E-Mail This Article to a Friend Pop in a hard place Why 40,000 Ben Folds fans can’t be wrong BY MATT ASHARE

Back in ’95, when Ben Folds was working on the album that would introduce the Ben Folds Five to the world, he wondered what would constitute success. So he turned to one "successful" bandleader he knew, Archers of Loaf frontman Eric Bachmann (Folds played drums and piano in the eclectic and ambitious Barry Black, a mostly instrumental Archers of Loaf side project Bachmann headed in the mid ’90s), and popped the question. "My measuring stick for success was selling as many records as Archers of Loaf," Folds says when I catch him "decompressing" in LA after a long flight from Australia, where he now spends most of his time. "I remember one night Eric dropped me off at my house, and I didn’t really know what to say, so I just asked him how many records the Archers had sold. He said something like 40,000, and that number stuck with me — even after we got popular and I became some kind of ’90s one-hit-wonder bitch boy — because last year, when I found out I’d sold that many copies of those EPs I released, I was very happy."

Oh yeah, the EPs. There wouldn’t be a Songs for Silverman (Epic), the new Folds full-length that arrived on April 26 in advance of a club tour that hits Avalon this Saturday, without Super D, Sunny 16, and Speed Graphic, the trio of solo EPs Folds released in 2004. The difficult road that led to Songs for Silverman was full of false starts, breakdowns, and side trips, including the scrapped solo album recorded last year as a follow-up to Rockin’ the Suburbs (Epic), the commercially disappointing 2001 solo debut with the unfortunate September 11 release date. That 2004 effort never saw the light of day, though two of its tracks do appear on Songs for Silverman. Instead, Folds entered what he describes as a midlife crisis of sorts, as he slouched toward 40 with a wife, twins, and no band to speak of. He did collaborate with Ben Lee and Ben Kweller as the Three Bens, he arranged and produced a not-quite-as-silly-as-you-might-think solo album for his pal William Shatner, the star-studded Has Been (Shout Factory, 2004), and he recorded those three EPs. But, confused by his solo debut’s lukewarm reception, he struggled with the idea of a new full-length.

"Rockin’ the Suburbs was an unabashed attempt to kick out some catchy songs and have a bunch more hits," he reflects. "But a lot of things were going wrong for me at the time. Having the album come out on 9/11 didn’t help. So I ended up with a touring band that I couldn’t afford to pay. Touring alone with a piano was great. That was born out of the pocketbook, but in retrospect, it was the beginning of my rebirth. I guess I’ve had some really great failures in the past few years. I mean, Rockin’ the Suburbs is a fine album. But after it failed, I had a really hard time figuring out what to do next. Every time I started working on a new album, it sucked."

What Folds describes as "failures" were actually small triumphs. Each EP found its way to the #1 spot on Billboard’s then-new downloading chart, and that made him an unwitting pioneer in pop’s brave new digital world. They reintroduced wayward fans to the manchild piano prodigy with a talent for confessional songs (like "Brick," which was inspired by a real-life situation involving a girlfriend and an abortion), a quirky, "geek-rock" image, and a wry sense of humor reflected in song titles like "Battle of Who Could Care Less." The bright piano melody that opens Sunny 16 is undercut by the mixed emotions of the song it kickstarts, "There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You." Folds goes on to attack the perennial ugly American from an amusingly skewed angle in "All U Can Eat," a song peppered with gorgeous background harmonies, tasteful jazzy piano refrains, and more than enough f-bombs to keep it out of Wal-Mart.

Super D opens with a guitar-less cover of the Darkness’s "Get Your Hands Off My Girlfriend" that makes for a decent tongue-in-cheek piano ballad; Speed Graphic offers a straight-faced rendition of the Cure’s "In Between Days." The EPs are all over the musical and emotional map: a spare piano-and-voice recording of "Give Judy My Notice" (a tune reworked on Songs for Silverman) runs up against a brisk, drum-driven, harmony-laden "Protection," and "Get Your Hands Off My Woman" gives way to the sobering introspection of "Kalamazoo," which catches its groove on the second chorus and continues to build till disco strings make their debut. Trumpet, acoustic guitar, and strange little electronic touches flesh out the character study "Rent a Cop."