Music: October 2008 Archives

I’m spending this week in New York City on business. I had trouble getting comfortable on the flight over (which might have had something to do with an older Asian woman who was trying to cuddle with me), so I decided to try to bring some tranquility to seat 31F with some music.

I’m usually a shuffle guy, in fact I’m almost always a shuffle guy. It’s funny because I’m generally decisive. For some reason, though – I enjoy music when it’s random. After doing that for about 5 minutes, I found that I had skipped through about 50 tracks – and at that rate it might have been a little difficult to fit in some sleep. So I, for that afternoon, became an album guy.

The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner. It was Ben Folds Five’s third and final studio album. I’ve been thinking about that record a lot because they recently reunited to play it front to back (and I failed miserably at getting tickets). I have to say, on the whole, I never really liked Messner as much as the other Ben Folds Five albums. It did, though, have some of my favorite songs of theirs – like Don’t Change Your Plans and Army.

But for the first time, I got it. I understand why that album might actually be their best.

I had heard an interview with Ben a while back discussing this record. He had said it was originally written and recorded as all one song. There were long instrumentals that transitioned from one track to the next. When I listened all the way though, it became something that was much more than the sum of its parts. Songs like Mess and Hospital Song that never really did it for me, now became an intricate part of the album’s story.

That album was meant to be listened to, in order, from start to finish. Like a piece of classical music written with many movements, each piece building the previous. Its finish is even poetic and ironic (knowing their breakup was months away), with the last line of the last song Lullaby having the simple and and unapologetic words “let the moonlight take the lid off your dreams.”

It’s strange, because it’s taken me 8 years of listening to it to get to this point. And now, I can’t seem to take that album off repeat.