Moxy Fruvous, the platinum-selling pop quartet from Toronto, strayed a bit from its busking roots on its second album, “Wood,” in 1995. But bassist-vocalist Murray Foster says he and singer-guitarist Mike Ford, multi-instrumentalist Dave Matheson and drummer Jian Ghomeshi are back to their old witty, sardonic selves with their Bottom Line debut “You Will Go to the Moon.”
“For ‘Wood,’ we split our personalities with a serious side and a funny side,” Foster said recently. “After touring that album for a year, we decided we wanted to do something eclectic, upbeat and funny. That’s who we are. We had a bit of an identity crisis before, in some ways.”
An album doesn’t get any more experimental than “You Will Go to the Moon”: There’s pop songs, accordion love songs, gangsta banjo hip-hop, even a Beck-like cover version of the Bee Gees’ “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.”
For Moxy Fruvous, like brethen Barenaked Ladies, it’s all about having a sense of humor.
“I think Canadians, for whatever reason, are funny people,” Foster said, laughing. “People ask us, ‘What’s in the drinking water there?’ It’s partly because we’re a smaller country that has no sort of ego. We’re really not No. 1 in anything. We’re very humble about it. There’s no delusions of grandeur.”
BWF (before we forget): Check out Moxy Fruvous on the Web @ www.warnermusic.ca/moxyfruvous/index.html, or send e-mail to moxy@passport.ca.