One year after its release, the breakthrough album from Ben Folds Five is finally rising up the charts with more than a little help from the ballad "Brick" [750k QuickTime].

Those familiar with their latest effort, "Whatever And Ever Amen," or the band's self-titled 1995 debut know that the group is armed with an offbeat sense of humor, and that the somber "Brick" is a change of pace for the band.

Ben Folds himself says that the song grew out of the chorus line "She's a brick and I'm drowning slowly," a phrase that drummer Darren Jesse came up with two years before Folds wrote the autobiographical song.

[article id="1439412"]"Really, it was just looking back through a notebook and realizing I was doing a lot of writing about... basically... I'm still not so good at talking about all this stuff,"[/article] Folds told MTV News. [article id="1439412"]"High school. It's about a high

school couple having an abortion, basically [900k QuickTime][/article], and it's something I wanted to put into a song before, but didn't really know how to go about it, and how do you do that? What do you say really? But that chorus kind of captures a lot, I thought, so it was easy. All I had to do was fill in the story in a way that painted the picture that something was happening.

The group recently released an album of early B-sides and live tracks called "Naked Baby Photos" (see [article id="1425678"]"Ben Folds Five To Reveal 'Naked Baby Photos'"[/article]), and is now at work on a song for the "Godzilla" soundtrack which is due in May.