He writes these really earnest lyrics from the point of view of someone who’s really short on brain cells. Real: “Jared came up with ‘Free Coffee.’ “įake: “I changed the title to ‘Free Coffee Town.’ They were really horrible words. So that’s what that means, Could you call my girlfriend from your phone number and tell her I’m going to kill myself if she doesn’t come back?” Yang.’ On the record I was thinking, ‘I’m really not a big fan of the doctor songs like, ‘I went to the doctor with my problems and he couldn’t solve my problem.’ And so I thought, ‘It seems like everyone that’s got a problem goes to about five different doctors now and they’re all like eastern doctors and chiropractors and a psychic.’ We’re pretty self-obsessed, so that’s what the real one’s about.”įake: “When I wrote the lyrics it thought it’d be funny if ultimately he was going to the doctor so he would call his girlfriend for him, supposedly because his number’s been blocked and she’s got a restraining order against him. The line that I had trouble singing without laughing was ‘All these corporations poisoning our air/the children are angry and hungry and they don’t even care.’ Something like, let’s get this thing together, people, before we don’t have a planet at all or something. When I write the bad lyrics they’re really bad ’cause they sound real somehow. When Sam writes bad lyrics, to me they’re funny and I forgive him. It’s about saving the starving children and how it’s not the president’s fault. Real: “The album is called Way To Normal, there is no real song called that.”įake: “I thought if we’re writing really bad songs, we got to have a ‘way to normal’ theme song and it has to be slightly, half-assedly political. We’ve got it on video, it’s just us laughing the whole time.” I sat down, I found a riff, he sang the lyrics over the riff and it was done in about 45 minutes. It’s actually sillier than the fake one.”įake: “We thought it be funny to think, ‘How would a 13-year-old write that song?’ If you’ve been brainwashed then you’ll know all about how it feels to be messed with until your insides fall out. I wrote this song back suggesting we have a dance-off. Real: ” ‘Brainwashed’ on the record is actually a response to someone I know writing an extremely judgmental and mean song about me. Keep reading for Folds’ track-by-track comparisons of the leaked and real songs from Way To Normal.
In the end people got free songs and we had something to do on July 11.” I think some people hate it because they were told it was a joke. We’re all not honest these days about the way we listen to music. “Everyone I know keeps wanting to put it in and play it. “I may be on crack, but I think if that was half the real record, it’d be good,” he adds. If people must scrutinize new Folds files for authenticity, Folds says, “I’d be happy with that. “Fan sites would delete it,” he says, explaining Webmasters were afraid of being sued. “I figured a lot of people would get it and a lot of people wouldn’t, but that’s the way it is with my music in general.”įolds’ friends leaked the six tracks in late July, bundling them with real singles “Hiroshima,” “You Don’t Know Me” featuring Regina Spektor, and a piano-and-orchestra version of real song “Cologne.” A week went by without a response. “They sound like roughs because they haven’t been worked over and ruined like everything else that gets released these days,” Folds says. Folds really likes “Bitch Went Nutz” - a song told from the narrative perspective of an ignorant ex-boyfriend - and is now hosting it on his MySpace page. “You can just be free to write and let it go.” Some of the session went a little too well, though.
“The word ‘fake’ came up when we started doing it and it takes all the responsibility out,” he explains. They finished six at the pace of Sixties studio musicians and had a blast. Folds says the group rented studio time with nine joke songs in eight hours as the goal. The self-leak idea came during an early July flight to Europe with drummer Sam Smith and bassist Jared Reynolds (the trio were traveling as part of a year-long tour that includes 15 dates in the fall Way To Normal hits stores September 30th).
I just think that we all need to remember how to have fun.”
“They got the making-of camera up their ass the whole time and they’re on the BlackBerry the other half of the time. “You see so many rock bands in the studio and it’s serious, serious business,” the 42-year-old singer-pianist tells Rolling Stone. Only the songs weren’t real - he spent eight hours recording “fake” versions of six tracks during a late-night Dublin, Ireland session in early July, then let friends work their magic on the Web. Singer-songwriter Ben Folds responded to the inevitable leak of his forthcoming album Way To Normal in a unique way: he leaked it himself.