The “Last Summer On Earth” tour, with fellow ’90s icons like Blues Traveler, Cracker and Big Head Todd and the Monsters, brings back happy memories for Barenaked Ladies bass player Jim Creegan.

Memories like jamming, improvisational singalongs, or that time years ago on tour when John Popper dug BBs out of his mouth with a Bowie knife. Ah, misty slightly weird memories.

“They were in there for like 20 years,” recalls Creegan, who comes to Cruzan Amphitheatre on July 18, as he recalls his anecdote about Blues Traveler’s intense harmonica-playing lead singer. “I guess when he was a kid he was playing around with a BB gun and got shot in the mouth. They got stuck there, and we were lucky enough to be there to see him pull the BBs out with a huge hunting knife. I think they’re all gone now.”

Creegan and company get to recreate the good times - hopefully without the impromptu mouth surgery - during the “Last Summer” tour. “It’s good to see those guys again,” he says. “Some of the others we’re just getting to know. We’ve all had similar trajectories, being primarily live bands. Everybody puts it all on stage. I like it better when we’re playing outside in the summer, as opposed to playing in the bowels of a hockey arena in Canada.”

Barenaked Ladies has been doing just that for about 25 years, having been formed in 1988 in Toronto by school friends Ed Robertson and Stephen Page, and joined a year later by friends Jim Creegan and his brother Andy. Since then, the band’s become known for its quirky way with a clever pop lyric. They’ve covered familiar emotional ground in some unconventional ways, name-checking Beach Boy Brian Wilson, imagined breaking and entering, Kraft dinners, sexy anime heroines and monkeys along the way. (They also provide a zippy jaunt through the creation of the universe on the theme to CBS’ “The Big Bang Theory.”)

“When I listen to music, it’s really about somebody connecting emotionally to lyrics. That’s what makes a great song, and it goes a long way. We have a relationship with the things we write about, and the fans identify, so we’ve found some kind of common ground,” says Creegan of songs like If I Had A Million Dollars, Brian Wilson, The Old Apartment, One Week, Pinch Me, It’s All Been Done and others.

One Week, still heard on pop radio, follows the familiar terrain “of that period of time spend being in a fight with your significant other, before things come around and get to be normal again,” Creegan says, albeit with references to Harrison Ford, Snickers and Aquaman between sentiments that will ring true to anyone who’s ever been in that fight, like “Can I help it if I think you’re funny when you’re mad?”

Likewise, The Old Apartment, follows the regretful musings of a guy breaking into his former home with a former love and one’s helplessness to change the past, which reminds Creegan of driving by and noticing “that someone had cut down a tree outside of the house I had rented. I was like ‘How could they do that? That’s stupid!’ But I had no say in it at all. I was gone.”

Just like we evolve - hopefully - past old relationships, BNL has evolved as well. The old lineup has changed a little - Andy Creegan and former co-lead singer Page are gone - and Jim Creegan says he thinks that the band “is more collaborative now. We’re all developing as writers. I started in the band when I was 19. We’re lucky that we’ve had room to explore and write and expand as artists. It’s a good time for us.”

Creegan, who has his own side projects as well as a young family, says that he hopes that the tour provides new opportunities to jam with the other bands. “I’m the one who wants to collaborate all the time. I’ll be talking to anybody that doesn’t have a bass player,” he says. “And even if they do, I will lock (them behind doors) and show up on stage with the other band members.”

Whatever surprises are in store, he’s pretty sure that pieces of embedded metal will not be among them.

“I think it will be a mouth BB-free show,” he says. “So bring the whole family.”