Image Credit: Eamonn McCabeThis Tuesday saw the release of Lonely Avenue, the inaugural collaboration between musician Ben Folds and music-loving novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy, last year’s Juliet, Naked).

EW caught up with the cross-continental collaborators—via conference call, naturally—to find out how they made an album across three thousand miles, and why they can’t wait to work together again.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So Nick you’re in London and Ben, where are you?
BEN FOLDS: I’m in Nashville, just sitting at home.

So did you guys put this together the way Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello did with the Postal Service, sending things back and forth through the mail, or did you Skype?
NICK HORNBY: No, we didn’t even look at each other, did we? We pretty much did it all on email. I would send the lyric, and then Ben would send back an MP3, and then obviously as the recording process went on, he sent me more and more MP3s with bits added to them.

So say that Nick, you sent lyrics, Ben, would you give him back one option, or would you give him a buffet, like, “this a ballad,” or “this is a rockier song,” or did you take one approach and hone it?
BF: His lyrics were pretty much completed. They were complete—there was one song that got a couple lines cut out of it—but they didn’t come with instructions like “this is a ballad,” they sort of implied that themselves.
NH: As I understand it, the way Ben works anyway, he’d look at the words and more or less either a song came to his mind or it didn’t come to his mind, so I ended up writing a lot more sets of lyrics than he actually used, it was a kind of instantaneous hit thing for him, either a tune came or it didn’t, so in terms of options, I think the melody comes more or less fully formed and with it’s own feel. Is that right, Ben?
BH: Yeah, usually there’s some sort of math problem to work out, just a matter of syllables and how something’s going to be set up. But for the most part the melody of what’s the chorus and what’s the verse and what the general framework is comes pretty quickly. You know I might figure out something two or three weeks later just out and about or sitting at the piano or at some point it occurs to me and I go “Ohhh, OK, that’s what I do, I rest a couple bars.” Those sort of things, the last 2% came much slower, but the basics of it, most of the time I could have gone out and just played the song at a gig the night of or the next night, most of it’s obvious.

OK, Nick, how is this different than say, the stuff you’ve done with Marah?
NH: Uhm, well I don’t… there was never any mix of words and music directly when I was with those guys, that was more of a thing where we were friends and I read some stuff that I had written and that was punctuated by their music more or less, so it just became a kind of music and words evening, but we didn’t actually collaborate on anything.

And Ben, how was Nick to work with compared to, say, William Shatner? READ FULL STORY »