Ben Folds - Way To Normal Review

Ben Folds may have named his third solo LP Way To Normal, but the North Carolina native doesn’t have any such destination in mind. If you listen closely, you can see he’s on the highway to hell, or at least to “Effington,” his own version of The Truman Show. More movie set than true home, that song—and the entire album—reaffirms the long-suspected idea that Folds is more comfortable on the margins of art, respectability and society, a perpetual outsider reveling in his own eccentricities, from naming his former trio Ben Folds Five to mounting a project with Ben Lee and Ben Kweller and dubbing it “The Bens” to producing an album for William Shatner to palling around with “Weird Al” Yankovic.
Instead, these 12 songs are more of an anthropological study of aberrant human behavior, idiosyncratic news stories and bizarre chapters of the musician’s own autobiography, all observed with the same unstinting absurdist eye as J.D. Salinger when he penned Nine Stories more than 50 years ago. Folds’ “Kylie From Connecticut” suffers from the same thwarted dreams, disillusionment and frozen acceptance as the highball-drinking heroines in Salinger’s “Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut,” and the song conveys that same sense of being the prisoner of your own wrong choices....full text He's a busy bee, is Ben Folds. As well as producing and playing on the magnificent Amanda Palmer solo album, he's collaborating with author and longtime fan Nick Hornby, getting his old band Ben Folds Five back together for a recent one-off gig and has even found time to release a bunch of new songs and leak them online as an inside joke with his fans.

And inbetween all this activity, he's even managed to record a new album, the follow-up to the somewhat subdued Songs For Silverman. If that album saw the dawning of a new 'mature' Folds, Way To Normal sees the North Carolina native going back to his roots - full of upbeat and literate songs that manage to be both funny and sad at the same time. All interspersed with Folds' remarkable piano playing....full text He's a busy bee, is Ben Folds. As well as producing and playing on the magnificent Amanda Palmer solo album, he's collaborating with author and longtime fan Nick Hornby, getting his old band Ben Folds Five back together for a recent one-off gig and has even found time to release a bunch of new songs and leak them online as an inside joke with his fans.

And inbetween all this activity, he's even managed to record a new album, the follow-up to the somewhat subdued Songs For Silverman. If that album saw the dawning of a new 'mature' Folds, Way To Normal sees the North Carolina native going back to his roots - full of upbeat and literate songs that manage to be both funny and sad at the same time. All interspersed with Folds' remarkable piano playing....full text