Review of M. Ward’s A Wasteland Companion (and a few thoughts on fandom)
Release Date: April 10, 2012
I don’t know about everyone out there, but I have a short list of musical artists who, in my mind, can do no wrong. The overall quality of their work is never in doubt for me, but instead falls along a continuum of “good songs” to “incredibly transcendently amazing awesome songs.” This inability to truly pass judgment is, I think, an experience common to a lot of music fans. Our reactions to certain musicians’ work is just too personal, too emotional, for us to be objective. It’s the experience that leads people to say that music “sounds like how I feel” or that a writer “writes how I think.”
This is nonsense of course, especially the idea that a musician’s lyrics are written “how we think.” I’m sorely tempted to think this is true of the relationship between my psyche and the lyrics of Ben Folds. In truth, the situation is more complicated. Instead of “writing how I think,” his lyrics are more like what I wish my thoughts sounded like: funny, unexpected, self-deprecating and somehow simultaneously Broadway-classy and Vaudeville-crude. His music provides an ideal on which I can hang my own hopes and anxieties about myself, which is why it is so hard for me to criticize. Read more
