Yesterday I wrote about the nostalgia for 90’s acts that contributed to a new release by The Wallflowers. No doubt many people will look at the reunion of Ben Folds Five in the same light.
The band put out three studio albums between 1995 and 1999 then broke up unexpectedly. Their output generated one medium-sized hit (‘Brick’) and a small but devoted legion of fans like myself who couldn’t believe something so great ended so quickly.
This pick will come as no surprise to regular readers of the blog. I’ve gone on record calling this my favorite album and even featured it in its entirety a year and a half ago.
In fact, I’ve had to cheat in order to post a song today. This recording of ‘Alice Childress’ isn’t from the album itself but from a live radio performance by the band on KCRW. Fittingly, given yesterday’s featured album, Folds writes in the liner notes that he sang this song “absolutely intimidated by Fiona Apple’s performance on the same show.”
Here is another of those wonderful sophomore albums I mentioned a week ago. Three of my top six fall into that category, which could be a coincidence or could be evidence of some universal musical truth the nature of which has thus far eluded me. Anyone want to take a stab at it?
I’m against retrospective box sets on principle. If I’m a big fan of an artist, I own everything he or she has released and probably a few odds and ends picked up on the Web along the way as well. Invariably, the contents of a career-spanning release will be 90% redundant with what I already have.
For that reason, I initially decided not to buy Ben Folds’ 3-disc set, The Best Imitation of Myself: A Retrospective.
Once in awhile I’m pleasantly surprised by my wife falling in love with a song by one of my favorite artists. Normally our tastes overlap only sparingly and the music I listen to the most tends to fall outside of her circle of favorites.
Ben Folds is of course one of my very favorites and my wife is largely ambivalent toward him. However, she is a big fan of most of Ben Folds Five’s debut album (especially ‘Best Imitation of Myself‘ and ‘Video‘) and she recognized the brilliance of ‘Emaline‘ even before I did.
Meet Me In Montauk 