Ben Folds’ ‘Lonely Avenue’ leads to BC professor

Saskia Hamilton is the director of Women Poets at Barnard and an associate English professor. What fewer students know about this unassuming professor is that she’s now the subject of a pseudo-punk rock song.

Musician Ben Folds and British writer Nick Hornby released their collaborative album “Lonely Avenue”—which includes the track “Saskia Hamilton”—in September. Hornby, best known for screenplays like “An Education,” wrote the lyrics, and Folds composed. “Nick is pretty much a doer,” Folds said of their dynamic. “I was like ‘Shit, he’s working. I better get busy.’ So I would write a song and send it back the next day.”

Although recording the whole album was an 18-month process, the turnaround time for each song was incredibly short. “It usually took about 15 minutes to an hour for me to get the form, the melody, and everything hashed out,” Folds said. He would sort out any missing pieces later that day in the studio while the other musicians learned their parts. They recorded. And that was usually what appeared on the record.

Despite having recently released “Ben Folds Presents: University A Cappella!” and including a song about a college professor on his album, Folds does not work with a college audience in mind—or any audience, for that matter. “You’ll write some song and realize that there’s 15-year-old boys who are into it when you thought it was for housewives or something,” Folds said. “You cut yourself off from the important stuff when you worry about who the audience might be.”

Hamilton, or rather the boy who is in love with the poetry of her name and sings about her, is only one of a flush of one-song personas in “Lonely Avenue.” “Here’s another personality, another color, and this world needs a little soundtrack to its life, and that’s what I do,” Folds said. “’Cause that’s what I do when I write a melody—it’s a soundtrack to my life.”

Interpreting different characters and employing narrative style are nothing new to music, but an album-long author-musician collaboration does have some novelty.

To Folds, though, Hornby is a natural fit for the musical realm: “His [Hornby’s] lyrics were convincing enough to me to think that there needed to be a soundtrack.” Hornby was no stranger to music before the Folds collaboration: He has been a music critic for the New York Times and wrote lyrics for Philadelphia rock band Marah for several years.

The story behind the Hornby-Folds collaboration is one of aligned interests organically converging. “He’d been listening to my music, and I’d been reading his books, so it all sort of made sense,” Folds said. The two got in touch after Hornby wrote about Folds’ song “Smoke” in his pop manifesto “31 Songs.”

“He could’ve been a writer of any kind … or not even a writer of any kind,” Folds said of working with an author like Hornby. “It’s more down to the person than the profession.”

Considering Folds’ tendency toward a storytelling component in his previous works, the collaboration remains in tune with Folds’ overall discography. “There’s a different heartbeat to his lyrics than there is to mine,” Folds said, “but … these don’t feel like cover songs, they just feel like more of my songs.”

An irreverent flair can be found in both Hornby’s lyrics and Folds’ own words on composing: “I don’t feel the need to accomplish something that I haven’t accomplished before, which might seem really lazy, but what I really feel like is that I want to do something that resonates.”

The manic refrain of “Saskia Hamilton” at least audibly does this. Before composing the song, Folds had gathered from Hornby that Hamilton was a poet but didn’t know she was a professor. Reading the lyrics with Hamilton’s name repeated “like 20 times in a row,” Folds said, “I made what I considered silly boy music.”

“It turns out she [Hamilton] played in a punk rock band when she was a teenager,” Folds said. “So the style of music wasn’t a shock to her at all.” Hamilton didn’t wish to comment on the song itself, except to say that she did “like its use of literary terms.”

Hornby and Folds met Hamilton after performing at Housing Works in October. Already familiar with the idea of Hamilton from the song, Folds said, “I met her and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s Saskia.’”

Dressed in all the album’s personas, Folds will play at Montclair, N.J.’s Wellmont Theater, this Friday, Nov. 18 (tickets $38) and will circle back closer to campus with a concert at Beacon Theater (tickets $39.60-$59.50) on Dec. 15.

Whether or not students find the album worth going out for, Folds said, “We’re happy with the album, and that’s kind of an unusual place for me to be having just finished it.”

Christine Jordan contributed reporting to this article.