Ben Folds continues his US tour, featuring music from Lonely Avenue, his album with Nick Hornby, with a stop at Club Zoo in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review says the collaboration "yielded one of the year's most compelling albums." Sequenza21 calls Lonely Avenue Folds's "most musically ambitious and wide-ranging effort to date; yet it’s uniformly distinguished. Perhaps in response to the rich lyrical terrain he has before him, Folds incorporates a number of stylistic inflections this time out, from savvily arranged seventies pop to undulating minimalism and from sensitive balladry to brash piano punk."
Ben Folds continues his US tour, featuring music from Lonely Avenue, his new collaborative album with Nick Hornby, with a stop at Club Zoo in Pittsburgh tonight.
Leading to tonight's concert, Folds spoke with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review staff writer Rege Behe about his collaboration with Hornby, which Behe says "yielded one of the year's most compelling albums" in Lonely Avenue.
Behe says of Hornby, the album's lyricist: "Contemporary writers often use music as a means to evoke mood or pinpoint an era. No one does this better than Nick Hornby."
Read the article at pittsburghlive.com.
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Folds also spoke with Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Scott Mervis about the project and his connection with Hornby, dating back, in a way, even before the two men had met one another.
"We go back in that, if I could name one author that I would associate with my band touring at that point in life, it's Nick Hornby," Folds recalls. "He will tell you the same of my records, during the time he was writing High Fidelity and About a Boy. Our records is what he was listening to. We were both big fans of the other's work."
You can read the article at post-gazette.com.
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Sequenza21, in its review of Lonely Avenue, suggests it's not such a stretch to appreciate the novelist as lyricist. "Hornby makes the leap convincingly," writes reviewer Christian Carey, "suggesting that he belongs in the musical realm not just as an astute commentator, but as a full-fledged participant."
That makes Folds and Hornby a good match for one another, given the "eloquent, often poignant, music by Folds." Carey continues:
Indeed, Lonely Avenue is his most musically ambitious and wide-ranging effort to date; yet it’s uniformly distinguished. Perhaps in response to the rich lyrical terrain he has before him, Folds incorporates a number of stylistic inflections this time out, from savvily arranged seventies pop to undulating minimalism and from sensitive balladry to brash piano punk.
Read the complete album review at sequenza21.com.
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Folds's European tour dates for January and Febrary were announced earlier this week. For more information on the complete Lonely Avenue tour, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour. To pick up a copy of Lonely Avenue on vinyl, CD, or in the deluxe edition, with high-quality, 320 kbps MP3s included at checkout, head to the Nonesuch Store.
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