Ben Folds

Wed 27th Apr, 2011 in Features

Ben Folds’ new album, Lonely Avenue, co-written with the amazing novelist Nick Hornby (of High Fidelity fame) is as fun and catchy as his beloved Whatever And Ever Amen and The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner albums – and clearly still quite exciting for Folds, too.

“I still feel like it’s a good record which is I’d say a good sign. I get pretty down in what I’ve just done for quite a while usually. When the next record comes out I can sort of admit what’s good about that record, but right now I’m still feeling pretty good about it… I think when you do that you’re putting your vibe more into the arrangements and musicality of a record and then sometimes the vibe comes from the rawness of getting the very first take and mistakes and those things. Oddly enough some of the slickest sounding stuff on this new record was done in the first or second [day after] the day the song was written.”

Part of the spontaneity and smoothness of the recording process for Lonely Avenue is to do with Folds’ band, which chugs along like an efficient machine due to the strength and familiarity of the friendships and working relationships that it has been built over the years. “My band is really well oiled and I just say ‘Here’s the chords, here’s what I’m paying you to do, run the tape and we’ll see what happens,’” Folds explains. “Then you go and listen to it and we’ve got it! Maybe 15 years ago I would’ve had to do it again and again because I would’ve fucked it up.”

The difference this time around was that the lyrics weren’t Folds’ – despite his immense talent as a lyricist, Folds collaborated with Nick Hornby for a different lyrical flavour on this album, and clearly a different writing process as well. “That bastard Nicholas!” he jokes before explaining that he didn’t see a need to edit Hornby’s words: “he’s a world class novelist and his success is deserved. Some people’s isn’t and I think his is definitely. He’s a great writer and if there were moments I didn’t quite understand the first read, I wasn’t going to go up against him so I just let it go. But then after I would listen to it and it would dawn on me what he was doing I would be like ‘Ohhh, that’s the perspective, man he’s good!’”

The result of Hornby’s writing is a darker, heavier tone than a lot of Folds’ own work. “I would like to think that Levy Johntson’s Blues might even resonate a little bit more without the distraction of the celebrity because it really is about growing up really fast,” Folds says of the song written about the boy who knocked up Sarah Palin’s daughter. “But you’re right – context is probably helpful to you: Levy wrote the chorus – they were his words, words from what he wrote on his Myspace page,” Folds reveals.