If you’ve had at least one of your ears clag-pasted to the radio (namely Triple J) over the past month you would have managed to sample the latest release "From Above” by musician & songwriter: Ben Folds (Underground, Brick, Army) and literary quirk-ster/Academy Award nominee: Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy).
Over dinner last year, the pair decided to sandwich together their artistic genius’ to plate-up the whimsical, piano-based pop-from-the-heart album, Lonely Avenue.
"There's such a wide world of things you can do with music," Folds told Billboard.com. "I feel like I can get a football player and have him tell his life story and turn it into music and I think it would be unique. With Nick, my biggest fear was he would send me great lyrics and I wouldn't be able to do anything good with them. I had complete confidence in him."
And that’s how it came to be: Hornby sent lyrics and off-beat anecdotes to Folds who weaved them into imagined melodies; later recording the songs onto two-inch tape for better vinyl audio quality, with string arrangements by Paul Buckmaster.
"It's precisely nine years since I started working on ProTools," he notes, "but after the experience of the last record (2008's Way to Normal), I just asked myself, 'Digital recording, is that helping my records?', because it was not fun. If it's not fun and it's making them better, great. But it's not that fun, and I don't think it's improved (the records). So I'm coming back to analogue simply because I really gave digital a full go and I appreciate it, but I like rewind time and I like making choices on the fly...and that's what you do when you're working with tape."
Interesting to hear Folds change tact with production in making Lonely Avenue; he really manages to sound out Hornby’s stories with such beautiful emotional tension, meshing loneliness with a sweet, up-beat tempo. If working in analogue helped to enhance these elements, then perhaps nostalgia isn’t just a guilty pleasure.
Here is a taste of Hornby’s words taken from the track “From Above”:
They even looked at each other once across the crowded bar
He was with Martha, she was with Tom
Neither of them really knew what was going on
A strange feeling of never, heartbeats becoming synchronized
It's been that way forever but most of the time it's just near misses
And kisses once at a bookstore, once at a party
She came in as he was leaving and years ago at the movies
She sat behind him, the 6:30 showing of "While You Were Sleeping"
He never once looked around
Genius. Listen to it below:
Lonely Avenue is due out October 1.
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