fun. Has, Well...Fun On 'Some Nights'

As hard as Nate Ruess tried to be Freddie Mercury on fun.’s 2010 debut album Aim and Ignite, the imitation (however good it was at times) remained an imperfect project. Some songs—“All The Pretty Girls” and “Benson Hedges”—came close to Queen’s bombastic spirit, but they only touched the majestic absurdity of Queen’s work and Ruess’s voice only ever managed to flirt with the playful heights of Mercury.

In a lot of ways, fun.’s new album Some Nights finds Ruess and company looking beyond Queen for inspiration. The only track that obviously touches on their prior Queen obsession is “Some Nights – Intro,” whose background vocals come closer to the crazed, operatic puzzle that is “Bohemian Rhapsody” that any song I’ve heard in some time. “Some Nights,” however, makes it clear that this album is not dealing with Queen at all. The song, and the rest of the album, is a cultural amalgam, combining the past and present of popular music to fine results.

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“Some Nights” incorporates details from the world of current top 40 radio, including playful Auto-Tune and even the occasional 80s drum machine à la Kanye West’s album 808s & Heartbreak, and layers them over a nigh-tribal drum pattern and anthemic background vocals. “We Are Young” has a similar formula, dropping in every pop song’s favorite combo of big drums and heavy synth before then building to another anthemic climax, buoyed up by Janelle Monáe’s wordless backing vocals.

fun. makes it into almost something of a game; these songs are spring-loaded with cultural allusions, sometimes so direct as to make you start when listening to the album for the first time. For instance, “Carry On” is a common enough song title—i.e. not quite enough to lead us directly back to Kansas’s prog-rock epic “Carry On My Wayward Son”—but it does melodically lead us back to Styx’s classic prog epic “Come Sail Away” in a few moments.

“Why Am I The One” could not be any more open about its love affair with Elton John. If you’re one for comparing tunes, listen to the “…hold you like I used to” in Ruess’s song alongside “there’s a calm surrender” at the beginning of “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?”. And later on, while I can’t yet point to direct melodic argument, it would take a long time to convince me that the chorus of “Why Am I The One” doesn’t draw ideas straight out of Elton’s work, in particular “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.”

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We could play this game all day long—from the pop-punk influences of “It Gets Better” to the achingly open Kanye influence of “All Alright.” But as much fun (!) as the game might be, it gets old. I don’t rate albums on a scale—stars or ten points or whatnot—and this album is a perfect example for why I avoid that practice. For although parts of this album are absolutely fantastic, there are parts of it that feel awkward. “One Foot,” for example, with its horn-led backbone and hip-hop sensibility, just doesn’t work. It’s a cumbersome experiment (and maybe a brave one), but it ultimately fails. I feel more or less the same way about “All Alone” and “Stars”—another Kanye imitation, which, with its synth/Auto-Tune at the end only makes me pine for “Runaway.”

But what remains true from one song to the next in this album is that Ruess proves himself as one of the smartest songwriters working in pop music today. From his characteristically inventive melodies (which he’s been churning out since a member of ‘desert-pop’ group The Format) to his aching, personal lyrics, Ruess doesn’t falter from one song to the next.

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You all know that lyrics are important to me and fun.’s lyrics are no exception. Although Ruess could easily get away with penning lyrics composed of largely unimportant phrases (See: most pop songs today.), he goes the extra mile. “Some Nights” sounds, on first listen, as a kind of innocent party song, but its layers reveal itself listen after listen. It’s a song that deals with frustration: frustration with love, frustration with family, and frustration with music.

…five minutes in and I'm bored again,

Ten years of this, I'm not sure if anybody understands.

This is not one for the folks back home; I'm sorry to leave, mom, I had to go.

Who the f—k wants to die alone all dried up in the desert sun?

There is a darkness at the heart of the song that the melody and arrangement don’t do a whole lot to acknowledge. In that way, it’s not unlike the sunny pop of Wilco’s album Summerteeth, which buries lyrics about domestic violence and drug abuse under seemingly warm melodies.

But even as Ruess explores the darker areas of his life, he acknowledges the silver linings; when looking at his sister’s failed relationship (“the con that she called love”), he can’t help but look at his nephew and admit, “the most amazing things…come from some terrible lies.”

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The question lingers at the end of the album: Where can they go next? fun. has opened so many doors of inquiry that they could go almost anywhere from here. I can only pray that they don’t fully embrace hip-hop; although I can imagine someone rapping a verse to a fun. tune, the truth is that I would rather not. They’re too good at the whole prog-rock business to leave its fertile territory so soon.