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Ben Folds & Nick Hornby - Lonely Avenue (2010)

Indie | Piano Pop

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Nonesuch Records. The album features music and vocals by Folds and lyrics by Hornby, with string arrangements by one of the most influential pop string arrangers of all time, Paul Buckmaster (David Bowie, Elton John, Leonard Cohen). The record, which Folds made specifically to be listened to on vinyl, was recorded on 2-inch tape and will be available on audiophile-grade vinyl, cut with the Direct Metal Master process at Abbey Road Studios and pressed at Pallas Manufacturing in Diepholz, Germany. Lonely Avenue will also be available on CD, digitally, and in a special deluxe edition that includes four short stories by Hornby. The idea to create an album of Folds’ unique pop songwriting sensibilities with Hornby’s insightful prose was conceived during a dinner conversation between the two friends one night in 2009. After that, Hornby began regularly emailing lyrics to Folds, who then turned them into Lonely Avenue’s 12 musical short stories. The songs touch on subject matter ranging from a mother with a child in the hospital over New Years Eve to the work of Doc Pomus, lyricist of countless `50s and `60s pop hits. On composing the music Folds recently told Paste: “I kind of ran the gamut between being as simple as I’ve ever been, and sometimes having to go [Russian composer Dmitri] Shostakovich on some of them.” Hornby says of the pairing: “At this stage in my career, I want to collaborate with all the talented people I can find, and I’ve always been a big fan of Ben Folds’ music. It’s been a real privilege to watch and listen to Ben at work, and I’ve learned a lot about how proper songwriters like Ben think.” Ben Folds first found mainstream success as the leader of the critically acclaimed platinum selling Ben Folds Five. He has gone on to have a very successful solo career, recording three studio albums in addition to a pair of records documenting his renowned live performances and a remix record. Folds also recently released Ben Folds Presents: University A Cappella!, a collection of his songs performed by college groups. In 2009 Folds was featured as a judge on NBC’s a capella competition The Sing Off (a role he will reprise later this year on the show’s second season), and earlier this year Folds’ viral Chatroulette video became a YouTube sensation, garnering almost five million views when he joined a video chat with an unsuspecting online companion live during a show in Charlotte, NC. Folds previously collaborated with Hornby on a song for the Folds-produced William Shatner album, Has Been, which the Huffington Post called “one of the few records in recent memory that dared to tell the unvarnished truth about the human condition.” In addition he has performed with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy left, the Boston Pops with Keith Lockhart, and four sold out nights with the Sydney Symphony at the Sydney Opera House. Nick Hornby often writes about music, musicians, and music lovers in his fiction and nonfiction work. His six novels, some of which have been turned into successful films, are High Fidelity, About a Boy, How To Be Good, A Long Way Down, Slam, and Juliet, Naked. He has also published three works of non-fiction, Fever Pitch, Songbook (a collection of essays about songs that influenced his life), and The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, as well as a book of short stories, Otherwise Pandemonium. Hornby wrote the screenplay for the film An Education for which he was nominated for an Oscar and a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay.

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Lonely Avenue offers equal measures of humor and pathos in often deceptively cheerful songs that unfold like brilliant, bittersweet short stories. Folds literally gives voice to Hornby’s endearingly mixed up, lovelorn characters, who come across as sympathetic even at their most hapless. An aging pop singer has to endlessly and agonizingly reprise his one hit, a paean to a woman he left years ago, to the fans who still attend his shows (“Belinda”). A mother tries to avoid a stunning view of New Year’s Eve fireworks as she attends to her child in a London hospital (“Picture Window”). A suburban man tries to empathize with his tattoo-ed, Metallica-blasting neighbor, while drawing the line at his scary pit bulls (“Your Dogs”). Hornby reconstructs the world of crippled, Brill Building-era songwriter Doc Pomus circa 1962, a fabled tunesmith who held court at the Hotel Forrest in midtown Manhattan (“Doc Pomus”) and imagines, with unexpected tenderness, the moment when Alaskan teenager Levi Johnston discovered he’d impregnated the newly announced vice-presidential candidate’s daughter (“Levi Johnston’s Blues”). There’s also an exuberant, out-of-left-field mash note to real-life American poet Saskia Hamitlon that celebrates her euphonious name as well as her work, and deftly manages to rhyme “idyllic with “dactylic.” (Folds’ melody makes that seem easy.)

The official genesis of this project can be traced to a 2009 dinner conversation between the pair, but it was an idea that had germinated for years as these artists’ friendship evolved out of mutual admiration. As Folds recalls, “On one of my first U.K. tours, it was probably as High Fidelity was blowing up, Nick was at those shows. If I’d known that the guy whose book I was reading was there, I would have been really nervous. Even though we didn’t meet, that’s where it started. He was listening to my record and I was reading his book at the same time.”

“I think we’re a good match,” Hornby declares. “I’ve listened to him ever since the first album came out. With some recording artists I think the music comes from some place I don’t understand yet I still love it. But Ben’s stuff comes from a place that I’ve got in me anyway. He was always likely to understand what it was that I wanted to do and vice versa.”

In Hornby’s 2002 Songbook, a collection of 30 essays about pop songs published to benefit children’s charities in the U.S. and the U.K., Hornby ruminated on Folds’ “Smoke” and included it on a CD compilation accompanying the original hardcover edition. The essay was ostensibly about the painstaking craft of creating the effortless-seeming pop song, of which Hornby considers Folds a master, but, like most of the essays in the book, it addressed so much more. Hornby called “Smoke” “one of the cleverest, wisest songs about the death of a relationship that I know” and, he admitted, he turned to it regularly as his own marriage unraveled.

That piece caught Folds’ attention at a time when he was developing an album, Has Been, with William Shatner, who’d guest-starred on Folds’ solo Fear Of Pop, Vol. 1,and this improbable project turned into a noble, heartfelt effort. Explains Hornby, “I got an email from Ben asking if I would help write some songs for Shatner, which was obviously too enticing a prospect to resist. I had never written lyrics before–I had never even tried to write a lyric before–but I thought about Bill and what might be fun for him to sing in his own way and I submitted two songs. One took me a long time and one took me no time and Ben was taken with the one that took no time and they recorded that for the album. I think it turned out really great; Aimee Mann sings on it as well. It was so much fun to see my words turned into something different. Then Ben thought maybe we should have a go at something more than that, and that’s how this began.”

“Nick may not agree with me,” says Folds, “but I see him as a very disciplined writer in the best kind of way. He begins working and you start getting song after song after song. I had far too many to make an album. Which was great. I could just pick out the ones that I felt an immediate bonding with. The first one that we warmed up on was ‘Levi Johnston’s Blues.’ After watching the Republican National Convention the rest of us were thinking, ‘holy shit that woman could be president,’ but Nick was thinking, ‘holy shit, this poor guy’s got to marry the daughter.’”

Hornby left the musical decisions entirely in Folds’ hands once he delivered his lyrics. With “Levi Johnston’s Blues,” recounts Folds, “Nick was amused that I made it more cinematic than he ever thought it would be. The thing is, he sees so many angles in something, he could easily sell the depths of what he’s written short, and I think sometimes he does. His books are like that too. He’s a good body snatcher. The way he gets into his characters is seamless.” Hornby had envisioned “Practical Amanda,” about a woman who sees as much fix-up potential in a disheveled man as a rundown house, as “really bright, breezy, upbeat,” but Folds transformed into it a gentle ballad. He also grabbed key phrases from “Password” and repurposed them for some very funny spelled-out bits that particularly delighted Hornby: “That was really a joy to me the way he decided to do it; it was his idea to have the backup vocals spell out the words.” He adds, with a laugh, “All the genius touches were his.”

Recording to tape required that Folds listen for and swiftly capture serendipitous moments with his fellow players, rather than ponder the endless choices the digital world offers. As soon as the words arrived, Folds sought out melodies for them: “I would basically sit at my computer staring at the text document that Nick had just sent, maybe with a short scale toy bass guitar, thinking about what the song is and what it could be. The next day I’d go into the studio, find the melody on the piano while everyone was setting up, and then I would start barking chords and we’d end up recording by the end of the day. These songs paint pictures so I’m always talking about the words and the guys were always gathering around the piano to see what Nick’s written. The bass player would looking at a lyric and go ‘goddamn, that’s cool, I know a girl just like that.’ And then he’d be ready to play.”

Other times Folds preferred to work, quickly and intuitively, on his own: “For a song like ‘Your Dogs,’ I started playing the piano, then I went to the drums, the bass, the distorted synthesizer, finally coming ’round to the mic and–boom, there were the lyrics, I’m singing them and we’re done. When that would get old, I’d get into solo piano and Paul Buckmaster mode,” with Folds playing live on a Steinway he recently acquired alongside the string section. “Then we came full circle by bringing back the band and writing the music and recording two songs in two days–’Claire’s Ninth’ and ‘Doc Pomus.’”

Sequencing required careful deliberation, according to Hornby: “We had a lot of back and forth about that but Ben’s feeling for sequences and his arguments for them were way more authoritative than anything I could muster. I would start off thinking a certain way then Ben would explain patiently and with great good humor why I was wrong.”

The result is an 11-song set that’s as playful as it is soul stirring, and more than a little magical. Concludes Folds, “With some albums the comet goes by and you grab it while it’s passing and everything you do has some comet dust on it. This is one of those albums, and I don’t often say that.”

Tracklist:

01. A Working Day [01:50]

02. Picture Window [03:42]

03. Levi Johnston's Blues [05:15]

04. Doc Pomus [04:13]

05. Your Dogs [03:23]

06. Practical Amanda [03:52]

07. Claire's Ninth [03:49]

08. Password [05:21]

09. From Above [04:04]

10. Saskia Hamilton [03:09]

11. Belinda [06:13]

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