I'm not sure why this song resonated with me so much when Folds' first - and best - solo album came out. I got hold of it in the dying days of Autumn, 2001, which meant that a) I was barely past the halfway stage of my degree, and b) despite being crammed with half a billion arseholes, the Western World had lost every single stinking piece of its collective shit.
An odd time both personally and generally to fall in love with a song about a guy getting coldly fired twenty-five years into his career, then. I couldn't point to twenty-five years I had of anything, including existence. Something in the horrible, banal unfairness of it all still chimed with me, though. I already had a copy of Whatever And Ever, Amen, so I knew, per "Cigarette", that Fred was struggling as primary carer to his chronically ill and stupified wife. And now he's here having his professional life torpedoed because - well, why? Nobody seems to have thought it was worth letting him know. The implication is just someone higher up has decided that younger must necessarily be better.
I wonder why Folds decided to give his shitcanned newspaper man the same name as his struggling care giver. I suspect I do know why its a paper specifically that's the place he's being fired from - a reference surely to the lyrics of "Cigarette" having been ripped from a run-on headline Folds had read. But why make the link at all?
Maybe Folds was just thinking in terms of the thematic link between thankless jobs that were never going to end well. Whatever his intent, by putting Jones' stories into two different songs and separating them by four years, Folds highlights how completely irrelevant the guy's personal circumstances are to the asshole boss who's kicking him to the curb. Not personal; just business. As though the two are ever separate. Jones can't even relax with his hobbies any more. The hurt is just too deep.
This second chapter in the life of the luckless Jones is more subtle and measured. The melancholy of the piano chords is less overwrought, the lyrics of light and shadow and resignation and anger a more effective delivery system than simply singing a headline, no matter how oddly structured it was. It's maybe unfair to compare the two, really, given "Cigarette" is supposed to hit you sideways and then get out before the second count reaches three digits. The longer run-time of "Fred Jones Part 2" actually allows time for the sadness to permeate, though. No doubt this is helped by the cello - I've always been a sucker for a cello - though the backing vocals from Cake's John McCrea are a welcome addition too.
But it's those last two lines before the final refrain that linger longest.
And all of these bastards have taken his placeAll the anger the paper and his bosses and the restraints of the song's structure itself are finally cast aside while Fred howls at the canvas in his basement.
He's forgotten but not yet gone
Maybe that's what it is, the reason for this song landing so hard with me. The fury spat at the injustice engrained into a system that steals your labour from you every week until it eventually decides it can steal someone else's labour more effectively, and pretends you never really existef all. Perhaps even then, I knew on some level where all this was going.
It'd be nice to think so. Really, though, the chief suspect has to remain that cello.
B-side:
