One of my higher-ups alerted me to your valedictory XX Files column in yesterday’s Washington Post Magazine. Imagine my surprise to discover that it was all about me!

Surprise and chagrin, to be honest. Because your column paints a horrifying picture of post-college male decadence, including but not limited to 1.) gluttony 2.) a dependency on beer and 3.) suggestively redacted Tenacious D lyrics.

The backstory, for the eavesdroppers: last summer, I was out on the town with a number of visiting friends (also recovering college a cappella types). On our way to the Russia House, a female companion begged us to sing a thing or two; we obliged with a swingin’ Jimmy Reed medley. Drawn to our unusual music, unknown women appeared on a balcony, offering beer and pie in exchange for ascent and song.

Free pie? We accepted.

What ensued was no more—I thought at the time—than a few nice songs and some light banter. Little did I know that we’d left an indelible impression on the lady of the house. Who, over a year later, would use the evening to bolster a coming-of-age narrative in the paper of record!

Now, I understand the nature of a column—you have to take your audience from point A to point B, creating symmetry and closure that may not have inhered in the events in question. So I thank you for calling us “college Romeos in shaggy haircuts” even as I forgive you for bemoaning the “salacious, operatic note[s]” of “Fuck Her Gently,” which we sang with no shortage of grace or obscenity for you and your charming guests. So you employ a sly, extended Shakespearean analogy in which—over the course of two songs!—a rapt, girlish Juliet becomes a stiff, scolding Lady Capulet. Which, you know, good for you—but it does makes us sound like scallawags.

What you must understand, Sandra—may I call you Sandra?—is that I was a different man back then. Hell, the scene in question went down last June (2008—the year of the rat, remember?), which is why I was initially puzzled at its inclusion in a September, 2009 column. I’m 24 now, Sandra*, and I’m trying to think ahead. No more beer pong parties. Time to buy two sets of guest towels. Maybe vacate that air mattress on my buddy’s floor.

So, apologies for the gross indecency. But thanks for the pie.

Yours immaculately,

Ted Scheinman

*As of two days ago, but who’s counting?

I’ve heard the Name Game play out in many contexts, but at a concert—between the drummer and some guy standing ten rows into the audience—was a new one. “Do you know Rebecca Callahan*?” shouted a tall kid in a white Polo. “She was, like, two grades ahead…”

“Rebecca, oh, yeah,” replied Fleet Foxes drummer J. Tillman.

This, one supposes, is the fate of stage banter at a show when the drummer admits he grew up in a nearby suburb (Rockville) and is pressed upon to kill time between every song while the lead singer re-tunes his 12-string guitar and the rest of the band hangs out in unhelpful silence. But that was the sort of casual vibe Fleet Foxes brought to the 9:30 Club on Wednesday, breaking down the distance between the band and the sold-out audience in such a way that it felt less like a crowded concert hall than the living room of a buddy who makes you pay $9 for a Guinness. Other topics of band-audience banter included the menu at Rockville pastry shop The Fractured Prune, frontman Robin Pecknold’s bad haircut (hidden beneath a red knit hat, which he refused to remove), and whether Tillman more closely resembled Jesus Christ, Charles Manson, or Rob Zombie.

The singing, though, was the show’s real fascination. The band’s post-Beach Boys, fjord-folk sound (which has finally given a cappella nerds and hipsters something to talk about with each other) relies heavily on dynamic three- and four-part harmonies, with subtle moving lines within them. It’s a slippery weapon to wield, and proper use requires absolute precision. But from the opener—the a cappella “Sun Giant” leading into “Sun It Rises”—through the epics “Mykonos” and “Blue Ridge Mountains,” the Foxes were tuned to each other far more consistently than Pecknold’s 12-string. This was especially impressive given that it was their opening show of the tour, and the tea-swilling Pecknold, as he put it, already felt “like dying.”

M. Ward, who played the following night, actually sounded like he might be dying—although that’s just an incident of his naturally laryngitic voice. No matter for Ward, whose mission seemed to be keeping old styles alive. The Hoarse Whisperer deployed his definitive rasp in service of what sounded like a blend of throwback blues melodies, surfer rhythms, and country-folk instrumentation (an alchemy that is rendered all too generic by the “indie” distinction that is often foisted upon him). Ward hinted at these influences all night—particularly on songs like “Big Boat,” an uptempo 12-bar that could have been lifted directly from the ‘50s pop charts—before sending the crowd into a full-fledged fit of twisting and hand-jiving with a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven.”

On both nights I only caught the tail end of the opening acts, but my impressions were that Espers—who played pleasant baroque despite the considerable handicap of being comatose—was all substance and no style; Ledroit Park natives Chain & the Gang—who dressed in striped prison jumpsuits and played one interminable, mostly spoken-word “song” for the last 15 minutes of its set—was all style and little substance. (But bear in mind, these were only superficial impressions.)

*not her real name.

Photo courtesy of www.jeremycharles.com.

So I finally got around to listening to Ben Folds‘ new a cappella album, and I had some thoughts I wanted to append to last week’s post. Those of you who are still in the process of forgiving me for bringing Ben Folds and a cappella in to this space to begin with will probably want to skip this one. (Also, full disclosure: I belonged to an a cappella group in college that was denied a spot on the album. I can now confirm that the singers who made the cut turned out to be much more talented than I am.)

I have always thought a cappella music was a lot more fun to perform than to listen to, but I can appreciate a well-realized arrangement when I hear one. This album has more than a few of those; that’s not the problem. The problem is that the portion of Folds’s oeuvre that lends itself to the a cappella adaptation is the sort of soft-edged superpop that been his general tack ever since Ben Folds Five disbanded in 2000. No vocalists, however talented, can imitate the frenetic piano runs and heedless mashing that made Folds so fun in the ’90s, and few would dare attempt his jazzier arrangements (”Sports and Wine,” “Uncle Walter,” etc.), which are more suited to piano than voice anyway.

Yes, Ben Folds wrote pop ballads in his days with Five, but they were always carefully nestled among those rawer uptempo tracks as ballast. Here, these songs are adrift in a homogeneous sea of melancholy. The album has no arc; just ultra-smooth crooning above triad chords, song after song, with only a handful of exceptions. (Two are worth noting: “Selfless, Cold, and Composed,” by the Sacramento State Jazz Singers, was an ambitious rendering of one of the best breakup songs of the past two decades, and the only track from this album that made it on my iPod; and “Magic,” by the University of Chicago Voices in Your Head. The latter unquestionably falls in to the emo-pop category, but the arrangement is so different from the original that the song is a completely unique artifact–which should be the goal of any group, a cappella or otherwise, when attempting a cover.)

This is not to knock the groups. My point is that Folds’s best music–the stuff he wrote when he was a pissed-off kid in North Carolina who probably wouldn’t be caught dead in a white turtleneck sweater and beret–cannot be imitated by human voices, no matter how talented. Meanwhile, choral adaptations of his latter-day work, even if objectively pleasant, are likely to wind up as inferior facsimiles of unremarkable pop songs.

In certain company, few admissions invite greater scorn than revealing a fondness for Ben Folds or a cappella. (I speak from experience.) Some people regard the former, if you’re not a melodramatic 17-year-old, as symptomatic of arrested emotional development; and the latter, to use the unfortunate parlance of the times, as “super gay.”

These people might feel vindicated to learn that Mr. Folds has embraced the cult of collegiate a cappella with a natural affection. Neither should this surprise his fans, who have watched the pianist make the gradual (and somewhat lamentable) transition from a key-mashing, punk-jazz swashbuckler to round-sound, uber-pop balladeer over the last decade. Folds has exhibited an affinity for clean, ethereal harmonies ever since he went solo; a preoccupation with a cappella was a logical next step.

Case in point, last fall he commissioned an album of a cappella covers of his songs from college groups. The resulting album, Ben Folds Presents: University A Cappella, was released today. Engineering a greatest hits album sung by a phalanx of adoring co-eds might seem like a magnanimous gesture of populism or the height of narcissism, depending on your perspective. In any case, proceeds from the album have been marked for music-education charities, so it’s all good.