It’s not uncommon for a band’s biggest commercial failure to be their greatest artistic success. This was certainly the case for Ben Folds Five who, after their third and best album The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (1999) failed to match label expectations, split to pursue their own projects.

Now, the trio is back to life and embracing a new business model, having crowd-sourced (through PledgeMusic) funding for fourth album The Sound of the Life of the Mind. With meeting their goal after only a week and breaking the Billboard Top 10 for album sales (a milestone, as Folds notes in this interview) it was clearly the right plan.

We recently spoke with the band about finding themselves together again, and what they really think of fan sponsorship.

When did you first get the urge to reunite?

BEN: I didn’t consider it until the first reunion gig in 2008, for a MySpace broadcast and I didn’t even really “consider” that — someone asked us, we didn’t see why not. Until then I hadn’t thought about it. I was busy, and proud of what we’d done with three great records.

DARREN: The gig didn’t necessarily lead to the current reunion. We did it but didn’t really talk about doing anything past that.

A lot of reunited bands do find touring success with only their old material, so what brought on a new Ben Folds Five album?

DARREN: Ben called us to play on his retrospective album [The Best Imitation of Myself] and that opened the door, getting us back into the studio. It really was that simple.

Was there a moment, for any of you, when you realized reuniting was the right choice?

ROBERT: In ’08 it was obvious there was still a lot of creative energy and synergy in the band. Sometimes there was some rust, maybe there wasn’t enough time while working on the retrospective to recall what we really do well together — but that frustration was a catalyst to stay back together again.

Is The Sound of the Life of the Mind the record you might have made after The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner (1999), had you stayed together?

BEN: Sound of the Life required those 12 years of being apart. It’s not the record we would have made, based on the demos we were working on before we broke up. [If we’d stayed together] the next record would’ve resembled my own Rockin’ the Suburbs (2001) solo album.

ROBERT: Yeah, we’d played through a lot of the songs before Rockin’ the Suburbs.

Over the years, did you keep in touch in terms of sharing work with each other?

BEN: No.

ROBERT: We talked to each other, we’d see each other on occasion, but didn’t talk too much about music ... more like, “How’s your family?”



Do any of the songs on the new album touch on that absence, thematically? 


BEN: I have said, sometimes cautiously, there’s a “death of ego” theme to it but you’d have to really read the lyrics to find it. That comes with reforming a band after 12 years or so — everybody has to ‘lose their story.’ I have a story, the other guys do, but we had to check those at the door to make music together. That’s as close I can get to that theme.

Besides the obvious, what was the greatest luxury of funding the album with fan support?

ROBERT: We had an extreme luxury of recording in Ben’s own facility in Nashville. And we got to make the record [before promotion] so any pressure was really just self-pressure.

Crowd-sourcing isn’t a totally new idea, but it’s new enough that no one is quite sure what to think of it. It was a success in your case, in terms of the actual funding and ultimately the commercial performance of the record itself — were you surprised by that?

BEN: If it was a political campaign, it would’ve been preaching to the converted — if you’ve got 500,000 people on your Facebook page and you reach 1 per cent of them, you’ve got a Top 10 record. We had the luxury of experimenting. We were in a unique position, having 12 years of audience anticipation.

I can talk like I knew what I was doing but it was really just “Let’s see what happens.” Some days we wondered if it was the right idea, other days it felt good.

ROBERT: Of all the options we had it seemed the best. I felt like, when the record was done, we’d made it for the people who had invested in it instead of the industry.

BEN: What hasn’t been said much is that this album and Amanda Palmer’s [Theatre is Evil] are the first crowd-funded records to reach the Billboard Top 10. Seems kinda notable? Hers was the first, ours next. You’d think there’d be some attention paid to that, but no one’s really talked about it.

To close, are there any bands you’re hoping to see reunite?

BEN: Nirvana.

Maybe in the next life?

BEN: They could do it with a hologram.