AILSA CHANG, HOST:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Ailsa Chang.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
And I'm Scott Detrow. It is the new album found on an old shelf.
(SOUNDBITE OF BEN FOLDS FIVE SONG, "ALICE CHILDRESS")
DETROW: Ben Folds, a pioneer in the alt-rock genre, is celebrating the 30th anniversary of his old band's debut album, "Ben Folds Five," with a special release. It's a double album featuring a remastering of that debut.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALICE CHILDRESS")
BEN FOLDS FIVE: (Singing) Alice Childress, anymore. No, not...
DETROW: Along with tracks from what Folds calls his shelved first attempt.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNDERGROUND")
BEN FOLDS FIVE: (Singing) Who's got the looks? Who's got the brains? Who's got everything? I got this pain in my heart, that's all.
DETROW: I spoke with Ben Folds recently, and we hopped in a time machine back to the 1990s when this three-person group with bassist Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jessee first got started.
BEN FOLDS: I had been kind of carrying most of those songs with me for maybe 10 years, which is crazy because I was 27.
DETROW: (Laughter).
FOLDS: And, you know, it just - I'd done everything from doing a stint living in New York City and trying to get my songs out there, and nothing. It just was dead end. And I moved back to North Carolina in late 1994, and my - you know, my ambition was is to find great musicians back home where I understood the musicianship and it was very grassroots and to do it more, you know, like a band. I loved rock music, but my songs were probably coming across a bit on the Broadway side at the time. So I moved back to North Carolina, and I met both Robert and Darren within about two weeks, and we were rehearsing immediately.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JULIANNE")
BEN FOLDS FIVE: One, two, three, four. (Singing) I met this girl. She looked like Axl Rose. Got drunk and took her home, and we slept in her clothes. And in the morning, put my feet on the floor and thought feel like never felt like this before. But Julianne...
DETROW: How quickly was it clear to you that, like, OK, I think I can break through with these guys at this moment?
FOLDS: There was kind of two layers to it. One was that the '80s finally lost their grip on the aesthetic of pop music. So I think there was that sense of optimism about it. And Robert, Darren and I just have a chemistry, and it was very lucky. You know, their take on my music is to beat it up pretty badly, you know, in a good way. Like, just it not being precious. And so when we played our first gig, I felt like it was obvious that we had, you know, had good potential. We were not like anything else, and we were moving our own piano on stage.
(SOUNDBITE OF PIANO PLAYING)
FOLDS: Does it sound pretty cool right there? Does it sound OK?
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Yeah.
FOLDS: Can you hear the piano?
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: The sound (inaudible).
(SOUNDBITE OF PIANO PLAYING)
DETROW: You've since had 30 years of artistic growth. And I'm wondering whether it's the original album or the shelved album, as you've been listening back and working on this rerelease, what to you has changed the most about your music? And what to you do you hear and you say, yeah, that's me? We still do that. We still sound like that.
FOLDS: Well, I mean, what I aspire to do at any moment is the best of what I am then. There's something that you're good at at that moment that you understand you have perspective on in that moment, and you have more perspective on that than you ever will again. So you don't recreate the past and you don't try to anticipate or fake what's going to be the future. You walk into a studio or you sit with your songs, and you make sure that that's what you mean to say and do at that moment. That's that. And I think that that first record, you know, the one that we released, does that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "JACKSON CANNERY")
BEN FOLDS FIVE: (Singing) Stop the bus. I want to be lonely when seconds pass slowly and years go flying by.
FOLDS: The other one really nicely documents, professionally records the songs. And that's still what I hear.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE LAST POLKA")
BEN FOLDS FIVE: (Vocalizing). (Singing) The end is growing near. And we're treading water now and holding back our tears
FOLDS: When I'm making music now, I don't feel like particularly a different person than I was with the first record, but you can't unknow things. And the thing that I still carry with me that I did from then, which is, if I made a record, and it didn't seem like who I was then, I would shelve it now, even if it had a $300,000 price tag attached to it, because I think that the worst thing you could do is to misrepresent yourself. Everyone else is going to do that for you.
DETROW: I'm really interested in the shelved first attempt.
FOLDS: Mm-hmm.
DETROW: How did you first come across it recently?
FOLDS: I obviously heard it when we decided that it wasn't what we needed to put out there. We'd gotten a record deal with Caroline Records. You know, I think Smashing Pumpkins might have started there. And we were really excited about getting that out. And then we felt that we were a, for lack of better word, an alt-rock band. But there was no one doing what we were doing. So they - everyone wanted to sort of look at this and market it and can it as kind of this adult, contemporary, older-people thing because it had piano in it. But we really rejected that.
And when we went into the studio, we just ended up sort of with - we're with the producer. It was very good. But he made a lot of decisions that were very much again, maybe, that was dictated by the label to a degree. The decision skewed very much toward someone who we were not yet. And when we realized the result, we rejected it. Of course, we had spent our $14,000 budget. It was gone. That was it. That's all they had. My friend Kerry McCarthy, who was my music publisher, she found, I think, 3- to $5,000 for us to record it again in three days.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNCLE WALTER")
BEN FOLDS FIVE: (Singing) Your Uncle Walter told me everything he would do if he was president.
DETROW: What is one song that you would point somebody to who's curious about this? Like, what's the one song, whether it was on the release or the shelved album, that you've kind of spent the most mental energy on or thought the most about over the course of this project?
FOLDS: I think the notable songs on the vaulted record are "Julianne" because it's different and "Evaporated." "Evaporated" ended up on our second record, by the way, not the first record. So the shelved first one was the first take of it, which I think is really interesting. As far as the song that I think when I press play on anything on that first album, the one I've always been the most interested - and it would probably be a surprise to my fans - but it was "Best Imitation Of Myself."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BEST IMITATION OF MYSELF")
BEN FOLDS FIVE: (Singing) The best imitation of myself. Maybe I'm thinking myself in a hole, wondering...
FOLDS: And it was because I believe that everything converged on that recording. The sound of the fuzz bass and the way that the band kicks in, the statement of not being yourself or being yourself, it's about imitating yourself is really perfectly relevant even now. It's something that a lot of us think about. Like, am I being me or am I imitating the person that I used to be? And so I think that that song stands out for that reason.
DETROW: That's Ben Folds. His new album, "Ben Folds Five (30th Anniversary)," is out September 9. Thank you so much.
FOLDS: Thank you. Good to talk to you.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BEST IMITATION OF MYSELF")
BEN FOLDS FIVE: (Singing) Did I make me up or make the face till it stuck? I do the best imitation of myself. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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