But all that talking about ourselves to rock journalists got old. So we got grumpier, and more sarcastic. We became a PR nightmare, with many journalists saying they’d never interview us again. It’s just that so many of the interviews seemed impersonal and inane after a while. On our first trip to London for press, I had a glance at the massive British weekly music magazine with whom we were about to speak. It was geared for fashionable fancy English fans. It was a little intimidating for three Southern fellows on their first U.K. tour. I noticed that the magazine’s most recent interview, with the English rock band Oasis, featured a quote set in massive bold colors, taking up a quarter page: IF YOU DON’T LIKE OASIS, WELL, THEN YOU’RE SHIT! So when I couldn’t think what to say in the middle of our otherwise-normal interview with this magazine, I blurted, “If you don’t like Ben Folds Five, well, then you’re shit!” And what do you know? That quote got the same bold quarter-page treatment. The other weekly U.K. magazine had us pose with wax figures at a London wax museum, which was unique until the next album, when the same publication had us do the same shoot with a different photographer. I guess they’d forgotten.
Another constant on the tours supporting our first album was the presence of label execs who flew in to various shows across the United States, interested in signing us up for our second album. We met the famous producer and head of Interscope Records, Jimmy Iovine. He’d flown in on a private jet in time for the end of the show. Our meeting was brief: “Hi, wish we could have seen the show. I’m Jimmy Iovine. Do the right thing!” He dealt a punishing handshake and, poof, he was gone! Seymour Stein with Sire Records, equally legendary, took us out to dinner somewhere along the way. You weren’t a real band until you had dinner with Seymour. Belle and Sebastian even had a song about their Seymour dinner, appropriately named “Seymour Stein.” I think we met most of the big record-label names on this tour.
We eventually decided on Sony 550, a relatively new major label. And I’m not sure whether 550 realized it or not, but we really didn’t know what we were doing when we insisted on absolute creative control. Record execs were known to intervene in record production, which is understandable when investing millions in a band of nearly no experience. But many labels went way too far and got up in the artists’ proverbial creative grill, which is what we feared, so we asked that they stay out. Of course, there’s a middle ground, but we were becoming wary of compromises. The extremes were working for us. The late (very great and missed) Polly Anthony, who was the head of 550, and Ben Goldman, our A&R man, honored our extremism and didn’t involve themselves musically.
We were given free rein over our budget, which we spent purchasing or renting recording equipment and soundproofing my seven-hundred-square-foot Isley Street shitbox. The record company was even okay with Caleb Southern as our producer, even though he had very few recording credits to his name. I’m sure no other big record company would have allowed any of this. In fact, the competing labels had told us as much. They’d have insisted on a “proper” studio with a seasoned producer checking on our progress regularly.
Caleb Southern in the kitchen (control room) in Isley Street shitbox. Recording Whatever and Ever Amen, early summer, 1997.
The result of letting us run wild was an album that wasn’t exactly stylistically cohesive. That may or may not have been a strength, but it certainly made Whatever and Ever Amen unique. Profanity-laden songs like “Song for the Dumped,” with its chorus, “Give me my money back, you bitch…and don’t forget to give me back my black T-shirt,” sat side by side with “Brick,” my story of high school abortion. The new more-serious approach took a moment to get used to for our fans.
I remember one night, as we were recording Whatever, some neighbors had gathered at the back door of the house/studio, eager to hear what we were up to. They were perplexed by what they felt was an overly whiny, plodding piano ballad. “She’s a brick and I’m drowning slowly” droned through the speakers in the kitchen, which was Caleb’s makeshift control room. To our neighbors, this was proof of selling out. Where was the fuzz bass? The pounding piano? They didn’t think this was any fun at all, and they didn’t mind telling me so on my back porch.
I didn’t quite understand what they were talking about. This wasn’t insipid. It was new and dangerous. “Brick” was a song about teenage abortion. It was true and raw. Anyway, it didn’t sound like a radio hit to me at all. It was recorded in a few live passes on an out-of-tune upright piano, while Robert made his first attempt at double bass and bow, all on about six audio tracks live in a small bedroom of the house.
But the two extremes—loud joke songs and dead-serious ballads—sitting on the same album presented a sequencing challenge. It was unusual. Can you take a band seriously right after they’ve been shouting “kiss my ass” over and over? Normally an album has some in-between material for glue, but we had two opposite gears. So do you make Side A funny and raucous and Side B serious and introspective? We decided to mash them right up together, one extreme next to the other, no apologies. It was an honest snapshot of where we were.
Half the album represented our time on tour, slogging it out in drunken rock clubs. The other half, the ballads, was new. It came from introspection inspired by travel and changes in life. We found, returning home to record after nearly two years away, the Piano-Band-That-Rocks routine was wearing thin. It didn’t seem natural to us anymore, all that excessive bashing. We felt like windup monkeys on speed. The crowds dug it, but certainly there was more to music, more to life, than that. And we’d just spent two years with beautiful, melancholy music, like Elliott Smith and Sebadoh, streaming into our don’t fuckin’ talk to me conversation-blocking headphones. Music that seemed to speak to what a young man feels when life is changing all around.
We had over a month to record Whatever and Ever Amen, but it ended up feeling rushed because so much of it was written in the studio. The pace at which we worked gave me less time to second-guess the new, more personal material. I reached for whatever was on my mind that day. “Selfless, Cold and Composed” was inspired by an honest and scathing handwritten letter I’d just gotten from Anna. I had her letter on one side of the piano lid as I scratched the lyrics out quickly next to it.
It’s easy to be easy and free when it doesn’t mean anything
You remain selfless, cold and composed
She was saying my affable, happy-go-lucky approach to our split wasn’t because I was able to be magnanimous. It was because I didn’t care. I wasn’t affected by it. If I’d actually given a damn, she said, I’d have been moved to raise my voice, or say something mean. Just once. I’d never considered that, and it hit home for me. “Selfless, Cold and Composed” was a song to myself, as if from Anna’s point of view.
Come on baby now throw me a right to the chin