About the last thing I ever expected from William Shatner was an album to love, at least the good parts. I have to confess I don't know much about his chief partner in crime here, Ben Folds, who provides most of the music and obviously deserves a lot of the credit. As for Shatner, I figure it this way: something, call it despair, switched him over around the time his third wife died (the incident gets a 1:46 treatment here, by the way, "What Have You Done," though it's a bit much for me) and/or when he started doing TV commercials for Priceline. The commercials were funny, and that led in some fashion to the hook-up with David Kelley, who occasionally knew what to do with him on "The Practice" and then "Boston Legal." Suddenly "Star Trek" had fallen entirely by the wayside, not to mention "TJ Hooker," and we were confronted with an uncanny performance artist hitting his peak as he reached his 70s; see also his more recent interpretations of Sarah Palin's twitter tweets as oily beat poetry. But what's best here isn't exactly what goes for the laughs, it's the stuff that is almost cringingly honest and as a result exceedingly poignant, proceeding from the center of a man overwhelmingly plagued by vanity and shallowness—and who's willing now to play it for laughs, if that's what it takes. In "Familiar Love," this man gives it to us straight-up on how to keep a dysfunctional relationship going over the years. In "It Hasn't Happened Yet," this man is realizing that his life is almost over and nothing he expected from it has happened, or probably will. In "That's Me Trying," this man is trying to reconnect with a middle-aged daughter he has been estranged from for years, and doing everything wrong—everything. He explicitly wants to avoid talking about the problems between them; he'd rather read and discuss Cold Mountain, if it's not too long (the chorus is a dagger to the heart: "Years of silence / Not enough / Who could blame us / Giving up? / Above the quiet / There's a buzz / That's me trying"). The Pulp cover, "Common People," is there mostly for the yuks, but opening the album as it does it's also a good way to introduce this man we will get to know over the next 40 or so minutes—the pathetic narcissist who craves our liking him, and who we can't help liking a little in spite of ourselves. Others along for the ride here include Joe Jackson, Aimee Mann, Lemon Jelly, Henry Rollins, and Adrian Belew, many of whom I would expect to find indulging camp irony high-jinks. But I think Folds really proves he knows what he's doing. His songs and arrangements carry this as much as Shatner the blithering lumbering brilliant main character.
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