Author Nick Hornby writes the words and musician Ben Folds puts the music to them. The September album “Lonely Avenue” is, on the surface, hard to resist. It features one of my favorite authors and the man responsible for what I think is a perfect album, 2001’s “Rockin’ the Suburbs.” And I can’t think of a previous example of a musician and novelist teaming up for an album (let me know if there are any), so they get points for an original gimmick.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the results are merely OK. I don’t mean to discourage creative people from expanding their horizons, but while I have loved all of Hornby’s novels, from “High Fidelity” through “Juliet, Naked” (both must-reads for music snobs), not to mention his essays on music (“Songbook”), I didn’t care for his stab at writing a movie, last year’s “An Education” (I know I’m in the minority on that one).
And I can’t understand how Folds could be so emotionally on-target with “Suburbs” and then be so all over the place since then. “Lonely Avenue” is an example of that: Why does the guy who wrote “Annie Waits,” “Still Fighting It” and “Not the Same” — three of my all-time top 300 songs — need someone else to write lyrics for him?
This might be a case where Hornby’s talents are made for novels and Folds’ talents are made for songwriting. Still, there are enough interesting tidbits on “Lonely Avenue” that I resist making a blanket statement like that. And besides, Hornby is a talented writer and Folds is a strong pianist with a great voice, so there’s no way this album could be completely worthless. Here are a few highlights:
- The chorus of “A Working Day” shows that Hornby, despite all the glowing reviews he has received, often suffers from a lack of confidence: “Some guy on the ‘net thinks I suck/ And he should know/ He’s got his own blog.”
- “Levi Johnston’s Blues,” about a certain Alaskan who was thrust into the political and tabloid spotlight, has a chorus that stuck in my head for days after I first heard it (for better or worse): “I’m a f*****’ redneck/ I live to hang out/ With the boys, play some hockey/ Do some fishing and kill some moose/ I like to shoot the s*** and do some chilling I guess/ You f*** with me and I’ll kick your a**.”
- “Doc Pomus” and “Picture Window” show Hornby’s interest in sick or physically challenged characters. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I guess it’s just not my favorite song topic.
- “Practical Amanda” is a song title that could’ve easily appeared on “Suburbs.” But it’s slow and boring, at least at first blush. It doesn’t hook a listener right off the bat like the pop gems from “Suburbs.”
- “Password” uses a fun device: Folds spells out several words in the lyrics, which seem to be based on someone’s Facebook profile. He puts epic lounge music to it, perhaps to show how funny it can be when the sounds don’t match up with the material.
- On “From Above,” Hornby comes up with a sad, poetic concept that might’ve been a discarded novel idea: What if we all had a soul mate out there and we passed them on the street every day without realizing it? “They even looked at each other once across a crowded bar. He was with Martha, she was with Tom. … Most of the time was just near misses. … Once in a bookstore, once at a party, she came in while he was leaving. … Years ago at the movies, he sat behind him at a 6:30 showing of ‘While You Were Sleeping.’ He never once looked around.”
- The rather beautiful final track shows that Hornby understands the depressing plight of the one-hit-wonder musician, something Folds probably experienced early in his career with the absurdly overrated “Brick.” In this case, it’s a piano-bar singer who has to sing “Belinda” over and over again, thus reliving the hard feelings about an ex: “No one ever wants to hear the song he wrote for Cindy. … And he can’t blame them. They can tell his heart was never really in it. … But he’s not there; he’s somewhere else. He’s with Belinda, in the days before he made it all go wrong.”
What are your thoughts on “Lonely Avenue?” And what other musician/author collaborations would you like to see?
