Ben Folds is very familiar with the road less traveled.
It's the same road that led him to abandon his gig as a session drummer in Nashville, return home to the collegiate town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and form Ben Folds Five with bassist Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jessee in 1994.
After cutting the self-titled indie in 1995, the band signed to a major label and cut "Whatever and Ever Amen," which became one of the surprise hits of 1997, thanks in part to a pair of singles: the boisterous "Battle of Who Could Care Less" and the maudlin follow-up, "Brick."
But rather than stick to the same path that produced the radio-friendly hits of "Whatever and Ever Amen," Ben Folds has instead opted for rockier roads and a steeper incline. The band held off from heading back to the studio to cut a new album and instead issued a collection of rarities and demos. When Ben Folds did return to the studio, it was to record the truly bizarre "Fear of Pop" album with William Shatner in late 1998.
Now Ben Folds Five has returned with a new record, "The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner," a loose-knit concept album that could be about a day in the life of any (and every) dreamy, slacker kid.
Ben Folds Five sat down with MTV News recently and talked about (and around) the new album, visions of Rush's Geddy Lee, and what happened when the real Reinhold Messner became aware of this "unauthorized" record.
MTV: On the liner notes to "Reinhold Messner," you thank a fairly wide range of people, including Geddy Lee from Rush. Why'd you single him out in particular?
Robert Sledge: Well, nobody has achieved the level of artistry that he did on the bass, I think, in the last ten years. So we did it just to give him his props.... Sometimes he comes to me in dreams and says these strange and cryptic things to me like, "Play dotted 8's on the chorus."
MTV: Speaking of strange messages, there's an unusual "preface" note in the new album that acknowledges the real-life Reinhold Messner. Did that come about after finding out there was a famous mountaineer of the same name?
Ben Folds: Well, actually, that was Reinhold's idea. He wanted a disclaimer... well, not really a disclaimer, but something to let everyone know that the record wasn't about him, which I can totally understand.
Darren Jessee: We didn't even know [about the real Messner] until we went to do an interview with... a friend of ours from Philadelphia, and he kind of tipped us off about the real Reinhold Messner. Most Americans aren't aware of him, and now we've learned quite a bit and can't wait to go camping with him. Hopefully we'll get to do some outdoors stuff with him.
BF: Yeah, climbing would be nice.
MTV: The title is taken from a name that Darren used on fake IDs while growing up in Charlotte, North Carolina. What prompted you to incorporate this into this record, and does the band consider the record to be a true concept album, per se?
BF: Well, it kind of is in a way, but only in that the songs on the record hold together, and there's a thread going throughout. It's not necessarily any specific concept that's the linking thread. It's lots of different themes, whether they're musical or lyrical, that tie the whole thing together. I suppose it could qualify for a concept record, but I think it's a little shy of meeting that [standard]....
MTV: So was it just a matter of sequencing the songs you already had written into a meaningful order?
RS: Well, some of that was fairly obvious. It would have been a lot shorter an album, and it would have been a total concept record, if we had gone with our original plan.
It began with a suite. Ben had written a group of three or four songs that were very similar. The chord changes were very similar, the ideas were similar, and some of the lyrics coincided with other lyrics. So there's only one real way those songs could have gone sequentially on the record.
MTV: Considering the potential legal hassles from the real Mr. Messner, did you ever consider changing the title of the record, especially since the "concept" isn't based on the name?
BF: Well, it was a little scary for a couple of days, because we didn't know them and didn't know if they were gonna go for it or not, and we were really into the name. I wouldn't have wanted to change the name of the album to "Reinholt Messner" or something like that.
MTV: For your live show, are you rolling out the new album in its entirety, track-for-track?
BF: Just a few. We've kept intact [the segues from] "Magic" to "Hospital Song" to "Army," which actually weren't the songs in the suite, but they seemed to work together really well. There were also two others we finished for the album that are going to be released on the Japanese version, including one song that Robert wrote, "Birds."
MTV: Why exactly do you put additional tracks on international versions of the album? Some fans might think you're trying to force them to buy a really overpriced album with just one or two more songs.
BF: Well, it's an import thing. [Foreign labels] think that if they have something for their domestic release that's more attractive than their imports, then hopefully those kids will buy it from their record company and not the American record company. Apparently it's a lot hipper in other counties to own the [American] imports, so they're competing with the imports over there.
Likewise for an American artist, if all the records you sell [in a foreign market] are the American imports, then you're not gonna chart over there. You still may sell all those records, but no one will really know it; you won't get the same play.
MTV: "Army" seems to be one of the few radio-friendly tracks on the new album. Was it designed to be the first single, or did you just know when you wrote it?
BF: In a way, there was really no [plan], but we knew we wanted to start with something more a little more upbeat than ["Brick"], and ["Army"] was one of the two upbeat songs on the record. So it was between that and another song called "Redneck Past." Those were the two contenders.
It's more representative of where we come from, 'cause we've actually written more upbeat numbers than not as a band, even though "Brick" was a hit single. It still kind of makes sense to go back to what your fans know, and then from there just kind of bum --
RS: Bum rush?
BF: Yeah, bum rush the material from there.
DJ: We're on the prog rock tip now.
