Ben Folds / Nick Hornby: Lonely Avenue
Ever since this album was first announced as a project where Folds would be putting Hornby’s words to music, one question kept running through my head: since when does Ben Folds need help coming up with lyrics for story songs? I mean, the man has practically assumed the story-song-writer throne abdicated by Billy Joel, and almost all of his output is a story song of one kind or another. I mean, if you’re going to have help, you might as well have help from an award-winning novelist, but… Ben Folds needs an assist writing story songs? Really?
As it so happens, it’s not such a bad deal. Folds and Hornby have a mutual admiration society going on, so they’re on each other’s wavelength. And there are some great results from that collaboration, even though at its heart, Lonely Avenue lives up to its name – it’s a bit of a bummer of an album. At the very least, a lot of the songs deal with relationships fraught with mistakes; zoom in a little bit further, and quite a few of them concern themselves with infidelity of one kind or another. Lonely Avenue isn’t the sunniest album to arrive in the past year.
Not that this means there isn’t some great music on there. The highlight of the album is “Password”, which starts out painting its protagonist in a slightly creepy, stalker-ish light as he guesses his way through his significant other’s passwords. His confidence that he knows everything about her vanishes as soon as he gets far enough to figure out that – surprise, surprise – there’s another man. The dramatic payoff is nicely handled musically, and the rest of it is just a gorgeous song with some of the best vocal harmonies anyone recorded in 2010.
A close runner-up for the great harmonizing award goes to “Claire’s Ninth”, which deals with a child of divorced parents wishing she could have “two birthdays” like all of her friends, as opposed to the awkward event that she’s putting up with where various family members are barely maintaining civility.
Somewhat more raucous are songs like “Your Dogs” (a litany of complaints sung to a white-trash neighbor) and the other highlight of the album, “Levi Johnston’s Blues”, chronicling what was likely going through the mind of Bristol Palin’s boyfriend at about the time her mother was announced as a vice-presidential candidate. Its hilarious, not-safe-for-work lyrics are surprisingly apolitical – by the end of the song, no one mentioned in the lyrics really comes across as an angel, not even Johnston himself. And in places, despite the hard-driving chorus, the song is surprisingly pretty.
Overall, the music is great, and the lyrics are unusually dark – and yes, I do know that I’m talking about someone who once spun a radio hit out of a story about taking his then-girlfriend to get an abortion. Folds has never shied away from heavier lyrical material (and I love him for it), but Hornby’s words seem to lack the deft wit that Folds has used in crafting lyrics before – ironic, since the author of books such as “High Fidelity” isn’t without a sense of humor himself. Lonely Avenue is a lovely ride into some not-so-uplifting territory – music to go along with a rainy day.
… Read more
- A Working Day (1:50)
- Picture Window (3:42)
- Levi Johnston’s Blues (5:15)
- Doc Pomus (4:13)
- Your Dogs (3:23)
- Practical Amanda (3:52)
- Claire’s Ninth (3:49)
- Password (5:21)
- From Above (4:04)
- Saskia Hamilton (3:09)
- Belinda (6:13)
Released by: Nonesuch
Release date: 2010
Total running time: 44:51
Ben Folds’ first entire album of new material since 2005’s Songs For Silverman (Supersunnyspeedgraphic really just being a compilation of material that had been tried out on limited-run EPs first), Way To Normal heralds Folds’ return to the U.S. (accompanied by the almost prerequisite seismic changes in his personal life), and as a result, the musical tone shifts wildly from song to song.
The usual caveats apply to Folds’ music – no-holds-barred language (it definitely earns its dreaded “parental advisory” sticker on the cover) being chief among them – but long-term Folds fans will probably be (mostly) pleased. It’s just that there are a couple of tracks here that might throw even the devout followers; the album title itself seems to hint that Folds is trying to find his way back to normal (no, it’s not a text-message-speak-era typo of “way too normal”)…and maybe the next album will be a four-star offering once he gets there and life settles down a bit for him.
Collecting remixes and re-recordings of material from Ben Folds’ trio of 2003-2005 EP releases, as well as a couple of soundtrack songs, side projects and a new song or two, Supersunnyspeedgraphic is both a lot of fun and somewhat baffling. Baffling in that, as often happens with complation/best-of albums, I would’ve picked some completely different songs in places, and a lot of fun in that these aren’t necessarily the same recordings as heard before on those short releases.
A pleasant selection of Rupert Gregson-Williams’ lively orchestral score combined with about an EP’s worth of material both new and familiar from Ben Folds, the CD from Dreamworks’ Over The Hedge may just be 2006’s most underrated soundtrack. 
With a portfolio that includes such ironic Generation X anthems as “Song For The Dumped”, “Rockin’ The Suburbs” and collaborations with William Shatner and Weird Al Yankovic, it may be easy to pigeonhole Ben Folds as a wacky alt-rock guy, and for a while, even he might have been content with that label. But his latest album, Songs For Silverman, is a bit less loaded down with that almost prerequisite irony – it’s a finely crafted, mature collection that, while not without moments of humor, acknowledges that the artist (and, perhaps, his fan base) is growing up.
Culled from the tour supporting of his excellent 2001 album Rockin’ The Suburbs, Ben Folds Live gives us a chance to hear Folds unplugged – just one man and his piano…as if that’s somehow a limitation. Folds makes the best of some of the more “produced” numbers by getting the audience to provide some backup (most notably on “Army”, which demonstrates that there were a lot of damn good singers in his audience that night, as does “Not The Same”). In other cases – “Fred Jones Part 2”, “The Luckiest” and “Jane” among them – he doesn’t need any elaborate backing; the songs are strong enough to stand on their own merits.
The first in a promised trilogy of short EPs of songs-in-progress, Ben Folds’ Speed Graphic sits nicely alongside the equally-cryptically-titled Sunny 16 as a sample of what might be on the way – again, there’s no guarantee that any of these tunes will make it to Folds’ next album.
Ben Folds is back, but you can be forgiven for missing the fanfare, because there hasn’t been much of it – this isn’t a typical major label release. As a warm-up to his next solo album, Folds has been trying out some works-in-progress on listeners through a series of EPs released only into the Japanese market (though you can order them from the links below). Folds has said that there’ll be a trio of these short releases, and some of the songs may appear on his next release on Sony, but some of them won’t – so once again, it’s interesting that we’re essentially listening to someone’s demos. But what demos!
If you’re worried about Ben Folds Five disbanding, don’t be. If you’re worried that post-Five Folds would sound like Ben’s ill-fated 1998 side project, there’s no cause for concern. This album, Folds’ first solo project, proves that he’s certainly got the stuff to forge ahead on his own.