Albums can be like old friends. Press play on something you first heard 20 years ago, and the result often resembles sitting down with someone from high school. Nostalgia carries the conversation, rubbing a shine into your first moments back together. Once you breathe out all the old stories, the names of old friends and old haunts, you’re left with an inelegant hush, fully aware of the space between two parties with nothing new to say.
The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner by Ben Folds Five is that rarest of confidantes and counselors. Sounding present-tense even as it prepares to turn 20 in April, it’s the sort of album that knows you at least as well as you know yourself. The songs understand your station, at any station, because they concern themselves with the types of problems that grow, rather than go, with time.
In spring 1999, Ben Folds Five seemed an unlikely candidate to make a record with this sort of staying power. Defying rock’s natural law—and math—the North Carolina trio took its guitar-less piano-punk to America’s radios with its second record, 1997’s Whatever and Ever, Amen. Listeners should’ve known this was no ordinary one-hit wonder: the band’s breakout, “Brick,” was an exquisite ballad about the emotional toll of abortion.
Expanding on that record’s lush, lyric tendencies, frontman Folds, bassist Robert Sledge and drummer Darren Jessee responded to pop success by returning to the studio and churning out Generation X’s answer to “Pet Sounds.” Folds and Co. didn’t bend keys or play with studio conventions like Brian Wilson did on that iconic album, but they accessed a musical palette deep and wide enough to express a stunning emotional range.
The band yips its way along the edge of a 1950s chord progression on opener “Narcolepsy” and seals the track with choral “ahhs.” Elsewhere on the record, timpanis reproduce the pound of a heart reckoning with someone else’s mortality. Strings and horns envelop the band and intercede on its behalf, expressing despair and desire with groans when words aren’t enough.
Sledge’s fuzz bass is the album’s unsung hero; in other hands, it would make a sound like a kid pulling at his shirt collar in a last grasp for the gold of youth and grit of punk. Here, it anchors the band to each emotion long enough to force a staring contest, then a reckoning. It heightens the storminess of “Narcolepsy,” articulates contrition on “Don’t Change Your Plans for Me,” augments the defiance—and spiraling lack of control—on “Army.” The shirt fits better than you think, rock and roll and responsibility rubbing each other raw on their way toward co-existence.
The record achieves levels of beauty rarely brushed against, and only then by pop masters such as Wilson or Burt Bacharach, writers who relished sweeping, romantic gestures, yet never surrendered the beauty of fine details. Folds, a singer with an unreliable falsetto and a songwriter with a penchant for four-letter words, proves he’s worthy of a seat at their corner table. His arrangements dance with timelessness—they could just as easily have arrived in 1969 or 1979—yet bear the scars of specific choices, and take the shape of present-tense emotion.
With the exception of a few of Wilson’s most tender expressions, Folds uses these buoyant arrangements to catalyze a deeper vulnerability; the only reason a song like “Mess” wouldn’t chart in 1969 or 1979 is that it’s hard to sing along to lines like these without breaking down: “There are rooms in this house that I don’t open anymore / Dusty books of pictures on the floor / … She’ll never see that part of me / I want to be for her / What I could never be for you.”
The album’s two best songs initially seem like antipodes. “Don’t Change Your Plans for Me,” perhaps the most splendid, complete composition in Folds’ catalog, is the sound of a heart careening, all regret and rock-a-bye waves. Quietly majestic flugelhorn and piercing poetry—“You have made me smile again / In fact, I might be sore from it / It’s been awhile,” Folds sings with particular tragedy—leave listeners wincing with recognition.
“Army,” in contrast, sounds like ragtime on amphetamines. On Whatever and Ever, Amen, Folds indulged his inner firestarter on cuts like “Song for the Dumped” and “One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces.” All the hallmarks of Folds’ most agitated anthems are on Messner, too: Physical, discordant piano playing. Well-timed swear words. Musical phrases ending in anarchic exclamation points.
All the hallmarks but one. The songs on Amen lash out, stressing the fight in Folds’ fight-or-flight response when aggrieved or abandoned. With “Army,” the joke’s on him. After his narrator chooses music over military service, he detonates a wickedly funny couplet: “Citing artistic differences the band broke up in May / And in June reformed without me and they’d got a different name.”
Reinhold Messner offers a range of responses to a revelation which settles over adulthood like fine dust, which is that life rarely works out like you thought it would. On “Narcolepsy,” Folds repeats the phrase “I’m not tired” like he’s pulling at a ripcord. If he says it enough times, he can convince himself he’s fine— and maybe persuade everyone else. Another wrenching lyric opens “Don’t Change Your Plans”:
“Sometimes I get the feeling / That I won’t be on this planet / For very long / I really like it here / I’m quite attached to it / I hope I’m wrong / All I really wanna say / You’re the reason I wanna stay.”
That’s the inner monologue of someone on the precipice of loving someone else more than himself. I recognize the feeling. I believe in a heavenly reward, yet still I want to linger on here when I glance at my wife across the room, or gaze upon my sleeping child.
Folds is completely naked and undone on “Mess,” singing of “this mess I have made” against a bossa nova beat that gently urges him to get on with his confession. What might sound like the record’s most defeated sentiment is a blessing in disguise. Every sliver of Reinhold Messner stresses the idea that to truly live is to know thyself and own every ounce of your cowardice, failure and disappointment.
A band that is, at most, agnostic—“No I don’t believe in God / So I can’t be saved,” Folds sings on “Mess”—taps into something like grace by acknowledging the extent of the wreckage all around it, then inviting any disheveled souls within earshot to keep company. Vulnerable to a degree most mainstream-facing bands never are, Ben Folds Five went on the record to say that messy can be beautiful and, no matter how personal or particular the details, we’re never alone in our loneliness.
Reinhold Messner hit the atmosphere in April 1999. I graduated from high school a month later. I gaze back on the music of that time like pictures on yearbook pages. I have little interest in reconnecting with Backstreet Boys or Sugar Ray. I left guys like Blink-182 back in high school. No matter how rad they once were, I can’t count on someone who would choose “dream of Californication” as their senior quote.
Instead, I look to the kid with the uncool haircut, who was both wise and a wise-ass, prone to sign your yearbook with something like “There are a hundred ways to cover your redneck past” or “You’re the magic that holds the sky up from the ground.” That kid offered friendship you could grow into, which, despite the years, continues to matter right here, right now.