Writing and recording The writing style of the album has been described by the band as a reactionary process, a result of the fatigue from playing in a bombastic rock band. Bassist
Robert Sledge stated in an interview with MySpace's
Front to Back that this fatigue naturally led to the band playing lighter material. Lead singer and songwriter
Ben Folds recalls being "tired of writing pop songs" and it led to changes in his writing style. As the new material was being written, Folds was "really into"
chord progressions and voice leadings that he says kept finding their way into what he was writing. Naturally, the original
demo for the album did not have traditional songs but rather was one long track containing all the musical ideas as a cohesive narrative. After some concerns from the label, Folds says, "Everyone took me out to lunch and asked me to split it up into separate songs instead of being one, and I remember
Caleb saying – kind of implying that we were sort of in trouble pretty soon because nobody was hearing anything that sounded like real songs on the record." He contributed a demo of the song to a compilation album the year prior under the title "The Magic That Holds the Sky Up from the Ground" before the song was reworked into the piano trio format for the album. The album was recorded in a three-month span. Unlike its predecessor,
Whatever and Ever Amen, which was recorded at Folds's house in
Chapel Hill,
Reinhold Messner was recorded at several
recording studios. It features a notable amount of
overdubs on nearly every song, such as a heavy use of
string sections,
french horns, and a dual
horn section in the lead single "
Army". The album's tracklist was nearly final, but the label requested that the album have at least one 'fun song', They also recorded an unfinished, Jessee-penned song entitled "Leather Jacket", which would later be contributed to a benefit album for Kosovar Refugees. Originally, "Don't Change Your Plans" was preceded by a long instrumental passage; Folds credits the album's late producer, Caleb Southern for helping edit down the song to its final product. He told an interviewer that Southern, "just cut it away and then all of a sudden it was this pop song . . . I didn't hear it like that at all, I just heard it as this little masterpiece thing.”
Lyrics Both critics and the band members themselves have described
The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner as, at least in part, a loose
concept album, following the Reinhold Messner character through his life, heartache, hospitalization, and childhood memories. In an interview with WXPN, Ben described how the album originally followed a more direct concept centered around sleep. Several sleep-related songs were cut off the final tracklist, but a few remained on the final album. The vocal portion of "Your Most Valuable Possession" consists of a message left on Folds'
answering machine by his father, Dean Folds, while he was partially asleep. The album's final song "Lullabye" also describes the narrator's childhood experiences through the framing device of a lullaby, book-ending the album with songs about sleep. On the
Ben Folds iTunes Originals album, Folds explains that the song "Mess" is a "loss of innocence song" about having so much baggage that now you are unable to completely explain your history; "you've made a mess." The song follows a breakup, possibly the one that occurs in the previous track on the album, "Don't Change Your Plans", as the narrator refers to his ex's new partner, saying "he'll never care for you more than I do". Darren Jessee described his lyrics for the song "Magic" as a love song written to either a good friend or a composite of several people he knew who died. "Your Redneck Past" is an entire song that was spun off from a throwaway lyric in Army about the narrator's redneck past. "Regrets" then follows up both tracks with the narrator spiraling further down into recalling memories and regrets all the way back to childhood. "Hospital Song", which refers to a real hospital:
Forsyth Medical Center, located on Silas Creek Parkway in
Winston-Salem; features the narrator lying awake in a hospital bed, depressed at the news that the doctor just gave him, crying "I don't believe that it's true." In the context of the album having a loose concept, this re-contextualizes many other songs on the album as the narrator simply revisiting memories from his past before an unspecified illness takes his life. ==Reception==