by Bryce Napier
Rockin’
The Suburbs
Released September 11, 2001
Epic Records
“They are genuinely things that bothered me, but it also seems that, in some ways, my expectations regarding Ben Folds were, at the time, unfairly high.”
Rockin' The Suburbs, released in 2001, feels like Ben Folds priming for superstardom. He’s billed as a solo artist, a subtle but significant change from his first three albums, all released under the band name Ben Folds Five. That combo (actually just a trio—they decided Ben Folds Three just didn’t have the same ring to it) had a gimmick that was never intended to be one: they had no guitarist. Ben played piano, Darren Jessee played drums, while Robert Sledge’s bass was cranked up to fuzzy extremes to fill in the aural gaps left by the lack of guitar. Even though there were two open slots available in the band name, the addition of a full-time guitarist would have betrayed the constrictive “rules” established by their signature sound. Going solo opened up his options.
Whether Rockin’ The Suburbs had the stuff to launch Folds into the pop stratosphere, we’ll never know for sure, since it had the misfortune to be released on September 11th of that year. By the time the general populace was ready to think about things other than 9/11, the album was already old news. Certainly it was for me. In fact, despite having chosen my representative favorites years ago, I’m only now giving pointed consideration to its position in the pantheon. (It was taking way too many words to adequately describe just what the first two Ben Folds Five records meant to me personally; suffice to say that they supply the benchmark to which the rest of his work is compared, and those comparisons have not been favorable.) To me, the Ben Folds/Five catalogue—nine-plus albums to date, depending on what you’d classify as an album—have been spotty in terms of quality after the first two records, and reside on a much lower rung of my esteem. I’ve culled a keeper or two from most of the titles, but I’ve long found them difficult beginning-to-end listening. I’m just coming to realize that circumstance may have prevented Rockin’ The Suburbs from ever getting its fair shake, though. Especially with me.
For the most part, the songwriting on Suburbs is not a vast departure from the musical sensibilities of the songs he recorded with the Five. Yet those sensibilities manage to get both streamlined and broadened here. From a musical standpoint, the early tunes were frenetically melodic. Songs shifted gears restlessly, boasting as many ideas as the band could cram into them. Rockin’ The Suburbs eases up on this substantially, trading in some of the rollercoaster factor for laser-focused craftsmanship.
Lyrically, Folds has always been about pulling off the scabs of the human condition to poke at the raw skin underneath, usually via character sketches and break-up songs. This was balanced, however, with wiseass snark, full songs that felt like they were built from in-jokes, mostly written to feed his own amusement. With the (somewhat painful) exception of the title track, Rockin’ The Suburbs dispenses with the latter type of song completely, and massages the character sketches into something more archetypal. This has the effect of making them less personal, less like portraits of people he knows in his life, which costs them some of their observational nuance, but perhaps makes them easier for more people to relate to.
The opening track, “Annie Waits,” is a perfect example of this evolution, both lyrically and musically. It kicks in with big, simple piano chords, punctuated by a handclap. He sings a verse over this simple riff, then sings a second with an additional Casio-style beat. At forty seconds in, the full band comes enters without deviating from the previously built groundwork. Eventually it moves into a bridge and a chorus (though even the chorus returns to the original riff, just with a new melody over the top of it), but it’s all in service of a tight pop song, and not as a showcase for Folds’s crazed soloing. Annie’s story, such as it is, is that she’s wondering if she’s being stood up, as her ride (and date, presumably) has neither shown up nor called her. There’s a light twist at the end, where the seemingly omniscient narrator turns out to belong to an actual person lamenting that Annie is not waiting for him instead. It feels a little like a not-sure-what-to-do-with-this ending; I don’t know that I think it works, and the lack of lyrical bite prevents it from being great, in my estimation. But the song itself is a total earworm, and a strong start to the album.
“Zak And Sara” continues the character-sketch format (six of the first eight songs on the record feature a person’s name in the title), but also brings up one of the reasons I suspect this record didn’t resonate with me sooner—I can’t make out the lyrics so easily, either the actual words or the intent. In fact, before putting the album on the microscope this week, I had no idea what the song was even about. Even now, after reading through the lyrics, I’m not entirely sure. Zak seems to be trying to impress/cheer up/connect with Sara by playing her a song while she mentally drifts away. Are they a couple? Is she sad because of Zak, or did she go somewhere with him to escape home life? It’s all so opaque and open to interpretation, which I’m not used to with Ben Folds lyrics. Musically, it’s rollicking and upbeat, and sounds like it could have easily fallen off a Ben Folds Five record. (Although that leads to a singularly dubious moment in the middle of the song, where a line about Sara pretending she doesn’t hear voices in her head “because at home they got her smacked” is immediately followed by a jaunty set of handclaps.) It’s fine—it’s good, even—but didn’t rope me in with its thematic hook, because I couldn’t (and still can’t) tell what its thematic hook was.
The problems get amped up a little more on “Still Fighting It,” which seems to have two wildly different and incompatible interpretations, either of which would be powerful message songs if only the specific meaning was made a little more clear. It seems to be about a father/son moment, the father seeing himself in the behaviors of his son, trying to explain the passage of time to the kid, marveling how much time has passed that he could have a son of his own, and how the son will experience the same passage of time. On the other hand, it also kind of seems to be about buying a meal for a homeless veteran, who’s “still fighting” a war in his mind, and the hope that this act of kindness might help set him right, and get back on his feet. And it’s weird that I can’t nail down one of these two divergent narratives, right? Folds can be very good at a heart-on-sleeve lyric (it’s one of my favorite things about him as an artist), at laying bare our collective vulnerabilities with a plainspoken turn of phrase, but I feel like it missed the mark here.
Perhaps the biggest reason I’d never thoroughly absorbed those first three songs is that I’d usually cue up the album to start at track four. Because, man, I love “Gone.” It’s one of the very few Ben Folds songs that easily matches my love for his first two albums. “Gone” takes a simple 1950s doo-wop structure and turns it into a pounding 6/8 singalong. And it’s a break-up song, one of his bread-and-butter formats. My takeaway is something like this: Okay, we weren’t good as a couple, but I don’t think that means we need to stop knowing each other entirely. However, that’s your call to make. “I hope you’ll find some time to drop a note / But if you won’t / then you won’t / And I will consider you gone.” It’s a little wounded, a little defiant, and a lot of cathartic fun to sing. I once made a Ben Folds mix to introduce a friend to his music, and this was my choice for a grab-em-by-the-throat opener. Top stuff.
“Gone” is immediately followed by one of his most poignant songs, a lilting piano and cello duet in waltz time titled “Fred Jones Part 2,” solidifying this middle stretch of the record, for me, as its heart. We finally get a character sketch that feels relatable, not because it’s vague enough to be applicable to everyone, but because it paints a specific picture of a universal fear. Mr. Jones is being forced into early retirement, observing that “no one is left here that knows his first name,” and he tries to gracefully accept it, doing the kind of thing he thinks retirees are supposed to do. He tries his hand at painting, and not until he assesses the finished product (“it doesn’t look right”) does he finally erupt: “…These bastards have taken his place / He’s forgotten but not yet gone.” There’s no narrative resolution, nothing to give it a silver lining; nothing but Fred’s gradual realization that he spent his adult life doing work that didn’t matter for people who didn’t care. Devastating, and devastatingly good.
After that one-two punch, it falls back into the territory of the first part of the record. “The Ascent Of Stan” is a mildly amusing portrait of a hippie forced to confront the fact that adult responsibilities have turned him into the kind of person he used to protest against. I don’t know what “Losing Lisa” is about. It strolls along at a Billy Joel-ish gait, has a chorus that talks about “black tears … falling down her face,” and doesn’t sound anywhere near as dire as that title and quoted lyric would suggest. The similarly-titled “Carrying Cathy” is the only thing that strikes me as a lyrical mis-step. A mawkish tale with “clever” wordplay, Cathy is a fragile girl who is always leaning on emotional support (thus being “carried”), but ultimately commits suicide, and in the end her remaining family have to cart her coffin (get it? they’re literally carrying her! hey! hey! do you get it?) down the gravesite for burial. His lyrics aren’t known for their subtlety, but there’s an art to their artlessness, and the sledgehammer they wield comes from rawness and insight, not weepy melodrama with a heavy-handed twist.
There’s another four songs on the record, but only two more with standout personalities for me. (For the record, the two I’m skipping are called “Not The Same” and “Fired.” They’re fine.) The title track is the most curious song on the record for several reasons. There’s the sound of it: it’s guitar driven. If there’s piano, it’s buried in the mix, and the prominent keys are organ (or electric piano, or Mellotron, or synth—apologies that I can’t always identify keyboard-based instruments by sound alone, but there’s a couple of different types in here). That alone makes it a significant departure. Then there’s the tone of it, a return of the snarky frat boy voice that informed a lot of Ben Folds Five records. He’s teasing the existential angst of those who have it pretty good, lamenting, “ya’ll don’t know what it’s like / being male, middle class and white.” And though there’s profanity sprinkled throughout the record, it’s concentrated and pointedly self-conscious here, as when he repeats, “You better look out, because I’m gonna say ‘fuck!’” The language alone makes it a strange to choice to feature it so heavily—it provided the album title, after all, and was the primary single. While the tempos and dynamics rise and fall over the course of the album, the tone is fairly sober throughout, except for this one song. I do like the lightweight silliness of it, but figuring in the timing of 9/11 makes it almost cringe-inducing to imagine it airing at the time. A shift of marketing gears would have seemed exploitative (and, frankly, would have been), and so it feels like it the record was left to die on the vine, but literally any other song on the album could have cradled the national mood after the tragic events of that day.
Case in point: “The Luckiest,” which closes the album. It is awash in hope and hopelessness in equal measure. It is another percussion-free arrangement; just strings, piano and voice. It is love and loss wrapped in free-associative non sequiturs, and really a beautiful song. I have a personal memory locked to it as well: When my brother-in-law and his wife lost their newborn son in 2008, they asked me to put together a slideshow memorial to remember him by, and this was the song I chose to play over it. It seemed to capture what they were trying to express in the aftermath of this crushing blow—that, even knowing how it was going to end, they wouldn’t have wished away his short life to spare themselves the pain of his loss. So, yeah, I can’t hear it now without thinking of them, and it chokes me up a little. But I could have seen it being embraced as a salve in post-9/11 America, had it been given the chance to pervade the public consciousness.
It seems like I’ve nitpicked a lot over the album, as a whole, which I have. These nitpicks are, I think, what got the record stuck in the purgatory of ambivalence for so long. They are genuinely things that bothered me, but it also seems that, in some ways, my expectations regarding Ben Folds were, at the time, unfairly high. There are records that aim a lot lower—that don’t try to pitch an idiosyncratic point of view with every song—which I love unconditionally, nitpicking be damned. Making a point of listening to it recently, far-removed from the context of September 11th, has enabled me to hear it with fresh ears. The music is outstanding. There’s not a single track that sounds less than fully-formed. I think I’m ready to induct Rockin’ The Suburbs into my inner circle of favorite albums.