager at the time nigel best who used to work for warner music canada before he managed us so he had he knew seymour a little and i think we were in new york for what was the new music seminar at the time and uh and he went and like met with

Seymour and played in the the tape and then another guy Mark Nathan who's been at a million different labels around the United States for years worked with um with Todd Rundgren for years and so on and worked at Casablanca Records and worked at MCA Records and whatever he had briefly worked with Sire in the 70s and fell in love with the band and brought our tape to a whole bunch of record people and basically got laughed out of the room everywhere except for with seymour who went oh it's he got it he said it's a it's a simon and garfunkel for the 90s um and so he saw past the shtick and heard the music which was really great.

In Canada, most of the labels didn't take us seriously. They really saw us as purely a novelty group. I think they figured that by the time the record was out, we'd be over. And we were getting a lot of play on CFNY in Toronto and CBC, and it was beginning to be much music and so on. But the labels, when they started to finally give us offers, they were crappy little offers, like embarrassing little offers. Like, are they putting you in the same, sorry to interrupt here, but are they putting you

in the same bucket as like, I don't know, Corky and the Juice Pigs? Well, you know, we did have, we were affiliated with Corky and the Juice Pigs early. You know, they had us as their opening act and so on. But I think, yes, and I think Canadians sometimes can get pretty embarrassed by their own. They don't want people to go out there into the world and embarrass them. And then we always end up doing that anyways.

That's just the way of – that's human nature. We try and go out there and be great Canadian ambassadors, but I think it's kind of the trauma of when people thought it was all Ben Johnson's fault back in those days. Think about the summer of 88 of Ben Johnson losing the gold medal. Right. And Gretzky moving to L.A.

Right. So we would walk down the street. When we were successful, people would go, hey, stay Canadian, which really just means don't embarrass us. And, you know, eventually we all embarrass you regardless. But I think that's where those kinds of, you know, eventually we all embarrass you regardless. But I think that, like, that's where, like, those kinds of, you know, we became a punching bag for some people. Nickelback were for years.

Remember how Loverboy were for years? Like that punchline of a joke. I literally just spoke with Brad Roberts from Crash Test Dummies, and he lives in New York now. And he basically said he ran out of the country because he says, and he made a great case for it that canada eats its young totally absolutely but i'm also like the other thing is like but that canadianness is a huge part of my identity and i'm responsible for like i i i have done that to other people over the years and you know i've tried to curb that behavior but um when i was younger uh this sense that like canadians somehow meant second best um you know

the joke was always that we were always saying uh go for silver and because that way you can't be disappointed uh and then when the world's looking at you you get very self-conscious um right so when seymour he actually sent somebody up i hadn't met him yet he sent andy paley who was a producer part of the paley brothers group that were on sire records early on uh but he produced uh the brian wilson comeback record in the late 80s and so on and he came up to see us open for the Sky Diggers at Carlton and called Seymour that night and said, yep, go for it. So Seymour sent us this offer. So I don't think we actually ended up meeting with Seymour until we were in the boardroom at Warner Music

Canada. He and Howie Klein, who was the VP at Sire at the time, later became president of Reprise. So we had a long relationship with him. And their lawyer came up and we talked about the potential for this deal. Now, when we actually, so he was, you know, I'm looking back now, if he was 80 when he died, that means he would have been like 49 then. Right. But I think I thought he was 70 then like it just doesn't make sense that i'm older than he was when he signed us but he just had this like vibe of being like you know an old new york guy and uh and we were these kids um

so he seemed much more worldly which he definitely was um but when we signed the deal part of our our requirements for signing the deal was we had we wanted to actually do the signing in public um and so we staged a concert in front of the scarborough civic center albert campbell square in front of scarborough civic Civic Center, Albert Campbell Square in front of Scarborough Civic Center. And we played a performance there out on the steps of the Civic Center with like several thousand people came to watch us. And then we sat at this big long table with Seymour Stein and all signed the contract, which is like it's a very kind of 60s thing to do yeah it's like the beatles or something yeah it's exactly that's how but we it was all about our

kind of pro scarborough shtick yeah at the time and then afterwards we decided we let's go for dinner together we'll do it we'll do a dinner and we booked for whatever reason we booked, for whatever reason, we booked Cali's Buffet, like kind of a very, like, ordinary buffet restaurant when that was a thing in Scarborough. Right. With our moms and dads and our brothers and stuff. And then Seymour Stein actually came to this thing. I mean, I'm sure he lasted 15 minutes and then went downtown for something good.

But at the time, we were like, this is great. Look at all the food you get. We were not ironic about it at the time. We're like, look at how much food you can eat. Listen, no, those buffets, that was the magic of the buffet because at that time, you would just eat until you felt sick, right? Like nowadays, it's like the thought of doing that, it's sort of like, oh, I want to do that but at the time when you're young that's the joy it's like you get excited because i'm going to just eat till i puke well and we were just on our own too we were you know probably 20 or whatever so it's like you got to maximize every meal that's paid for by somebody

else even if we were paying for that one it was paid for by the band rather than by us. Right, right. Now, see, I still want more Seymour from you, but I want to fold this into the story. So as you know, this is a very Canadian-centric show, so we don't talk a lot about the U.S. record deal because who cares about the U.S. record deal? We're listening in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. But on this show, many people, including yourself,

on that note, I should just remind everybody that if they want the deep dive with Stephen Page, that's episode 631. So I'll just read the description, then I'll get back to the Seymour Stein story. But Mike chats with singer songwriter Stephen Page about the Barenaked

Ladies origin story, although we didn't really talk too much about this. His time with the band, going solo, touring with the Trans-Can Canada Highwaymen, reuniting with Barenaked Ladies at the Juno Awards, his new musical, his Zoom concerts, and much, much more. This was like a pandemic episode, about an hour and 15 minutes. So people go to 6.31 for that. But just to fold this into the lore that I've been spoon-feeding people for the last 11 years. We talk about your getting played on, your busking

basically, and you're getting played on CFNY and then you've got your yellow tape, the famous independent yellow tape, and then there's the Speaker's Corner video for Yoko Ono. Then there's, correct me if I'm wrong, but you win a CFNY contest and it helps you finance the creation of Gordon.

So where exactly in all that does the U.S. record, is it post-Gordon or is it post-Yellow Tape? It's post-Yellow Tape. So we are signing this deal right around the time that we made Gordon. So we didn't have a deal when we made Gordon. And we had the money, $100,000 from CFNY, which is still a huge amount of money. And this was 30 years ago. $100,000 to make a record. Where the,

kind of the average Canadian major label, Canadian budget for a Canadian signing, I would have guessed in that time would be in the $30,000 to $40,000 range. So we had $100,000, which allowed us to go away to the studio in Moran Heights, the famous studio where Rush used to record and so on. So we could actually stay there. And then we did all our overdubs in Toronto, but it gave us the time to do that and then allowed us to, for instance,

get the record mastered in New York city and spend some time making the record and really kind of explore it, which was awesome. So the great thing about that was, was that we had this, this record. And we didn't have to pay for it and we didn't owe a record company for it, but we like, we, we offered it to sire, like, Hey, you can have, we have this record it's already paid for. And they kind of didn't owe a record company for it but we like we we offered it to sire like hey you can have we have this record it's already paid for and they kind of didn't care like they were prepared to pay for a record anyways and to them a hundred thousand dollars is not a big deal when you're talking about you know a madonna record right and the amount that goes into making a record and

honestly like i think in the u.s a marketing budget is probably very was very similar um if not that they invested that kind of budget into us in the u.s but we had this thing and so they just kind of swallowed up this record they didn't pay us back for it they took it but the plus of it i realized years later uh was that we never owed them anything for it. And the way these record companies work, the traditional record contract, it's like some kind of mafia contract, like where they pay for the record and all that money that they invest in making the record is now a debit from your account so every record you sell you

don't start seeing any money until you've paid off the record and then once you start seeing money you still only see your small like 15 royalty or whatever does this include videos like you have to pay off the everything so the game is rigged steven oh it's totally rigged it's almost impossible to make money i mean with videos quite often like we i think we had in our deal at least by the end like videos were 50 percent recoupable so if a video like for instance the one week video which cost an exorbitant amount of money like four hundred thousand dollars or something we were responsible for the first two hundred thousand of that but back in the gordon days we were making videos for you know whatever twenty thousand

dollars or in the case of lovers in dangerous time i think five um five dollars maybe and we still love that video like it oh yeah we love it it doesn't matter i mean it has a has a spirit as a feel in a way it doesn't matter but i, we couldn't have done the one week video with that budget. But as far as like the money goes, I remember being at a party with Chris Murphy in the 90s at some point. And he said, could you imagine if you had just hung on to that record and release it yourself, how rich you'd be? And he was right, like in a way that because we sold a million plus copies in in Canada and it was before I think we had really taken off in the U.S. so it seemed like you know if you could just keep that money yourself that would have been a great investment but the thing was for us was that we never got dropped like even when our second record didn't do quite as well and

I'm sure that the record company people in the U.s were like how can we still have this band because we weren't you know we were playing in the u.s we were slowly building an audience but it wasn't huge uh but because we never owed them money like by the time the second album came out right we were still already in a credit position where we didn't have to pay back like the previous record had done so well in Canada that essentially was paying for the second record. And Seymour's thing was just like, whatever the guy's like, if they're happy with it, I'm happy with it. He was kind of our A&R guy, which meant he did nothing. He didn't like, I think now, sometimes we could have used some help

with imaging and marketing and stuff, but really all of that stuff came from our idea of what the band, how we should present. We couldn't even blame anybody else for it. And he was totally fine with that. When I was born, they looked at me and said, what a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy When you were born, they looked at you and said What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl

Got these chains hanging around Alex, people want to strangle us with Before we take our first step Afraid of change Afraid of staying the same When temptation calls We just look away This name is the hair shed I wear

This hair shed is woven from your brown hair This song is the cross that I bear Bear with me, bear with me, bear with me Be with me tonight I know that it isn't right Be with me tonight Go to school I write exams

Superpass, superfail If I drop out Does anyone care about that? And if they do Steven Page is a good boy. I want to thank him for taking some time today to talk about Seymour Stein. He talked about the Barenaked Ladies

needing some AR. And I'm here to tell everybody about The Moment Lab. That's exactly what they do. They specialize in public relations. They have a team of experienced professionals who know how to craft stories that resonate with your audience and generate positive media coverage. So if you want to give your business a boost, don't wait any longer. Contact my friends Matt and Jared at The Moment Lab. I'll connect you. Learn more about how they can help you achieve your public relations goals. As always, Toronto Mic is brought to you by Great Lakes Brewery.

Fresh craft beer brewed right here in southern Etobicoke. So sorry, Stephen, you can't get it in upstate New York. You can't get Palma Pasta there either. That's delicious, authentic Italian food. They have four locations in Mississauga and Oakville. Ridley Funeral Home are pillars of this community since 1921. I recorded a wonderful episode with Brad Jones and his daughter Jessica. It's an episode of Life's Undertaking.

Subscribe, enjoy while you're subscribing and enjoying Life's Undertaking from Ridley Funeral Home. Listen to Season 4 of the Yes, We Are Open podcast. That's an award-winning podcast hosted by FOTM El Grego. It's a Moneris podcast. Al's been traveling the country, and he's been collecting inspiring stories from small business owners. And it inspired the heck out of me. Thank you, Al.

If Steven were here, I'd give him a wireless speaker from Moneris, but he's not here. And if I had given him that, he might have an old speaker that no longer works that he'd need to dispose of. Steven Page would go to recyclemyelectronics.ca and find out where he can safely drop off his old antiquated tech. So that does not end up in our landfills. We don't want those chemicals out there. So thank you EPRA for recyclemyelectronics.ca. Let's return to my conversation with Stephen Page. All right, let me ask you some dumb outsider questions here. But when I'm seeing Bare Naked Ladies at Peach Pit after dark, is that you guys and your relationship with Jason Prelick?

Does that have anything to do with, you know, Seymour Stein and the record label? Or is this all you guys just doing it independently? Well, so by that point, what happened in 1994, so after our second album, Maybe You Should Drive, came out, Sire Records, which used to be distributed by Warner Brothers Records, had a new deal where they were part of Elektra Records, which was part of the overall umbrella of WEA, Warner Music, whatever. But essentially what it meant was they had a different distribution arm

and a different promotional staff and so on. And Seymour became the head of Elektra. But he, I think he knew that it wasn't going to go well. I think that was part of their, it was kind of a thing that, think that was part of their it was kind of a thing that my understanding was warner brothers bought sire in the late 70s or early 80s and he became can stayed on as the head of it um but they used to call him seymour sign where he just he just couldn't stop signing acts and we didn't understand that when we signed we felt very special and then got onto the label and realized he had signed everybody and their brother and he had signed all these other toronto acts as well baron caddell and

rheostatics and acid test and and more um and uh so we were kind of like it is the classic throw them against the wall and see if they stick uh kind of um marketing technique we got lucky because we were big enough in canada and it got bigger and bigger that it it became something that they had had to notice but anyways i think when he had signed enough labels i think or enough other artists warners some claws kicked in where they went okay now we own the whole thing we've swallowed it all up um and i think he felt that there was going to be less opportunity for us at electra so seymour or howie klein who was his number two moved to become the head of reprise records which was the same staff we had been using for the previous two albums and seymour said as much as i hate to

see you go it's in your best interest to continue with howie um and we didn't know how to feel about that because i we didn't even know of how he liked us um he just kind of the person who doesn't come across as particularly enthusiastic about anything but we became very close with him later um but uh it was absolutely the right thing to do when we moved over to reprise so that was by the time our third record came out um born in a pirate ship right uh with howie at the at the helm lots of stuff was happening like how he was getting us onto the friends soundtrack the song shoebox ended up on that. And then when Old Apartment was happening, that was when we started becoming really friendly with Jason Priestley. And he directed the video for the Old Apartment.

Right. And then, so he'd already done that, and I think he got us on the show. But the kind of the escalation of that record, of that song, they worked, Reprise Records worked that record of that song like they they worked reprise records worked that record um like promoted it at radio around the united states for over 12 months which never ever happens where it would be like a hit in detroit and then it would like fade out and be a hit in atlanta and then it would fade out and just kept going around the country like that where eventually was our first top 40 hit in the U.S.

But if it had been a hit all at the same time, it probably would have been even bigger than that. And that was thanks to that, the culture of that label. So, I mean, without Seymour, we wouldn't have gotten there. But by that point, we weren't working with him anymore. Okay, so he's not there to, you know, say, I you so, when one week goes number one. Oh, I think he was very excited for it, though. I know he was. Lots of congratulations from him.

One of my greatest memories of Seymour was one time he would take us out for dinner when we were in New York, which was always exciting and terrifying. He'd take us somewhere. I remember one time Andy Cregan, our keyboard player, percussionist said uh he's very serious about music stuff and he said um do you know a place where i can buy an accordion here in new york city and seymour's like yep there's a store downtown where you can buy an accordion on one side of the store and a monkey on the other side of the store so you go and you get your accordion and then you get your monkey and you can stand out in the street and play your accordion with your monkey and he thought this was hilarious and he did not find this funny um but i remember one time we

played at the bottom line club in new york where we used to play there for quite a bit and that was a venue where you'd play two two shows in a night like a 7.30 and an 11. So after the first show, he threw us all in a cab and took us down to Little Italy and took us out for dinner, got us all really full and drunk, and he's like singing at the table. People always talk about how he loved to sing old songs, standards and country songs and whatever. And then we got back to the venue. We played our second set and we're all just stuffed to the gills of Italian food. And we look and down like almost in the front is there's Seymour sitting at the table

and he is singing along with what a good boy and And he's crying and he knows all the words. And then you look back and he's sound asleep. That's the greatest. All right. So take me back just to last week, I suppose it was. Yeah, I guess it was last week. I've lost track of time these days, Stephen. But when you learned and how did you learn and what was your reaction when you learned Seymour Stein had passed away at the age of

80? I had heard that he had he hadn't been well for a few years now and I'd seen, you know, I knew some people who'd seen him at shows and so on and that he was having mobility issues and and had been in and out of hospital and so on. So I guess I wasn't shocked. I was shocked to find out he was 80. I mean, he's the same age as my parents, and they seem a lot more sprightly than he ever did.

But he liked his Bacchanalian delights. He liked to eat and drink and enjoy life. And, I mean, this is a guy who's been through a lot of tragedy too, lost a daughter. His ex-wife, mother of his kids, was murdered tragically by her assistant several years ago. And I know they were still very close. So that was just, you know,

it was a horrible stuff that he had gone through. But he had such a positive impact on so many lives in the music business, both of artists and people who worked for him. I have a friend of mine who worked for him who said he was like one of the toughest people to ever work for just because he was erratic and hard to predict what his behavior was going to be like. But he was also really generous.

And that's what I remember thinking when I saw that. I mean, I was shocked because you're shocked when anybody you know has passed away. But I was also maybe not surprised. Well, my condolences, Stephen. You sounded like a great guy. He was a big part of our lives, for sure. And a big believer in Barenaked Ladies,

as was I when I heard on CFNY, Barenaked Ladies back in the late 80s there. So he had good taste in music. Awesome. Yeah, he was great. He was great. I have lots of great memories of him. And that's the thing. Still, all those artists will always be

associated with him and his vision. And that brings us to the end of our 1,236th show. You can follow me on Twitter. I'm at Toronto Mike. Steven is at Steven page. Our friends at great Lakes Brewery are at Great Lakes Beer

Palma Pasta is at Palma Pasta Moneris is at Moneris Recycle My Electronics are at EPRA underscore Canada

The Moment Lab are at The Moment Lab and Ridley Funeral Home are at Ridley FH See you all next week The Moment Lab, and Ridley Funeral Home are at Ridley FH. See you all next week.

Drink some Guin goodness from a tin cause my UI check has just come in ah where you been because everything is kind of rosy and green yeah the wind is cold

but the snow wants me to dance And your smile is fine, and it's just like mine And it won't go away Cause everything is rosy and green Well, you've been under my skin for more than eight years It's been eight years of laughter and eight years of tears. And I don't know what the future can hold or do for me and you.

But I'm a much better man for having known you. Oh, you know that's true Because everything is coming up Rosy and gray Yeah, the wind is cold But the smell of snow Wants me today And your smile is fine And it's just like mine

And it won't go away Because everything is rosy and green. Well, I've been told that there's a sucker born every day. But I wonder who, yeah, I wonder who. Maybe the one who doesn't realize there's a thousand shades of gray. Cause I know that's true, yes I do. I know it's true, yeah. I know it's true.

How about you? All that picking up trash and then putting down ropes. And they're brokering stocks, the class struggle explodes And I'll play this guitar just the best that I can Maybe I'm not and maybe I am But who gives a damn? Because everything is coming up rosy and gray Yeah, the wind is cold, but the smell of snow warms me today

And your smile is fine, and it's just like mine And it won't go away Because everything is rosy and gray Well, I've kissed you in France and I've kissed you in France and I've kissed you in Spain And I've kissed you in places I better not name And I've seen the sun go down

on Sacré-Cœur But I like it much better going down on you Yeah, you know that's true Because everything is coming up Rosy and green Yeah, the wind is cold But the smell of snow

Warms us today And your smile is fine And it's just like mine And it won't go away Cause everything is rosy now, everything is rosy and everything is rosy and gray Thank you.