The newly reformed Ben Folds Five have offered up an unmastered cut from their newest studio album, the band’s first in thirteen years. The song in question, ‘Do It Anyway’ was released through Ben Folds’ official Facebook page, along with a post from Folds exclamining, “The intensity of the track is typical of the rest of the album, but each song is quite different. That always was the way with our records I suppose. We’re nearly done and I think it’s a cracker.”
This isn’t strictly the first time in a decade the original line-up of Ben Folds, Robert Sledge and Darren Jesse have been together. The trio were reunited as part of MySpace’s ‘Front To Back’ series to perform their album, The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner back in 2008. The group again joining together to finish a few new tracks for Ben Folds’ career-spanning retrospective last year.
More interestingly, they’re going for a grassroots approach to market the new record. Forgoing a record label, Folds and co. are instead encouraging their healthy fanbase in “joining our label as Vice President of Promotion – There’s unlimited room for vices…. As Vice President of Promotion, all you have to do is put up with my tweeting and facebooking in the run up to the release, and recycle and retweet as much as you can deal with. I’ll run ideas past you all, feel free to chime in.”
Shortly thereafter, a Pledgemusic account was set up to simultaneously fund and act as a pre-order page for the new LP, with set donations offering up fan exclusive merch including signed records and t-shirts for a September release. In the eighteen hours since its inception, they’ve already reached 129% of their target.
The album is expected in September, but you can listen to the first (albeit unmastered) taste, ‘Do It Anyway’ below:
